A little bit of Mandriva P.R.

[Judland]

I didn't realize that with a Mandriva club membership (Silver class and above) you get access to all of the Mandriva commercial Linux desktop CD and DVD boxed sets. Last night I started downloading an official and complete set of the 2006 PowerPack set just to have handy... in case I have another PC that needs setting up.

I thought the policy was that club members got access to the last version of the software, but not the most current releases (not without buying them, anyway). But it looks as though I was wrong. I even received a message from Mandriva Support that I'd have access to the 2007 releases when they come out later this fall.

That's not too bad at all.

[Tsuroerusu]

All of a sudden, the club memberships doesn't seem like such a bad deal after all, too bad I am not old enough to get a credit card.

[jsusanka]

how has mandriva been on stability? - Last mandrake I bought was I think 8.x power pak and I wasn't too happy with the stability because they had a lot of bleeding edge and they had something called supermount that basically would lock up the system if you added any kind of external drive so you had to uninstall it and mount stuff manually. that is just one example because it wasn't really a big deal with me to uninstall it and mount stuff manually.
but it had other issues too.

then I tried one of their community distributions a couple of years ago and when I tried to get security updates they wanted like 29.00 dollars a year fo them otherwise it wouldn't apply them. Has that changed? do they support their free version with at least security updates?

[Judland]

how has mandriva been on stability? - Last mandrake I bought was I think 8.x power pak and I wasn't too happy with the stability because they had a lot of bleeding edge and they had something called supermount that basically would lock up the system if you added any kind of external drive so you had to uninstall it and mount stuff manually. that is just one example because it wasn't really a big deal with me to uninstall it and mount stuff manually.
but it had other issues too.

Yes, I started my Linux experience with MDK 8.2, as well. It was a step up for me, as I was using W98 up to that point.

Anyway, it's been several weeks and I haven't had any stability issues with Free 2006 what so ever. These days, it really handles portable media devices well, in my opinion.

What it won't automount is hard drives (like when your using the live CD version, One). There is some philosophy behind the reasons why, and it has to do with novice users and their lack of experience with such things.

My only issue with Free 2006 is with the toolbar app. that indicates when upgrades are available. It's a little bug and I've got an MDK admin. person helping me figure it out. But that's really small potatoes.

then I tried one of their community distributions a couple of years ago and when I tried to get security updates they wanted like 29.00 dollars a year fo them otherwise it wouldn't apply them. Has that changed? do they support their free version with at least security updates?

Yes, before joining the club, I had access to the free 2006 "standard" repositories and security updates were included, from what I could tell. At least, when I was updating my install, some of the updates were flagged as "security related".

[Judland]

All of a sudden, the club memberships doesn't seem like such a bad deal after all, too bad I am not old enough to get a credit card.

I guess it only matters if the purchaser feels like he/she is getting their money's worth. I do.