What is wrong with Mandrake

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Judland
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Post by Judland » Sun Sep 03, 2006 9:14 am

Wally Balljacker wrote:These may seem like small things to quibble about, but when it comes down to it, Ubuntu simply works better for me.

If you like Mandriva, then use it, it doesn't matter to me. Use what works best. Same goes for Tsuroerusu, he blows his load every time a new SUSE release comes out, so good for him. I hope every new Linux user can find a distro he or she loves as much as Tsuroerusu loves SUSE.
I don't think anyone replying to this thread has advised you not to use Ubuntu. I think our point is just trying to state why Mandriva isn't a bad OS. Use it... dont' use it... whatever. You've got your problems with it, just as some of us have our problems with using and accepting Ubuntu as the "chosen one" for Linux.

However it would be nice to respect other people's opinions, likes and dislikes, even if they don't agree with the current trends. The fact is, we are Linux users and promoters of open source software and free thought. That's what is important here.... at least in my opinion.

schotty
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Post by schotty » Sun Sep 03, 2006 7:29 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote: and referred to me as a SUSE zealot, whore
Okay, understood. Hoever, if you WERE a whore, would you answer the following two questions:

Do you profit from youre whoredom

Would you write a book for us "amateur" ho's that need some aid or guidance.


Thanks.

Whore in training.

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TankCatNinjaFish
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Post by TankCatNinjaFish » Sun Sep 03, 2006 10:05 pm

The problem with mandriva is that its one more distro that doesn't offer anything beyond what I already know. Its package selection is far inferior to Debian or FreeBSD, its fairly resource heavy, its RPM based, it has no presence on the business/corporate level.
Tsuroerusu wrote: I AM IN NO A WAY A ZEALOT OF SUSE
Bolding and underlining is cruise control for coolness.

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Wally Balljacker
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Post by Wally Balljacker » Mon Sep 04, 2006 12:35 am

Tsuroerusu wrote: I AM IN NO A WAY A ZEALOT OF SUSE
Dude, we'll be having a conversation about Arch, or Mandriva, or some other distribution, and you'll come in and say: "Hey, having a problem with Firefox? Try SUSE Linux 10.1, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop!". Don't deny it, I can pull up a number of old threads where you start talking about SUSE for no reason at all. I guess we all try and pimp our favorite distros to some extent, but don't try and act like you're not a SUSE fanatic when we all know you are.

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Post by Tsuroerusu » Mon Sep 04, 2006 7:55 am

schotty wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote: and referred to me as a SUSE zealot, whore
Okay, understood. Hoever, if you WERE a whore, would you answer the following two questions:

Do you profit from youre whoredom

Would you write a book for us "amateur" ho's that need some aid or guidance.


Thanks.

Whore in training.
As I said in my fairly long reply on page one of this topic, I like SUSE because I think it's a good distro, aka technical reasons, NOT because I get paid by Novell, SUSE or anyone else for that matter, in fact, you could say that I am a customer of Novell, because I have bought the boxed version of SUSE Linux 10.0 when it was on sale, because I really liked 10.0 and then I thought "What the heck, let's get a boxed Linux distro for fun" and went ahead and bought it, and just to even things out here, I have also bought an OpenBSD 3.9 CD-set, because I wanted to support them.

I am not quite sure how to answer this: "Would you write a book for us "amateur" ho's that need some aid or guidance."
As I don't want anyone to be a zealot of any particular thing, if you wanna be a zealot, be a zealot of free speech and democracy, because I think that's something that should be essential in any society.

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:The problem with mandriva is that its one more distro that doesn't offer anything beyond what I already know. Its package selection is far inferior to Debian or FreeBSD, its fairly resource heavy, its RPM based, it has no presence on the business/corporate level.
Well, as Judland said, this thread was not started to say Mandriva was better than something else, but just to say that it's not a bad distro, because it is not, it may not be for everyone, but the same counts for all distros, I personally prefer RPM to Debian's package management because I find it simpler to use and understand, but that's just ME, that's not to say an RPM based distro is better for mr. Ian Murdock :lol:

To the thing you say about Mandriva being resource hungry, I'd like to make a comment. I think it's fair for a distro to say "this is our minimum system requirement so that we can focus on creating a distro for X, Y and Z", if it's too much for you, then don't use it. If every distro ALWAYS has to keep backwards compatibility for old hardware as a top priority, or close to it, we'll never get anywhere very quickly, for example if Mandriva HAD to be able to run on say a Pentium MMX with 32 MB of RAM, they wouldn't be able to provide a good out of the box KDE experience, sure they could try to autodetect the user's system resources and install IceWM or Xfce instead of KDE, but again, that depends on how far you wanna take the argument of backwards compatibility. Xfce is a very nice desktop environment, but personally, I prefer KDE or GNOME (Yes, I DO NOT hate or seriously dislike GNOME at all). Because I like a very "complete", highly featured- and integrated desktop environment, for example, for me, I like an email client with a shitload of features like KMail or Thunderbird (I prefer KMail, because it integrates with a lot of KDE stuff, plus I generally like it better than Thunderbird), the same thing is the case for my calendar, and KDE's KOrganizer fits that role very nicely.

We do have distros that focus on being usable on very old hardware, and that's great, because that way a lot of people in poorer nations can use GNU/Linux and free software, but I also think it's good to have distros that focus on running on *newer* hardware, and notice I put some asterisks around "newer", so that the people who'd like it, can have a very fancy desktop with all kinds of things going on and dancing around and doing this and that.
The reason for the two asterisks, is that, for example my own computer is an AMD Athlon Barton XP 3200+ with 1 GB of RAM, Geforce4 Ti-4200 graphics card and a Creative Soundblaster 5.1 Live soundcard, this is not new hardware, by today's standards, it's old, it's technology from 2001 or maybe even earlier and the latest releases of Mandriva, SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, MEPIS, KNOPPIX etc. etc. run very well with all the bells and whistles turned on, I wouldn't necessarily call that "resource hungry", but that's just my own personal opinion.

I think the argument some people makes against distros such as Fedora, Mandriva and SUSE about them being big, bloated and resource hungry is bullcrap in a lot of cases (Not all), because what will turn new users on to Linux? WindowMaker (Which, from a Windows user's perspective, looks very weird) or KDE/GNOME with something like Xgl or AIGLX (I've heard a little birdie singing about NVIDIA releasing AIGLX support for their drivers this month with the 9XXX line of drivers)?

Mandriva's official system requirements is:

Code: Select all

Processor: an x586-class or above processor is required. This includes Intel Pentium I/II/III/IV/Celeron, AMD K6/II/III, AMD Duron, AMD Athlon/XP/MP. Hyper-Threading is supported. SMP multi-processor machines are supported. (*)

Memory: at least 64 MB is required (32 MB for text-install); 128 MB or more is recommended.

Hard disk size: At least 500MB is required, 1GB is recommended. Large capacity drives are supported (up to 250GB).
Source: http://www.mandriva.com/en/community/re ... features13

SUSE's official system requirements is:

Code: Select all

Processor: Intel: Pentium 1-4 or Xeon; AMD: Duron, Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon MP, Athlon 64, Sempron or Opteron

Main memory: At least 256 MB; 512 MB recommended

Hard disk: At least 500 MB for minimal system; 2.5 GB recommended for standard system 
Source: http://en.opensuse.org/Sysreqs

I've run SUSE 10.1 (With GNOME, I havn't tested KDE on this machine, I should really do that though) on a 550 MHz Pentium III machine with 256 MB of RAM, and the amount of RAM was relatively fine, when we consider it's the minimum requirement, but the CPU was too slow for the experience to be optimal, however XGL actually ran quite well, I have run 10.0 (Both KDE and GNOME) on another machine (Before the motherboard died) which was a 800 MHz Pentium III with 256 MB of RAM with a little faster bus, and that ran fine.

So from the examples above, I can say that both Mandriva and SUSE, and proably Fedora as well, will run smoothly on a machine from within the last five years. I don't see this as being "resource hungry", I see it as setting a clear direction for your distro, and defining what you are going for, because if you look at SUSE's out of the box KDE desktop, and out of the box GNOME desktop, both is something you can show to a Windows user and really say "Dude, this is cool!", I don't think your typical Windows user is gonna be so impressed with WindowMaker or Xfce (I'm not bashing any of them, especially since I personally do like Xfce), as those aim to be very simple and fast, and not necessarily a complete desktop environment (Xfce is very very close to this, but I view it as kind of semi-DE).

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote: I AM IN NO A WAY A ZEALOT OF SUSE
Bolding and underlining is cruise control for coolness.
I bolded and underlined that phrase because I really wanted to highlight and stress the point the phrase makes, not to be cool or anything.

Wally Balljacker wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote: I AM IN NO A WAY A ZEALOT OF SUSE
Dude, we'll be having a conversation about Arch, or Mandriva, or some other distribution, and you'll come in and say: "Hey, having a problem with Firefox? Try SUSE Linux 10.1, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop!". Don't deny it, I can pull up a number of old threads where you start talking about SUSE for no reason at all. I guess we all try and pimp our favorite distros to some extent, but don't try and act like you're not a SUSE fanatic when we all know you are.
And Slackware havn't been brought up at times when it wasn't relavant?

Seriously, I don't wanna argue with you about this, just to quote the character named Trunks from the DragonBall Z anime series, when asked if his sword was the thing that gave him enormous powers (Which it wasn't, he was just plain strong), "Believe what you want to".

I'm saying the same thing to you. Believe what you want to. I have stated what I say is the truth, and then you can twist it in any way you want to, or do something else like just not believe what I'm saying, I really don't care, because I am being honest, then you can believe my words if YOU think that what I am saying is the truth.
But I refuse to be more or less insulted as a "SUSE fanatic", "SUSE whore", "SLED whore", "SUSE zealot" etc. etc., that is the only thing I ask of you, I don't ask you to believe what I say, I'd certainly hope you do, but I only ask you and certain other people to not refer to me using any of the phrases, or ones similar to, the ones I just stated, you're welcome to when SUSE 10.2 comes out to say "That'll certainly make Troels happy", or "Our resident SUSE fan is jumping up and down about this event", because those two or similar I can take as a fun joke, but harash words like "whore" or "zealot" actually starts to hurt my feelings after a while, I can certainly take a joke, don't get me wrong, but I do have feelings, as do anybody when it really comes down to it.
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"Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love. This is the eternal rule."
- Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), founder of Buddhism.

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Gomer_X
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Post by Gomer_X » Tue Sep 05, 2006 8:34 am

I ran Mandrake for a while around version 9.0. I found the installer confusing, and when something didn't go right it completely crashed giving me no indication on how to fix it. It also formatted partitions without telling you, giving you no chance to back out or confirm. I found version 10.0 to be unusable.

I also didn't like the fact that the push you really hard to give them money. They make it next to impossible to get the free version, and cripple it.

If they've fixed these problems, it might be worth another try. If I were looking for a newbie oriented distro I'd probably recommend Ubuntu (or Linspire for an extreme newbie). If I had to have an RPM based distro, there's no reason not to run Fedora.

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Wally Balljacker
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Post by Wally Balljacker » Tue Sep 05, 2006 9:09 am

Gomer_X wrote:I also didn't like the fact that the push you really hard to give them money. They make it next to impossible to get the free version, and cripple it.
Exactly. The folks at Mandriva have always seemed like a bunch of money grubbing bastards, making it hard to acquire Mandriva without buying a copy of it. With other, better RPM-based distros out there, like CentOS, Fedora, and SUSE, I can gladly pass.
Last edited by Wally Balljacker on Tue Sep 05, 2006 9:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

Judland
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Post by Judland » Tue Sep 05, 2006 9:15 am

Gomer_X wrote:I ran Mandrake for a while around version 9.0. I found the installer confusing, and when something didn't go right it completely crashed giving me no indication on how to fix it. It also formatted partitions without telling you, giving you no chance to back out or confirm. I found version 10.0 to be unusable.
I didn't like the 9.x release very much either. That's what motivated me to see what other distros. were like. However, I really like 2006 and am anxious for 2007 due in the next month or so.
Gomer_X wrote: I also didn't like the fact that the push you really hard to give them money. They make it next to impossible to get the free version, and cripple it.
Hmmm...

Mandriva.com -> Downloads -> Download Mandriva {version name here} Free now -> choose mirror site -> choose ISO

Doesn't seem very impossible to me. Oh well.

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Wally Balljacker
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Post by Wally Balljacker » Tue Sep 05, 2006 9:19 am

Let me ask you something, Judland. Can you download the full featured version of Mandriva for free, and get security updates until the next release without paying anything, or joining their stupid club?

Judland
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Post by Judland » Tue Sep 05, 2006 9:46 am

Wally Balljacker wrote:Let me ask you something, Judland. Can you download the full featured version of Mandriva for free, and get security updates until the next release without paying anything, or joining their stupid club?
Yes and yes... however, the full-featured version of Mandriva is the free version with the use of a second, community driven source for the proprietary drivers (Seerofsouls, to be precise; and from what I can tell, Mandriva also contributes to SoS in certain ways for his support).

As far as I'm aware, security updates (as well as all other updates) are available for free. I've installed 2006 on several systems now and I've always been able to get official update repositories configure easily.

Start here: http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view ... rrorFinder

Although it's labeled "club", there are still many club resources available for free to Mandriva users.

As for the "stupid club" as you call it.... well, like I mentioned before, Mandriva does employ several people who develop software for Linux and open source projects - that not only benefit Mandriva, but many other Linux distros (recently, Sebastian Trü, author of K3B). I feel good being able to support such people and their efforts with something more substantial than just posts on a blog.

However, that is just me. For the people I've helped move over to Linux, I never make a big deal out of the whole Mandriva Club thing. I just mention it's there, if I mention anything at all.

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Wally Balljacker
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Post by Wally Balljacker » Tue Sep 05, 2006 9:53 am

Judland wrote:
Wally Balljacker wrote:Let me ask you something, Judland. Can you download the full featured version of Mandriva for free, and get security updates until the next release without paying anything, or joining their stupid club?
Yes and yes... however, the full-featured version of Mandriva is the free version with the use of a second, community driven source for the proprietary drivers (Seerofsouls, to be precise; and from what I can tell, Mandriva also contributes to SoS in certain ways for his support).

As far as I'm aware, security updates (as well as all other updates) are available for free. I've installed 2006 on several systems now and I've always been able to get official update repositories configure easily.

Start here: http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view ... rrorFinder

Although it's labeled "club", there are still many club resources available for free to Mandriva users.

As for the "stupid club" as you call it.... well, like I mentioned before, Mandriva does employ several people who develop software for Linux and open source projects - that not only benefit Mandriva, but many other Linux distros (recently, Sebastian Trü, author of K3B). I feel good being able to support such people and their efforts with something more substantial than just posts on a blog.

However, that is just me. For the people I've helped move over to Linux, I never make a big deal out of the whole Mandriva Club thing. I just mention it's there, if I mention anything at all.
Fair enough. However, it is true that they release new versions of Mandriva to club members only before releasing to the public. I consider that to be rather petty. TerraSoft, the makers of Yellow Dog use this tactic as well, in hopes to get more sales, and it kind of irritates me. It's stuff like this that tends to push me away from commercial distros.

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Post by Judland » Tue Sep 05, 2006 10:03 am

Wally Balljacker wrote: Fair enough. However, it is true that they release new versions of Mandriva to club members only, before releasing to the public. I consider that to be rather petty. TerraSoft, the makers of Yellow Dog use this tactic as well, in hopes to get more sales, and it kind of irritates me. It's stuff like this that tends to push me away from commercial distros.
Heh.. heh... well, I can see your point, but for those of us who are helping to support the distro. it is some-what of a bonus (or perhaps a "thank you") for having a club membership. Although, this isn't something I'd feel cheated out of if the free version didn't get pre-released to club members. Free is free, in my opinion.

Mandriva isn't perfect... I'm not saying that. But I can relate to what the company is trying to do, and I think it is worth while. So I will support them while I can.

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Post by Gomer_X » Tue Sep 05, 2006 11:27 am

Judland wrote:
Gomer_X wrote: I also didn't like the fact that the push you really hard to give them money. They make it next to impossible to get the free version, and cripple it.
Hmmm...

Mandriva.com -> Downloads -> Download Mandriva {version name here} Free now -> choose mirror site -> choose ISO
Yes, that's a definite improvement. I hit a mirror at random and got about 300K a second dl speed, which is pretty good.

I'm glad they seem to have fixed a lot of the problems they had. It would be a shame to see another Linux company go down the tubes. They've overcome some serious odds to get past their financial problems, so let's hope they find a niche where they can be profitable.

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Post by Judland » Tue Sep 05, 2006 11:48 am

Yup. Big improvements over the last year.

Contrary to popular belief, Mandriva does listen to their users, individual and corporate customers, and the members of the club.

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Post by TankCatNinjaFish » Wed Sep 06, 2006 12:23 am

Judland wrote:Yup. Big improvements over the last year.

Contrary to popular belief, Mandriva does listen to their users, individual and corporate customers, and the members of the club.
Mandriva doesn't have any corporate customers. Corporate destop linux usage is more like 90% Redhat 10% Suse (probably less suse). And another bad thing about mandriva: its produced in France.

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