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Testing Mandriva Linux 2006

When the second beta of Mandriva Linux 2006 was released, I didn't hesitate - I reconfigured my urpmi sources to point to the beta directory on a nearby FTP server and upgraded my 2005LE installation. The upgrade, as well as subsequent upgrades to beta3 and RC1, went without a hitch. Sensing that a final Mandriva 2006 was not far away, I then redirected the urpmi sources to point to the Cooker (Mandriva's development branch) and continued upgrading on a more ore less daily basis. The release was shaping up nicely and I didn't expect any troubles.

One day, however, things went wrong. After restarting the X window system, I was greeted by a screen that reminded me of faulty CRT monitors of yesteryear, with ghastly green and pink colors replacing the pleasant light blue of Mandriva's KDE. Worse, the mouse was barely functional, because the pointer was seemingly trapped in an invisible rectangle and the actual pointer was about half an inch to the left of the tip of the arrow. Additionally, some menus, toolbars and window edges were "decorated" by unsightly vertical lines, as if they were perforated.

After recovering from the shock of losing the good-looking desktop, my first reaction was "ah, well, it's a beta, it'll get fixed soon". Only it never did. At one point the Cooker was frozen, but my desktop remained broken. I was hoping that perhaps a clean installation of Mandriva 2006 final would restore the nice colors and revive the handsome penguin gazing at the sky (the default Mandriva 2006 wallpaper), but no joy - the pink and green color combination remained firmly entrenched on my desktop and no amount of xorg.conf tweaking would bring back Mandriva's pretty face from before that fatal upgrade.

To cut the long story short, Mandriva 2006 ships with a development version of X.Org 6.9 pulled from the CVS. Although this particular bug was reported on the distribution's forums and Bugzilla, it was never fixed before the final release and a lone errata entry is the only indication that Mandriva is aware of the issue. Apparently, it only affects a few NVIDIA and ATI cards and a solution is as simple as installing the proprietary drivers (which Mandriva provides to club members in the form of pre-built RPM packages). Unfortunately, my graphics card is a Matrox G450, which most certainly won't be cured by NVIDIA! Not to mention that, as some LWN readers love to remind me from time to time, tainting the kernel with a binary-only kernel module is just plain wrong!

Needless to say, the above trouble thoroughly soured my Mandriva 2006 experience. This was my main test machine with two dozens of other, well-behaved Linux distributions residing on its two hard disks. Interestingly, one of them, the latest test release of PCLinuxOS, also ships with X.Org 6.9 pulled from CVS (from roughly a month later than Mandriva's X.Org), but it has never suffered from any of those ghastly symptoms that made the Mandriva desktop look so horrible. Wading through Mandriva's Club forums, I found further evidence of discontent - some users experienced frequent and random hard lock-ups, while others complained about X.Org consuming 99% of their processing power. Mandriva's new desktop search tool called "Kat" (KDE's answer to Beagle) was also on the receiving end of some users' complaints for being extremely resource-hungry.

Next on test: a Pentium 4 laptop with a SiS graphics card - and the contrast couldn't have been any more different. On this particular piece of hardware Mandriva 2006 installed smoothly and has run beautifully ever since. No ghastly colors, no freezes, none of those bugs that some users and reviewers of the product reported in online forums and media. It has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience with perhaps a few minor annoyances, but nothing overwhelmingly negative. My only real complaint about Mandriva 2006 is that it ships with OpenOffice.org 1.1 and although several weeks have passed since the release of 2.0, Mandriva has yet to provide new binaries. As OpenOffice.org 2.0 is such a huge upgrade and is included in both SUSE 10.0 and Ubuntu 5.10, it is surprising to see Mandriva sticking to the older version (while, at the same time, quite happy to ship a half-broken development version of X.Org)!

With my opinion about Mandriva 2006 torn between an absolute failure on one system and a thoroughly enjoyable ride on another, it was left up to my main machine to swing the scales one way or the other. This box, powered by an AMD64 3200+ processor with a NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card and 2 GB of RAM, has had plenty of experience running 64-bit operating systems from all major Linux vendors. I downloaded the x86_64 edition of Mandriva's PowerPack and went on with installation. Incidentally, Mandriva no longer sells the x86_64 edition separately; instead, both the i586 and x86_64 editions are bundled together in one €80 PowerPack box.

When the installation finished and I rebooted the system, I was fascinated once again. A beautiful operating system that is really a joy to use! The installer correctly detected the NVIDIA card and installed the proprietary kernel module without any user intervention. But even with X.Org's native "nv" driver, the screen never suffered from any color disorder. Perhaps the most amazing part about the new Mandriva is its remarkable speed - it seems that the developers have implemented every speed tweak they could come up with in each new release, and version 2006 is possibly one of the fastest Linux distributions available today. Can you imagine a complete Linux OS booting into text console in 22 seconds and into full KDE in 45 seconds? Yes, that's Mandriva 2006!

What started as a complete disaster turned out to be quite a pleasant experience in the end. Unless you have an unlucky hardware combination, Mandriva Linux 2006 is a perfectly usable operating system, in addition to being extremely fast and serenely beautiful. But let my experience serve as a warning to potential customers: don't spend your money on a Mandriva 2006 retail box or on the Club membership until you've tried it out and made sure that it works on your hardware. While the ISO images of the product are, at the time of writing, only available to Club members (no word on when they will be released to general public), Mandriva 2006 can be installed directly from FTP or HTTP servers (after booting from a small "netinstall" ISO image). If it works, then your purchase is money well spent. If it doesn't then, well, let me offer a solution as suggested by a Club member who had experienced frequent lock-ups which no amount of tweaking could fix: "I solved the problem," he declared one day, "I've switched to SUSE 10.0."

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New Releases

OpenBSD 3.8 released November 1, 2005

OpenBSD has announced (click below) the official release of OpenBSD 3.8. OpenBSD is focused on security and is justifiably proud of its record of eight years with only a single remote hole in the default install. Version 3.8 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system.

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Sorcery 1.13.0 Released

The Source Mage Project has released a new version of its package manager, Sorcery 1.13.0. Some of the major features in this release include: "on_cast" triggers integrated into the dependency tree, dispel can now walk up and down the dependency tree, verification level selection for source files has been added, cast now has a screen mode with compilation and downloading displayed in separate terminals, and more. See the release notes for more information.

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Distribution News

Debian transition time

Steve Langasek reports (click below for full text) that the bulk of the C++ ABI transition will be pushed into testing soon. "As a result, any packages that have versions in testing and depend on one of these libraries must be updated at the same time. For the first time over the past months, we are now able to get a comprehensive look at just which packages are involved in this transition -- around 300 source packages that need to be updated!"

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Debian testing now with secure apt

A new version of apt, 0.6.42 has reached Debian testing. This new apt supports verifying signed apt repositories, adding an important layer of security to Debian upgrades by preventing installation of forged packages. The details are explained in the apt-secure(8) man page.

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New Distributions

Nexenta (Debian-based GNU/Solaris) launches

The Nexenta distribution has announced its existence; click below for the full text. Nexenta is a Debian-based distribution built on the Solaris kernel; the developers have "a working prototype" running now, and some 2300 packages are available. There is a site at gnusolaris.org, but it is currently necessary to ask the project for a username and password to get into it; that is expected to change in a few weeks.

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BeleniX

BeleniX is an OpenSolaris derivative from India. The 0.2 release of BeleniX is available as a LiveCD that can (optionally) boot into an XFce4 desktop. Like its parent, BeleniX has been released under the Common Development and Distribution License CDDL Version 1.0.

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Nonux

Nonux is a Slackware-based GNU/Linux distribution from the Netherlands. The website is in Dutch and it features Dutch localized applications. Available as a Live CD, Nonux can also be installed to a hard drive. The Nonux CD is currently at v1.6.

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News

The Debian Weekly News for November 1, 2005 is out, with a look at i386 compatibility in the upcoming etch release, a debhelper script that helps calculate libtool dependencies for development packages, a new version of OpenSSL, a Berlinux event report, and several other topics.

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Fedora Weekly News

The Fedora Weekly News #20 has the following articles: FreeSoftwareMagazine: FUDCon London 2005, Why we should use OpenOffice.org, Fedora user testimonials, Kernel Security Update fixes NVIDIA issue, HOWTO: OpenLDAP on FC4, HOWTO: F-Spot on FC4, REVIEW: New Linux (FC4) with an Old Laptop, and more.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of October 31, 2005 is out. This edition looks at a new Korean version of GWN, the introduction of subforums at Gentoo forums, Portage moving toward 3.0, and several other topics.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 124

The DistroWatch Weekly for October 31, 2005 is out. "Fans of the BSD family of projects can expect an exciting week as NetBSD 2.1, FreeBSD 6.0 and OpenBSD 3.8 are all expected to be announced and released with the next couple of days. On the Linux front, we have some interesting information regarding the Ubuntu Zero Conference, a link to guide describing the installation of Enlightenment 17 on SUSE 10.0 and news about a working graphical front-end for the Debian installer. Finally, the fans of Debian-based distributions will no doubt appreciate our review of The Debian System - Concepts And Techniques, a newly released book written by a well-known Debian developer."

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Package updates

Fedora updates

Fedora Core 4 updates: esound (update to 0.2.36), mutt (fixes for crashes), cpio (bug fixes), selinux-policy-strict-1.27.1-2.7, selinux-policy-strict-1.27.1-2.11 (change boolean name), selinux-policy-targeted-1.27.1-2.11 (change boolean name), cman-kernel (rebuilt for new FC4 kernel), gnbd-kernel (rebuilt for new FC4 kernel), GFS-kernel (rebuilt for new FC4 kernel), dlm-kernel (rebuilt for new FC4 kernel).

Fedora Core 3 updates: libgnomeui (backports a fix to GnomeDruid), kernel-2.6.12-1.1381_FC3 (fix a failure to mount RAID devices on startup).

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Mandriva update MDKA-2005:048

Mandriva has updated mdkonline packages that provide some enhancements, for 10.1, 10.2, 2006.0 and Corporate 3.0.

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Newsletters and articles of interest

openSUSE inspires derivative distros (Linux.com)

Linux.com covers SUPER SUSE derivatives. "The SUSE Performance Enhanced Release (SUPER) project is integrating experimental patches, packages, and configurations in an effort to create a faster, more usable, and more attractive bleeding-edge SUSE distribution. Novell, understandably, shies away from implementing these kinds of changes until it has done extensive testing to assure stability for enterprise customers. However, such rigorous standards are not a requirement for the desktop users SUPER targets."

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Distribution reviews

Trying out the new OpenBSD 3.8 (NewsForge)

NewsForge reviews the OpenBSD 3.8 release. "The most interesting feature in my humble opinion is the trunk virtual network interface. With trunk, you can combine multiple physical network interfaces and treat them as a single virtual interface, allowing for bandwidth aggregation and automatic fail-over. In addition, these virtual interfaces can themselves contain virtual interfaces and handle more complex scenarios, such as seamless hand-off between multiple wireless networks."

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Review: Mandriva Linux 2006 (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews Mandriva Linux 2006. "New to Mandriva 2006 is Kat, a Mandriva-sponsored desktop search tool similar to Google's Desktop Search. Cataloging both file metadata and contents, Kat currently supports a wide variety of graphics formats and a more limited selection of text formats, including PDF, HTML, Microsoft Word, Excel, OpenOffice.org 1.0, and OpenDocument. It requires an OS with lnotify activated; lnotify is a kernel module originally designed to search logs for suspect entries and the running of the kat daemon. Once set up, it provides quick and detailed responses. However, considering that Mandriva attempts to organize users by adding subdirectories such as Documents, Download, and Pictures to each home directory, I am uncertain about what advantages Kat itself offers over well-organized directories and a file manager in everyday computing."

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