Testing Mandriva Linux 2006 [LWN.net]

November 2, 2005

This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar

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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To the point Mandriva Linux 2006

Posted Nov 3, 2005 8:22 UTC (Thu) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

To the point how I too feel about Mandriva. It is the best distro, but with some added randomness: You never know whether it will work or not.

I once tested a release candidate of 10.0 or 10.1 (don't remember). I discovered about 20 bugs and since I have full time job to do, I thought I couldn't spend a full day just submitting bugs to the bugzilla. So i did the next best thing and emailed them to the qa email address. I never got a response and I'm pretty sure none of the issues were resolved during the 2 weeks before the final was released. Mandriva's quality process simply is below any standards. Someone decides to use a cvs version of xorg, there you go. Nobody has time to upgrade OpenOffice.org, well, it's not an important app anyway. Somebody decides to make a major change in the urpmi repositories and get's them offline for a week, the same week a new version is out, tough luck. Things are just too random and the wrong people have too much power to make bad decisions.

I too had X problems when upgrading. It seems that Mandriva chose the wrong driver for me, so I only had VGA display. When I switched to another driver, I had a nice big display which would freeze after 3 secs in KDE or 10 secs in Gnome. My third guess for a driver has been stable.

One other personal gripe of mine, Mandriva's own tools. This time there has been much marketing spin aroung a new *interactive firewall*. So you'd expect that when you upgrade to 2006 and log in, that interactive firewall is up and running. Well, you'd expect wrong. In fact, it will take you almost an hour of googling to find out that the interactive firewall is called mandy, and has no documentation. So you install the rpm, and wonder why nothing is happening. So you find out you have to run netapplet, which is the interactive part of mandy.

Once you get it running, you're in for a disappointment. Personally, I thought the name "interactive firewall" meant something like ZoneAlarm does on Windows, i.e. when some application wants to connect to the internet, you get to allow or disallow it interactively. But nope, mandy does nothing of the sort. Apparently the interactive part is just that it will inform you in real-time of an ongoing smurf attack (or something, as I said, documentation was scarce). I.e. it is doing something that shorewall already was doing silently without disturbing me. And even then, it is not very interactive anyway. Looking at the netapplet, I can only guess whether mandy is actually on or not!

I once decided to use Mandrake, because between it and SuSE (the other KDE distro to consider) Mandrake was much more open, enabled easy installation from 3rd party repositories (games and java) and had much more of a community around it. I valued those more over the admittedly superior quality of SuSE. Now that SuSE is about to surpass Mandrake in these areas as well, I suspect 2006 might be my last Mandriva.

In closing, I still think Mandriva is great, otherwise I wouldn't be using it in the first place. It just bugs me that they seem to employ too many amateurs. I'd expect there is a Linux distro I can just install and use, wihtout spending the first few hours tweaking X or something else that didn't work this time.

Testing Mandriva Linux 2006

Posted Nov 29, 2005 12:11 UTC (Tue) by ranger (guest, #6415) [Link]

1) The shipped openoffice alltime segfaults randomly opening files

Upstream bug ...

2) Openoffice 2.0 is only provided to club members

If you mean the version that shipped *after* the release of Mandriva 2006, yes. If you mean the last milestone release that was available at the time of release, you are wrong. Please see the openoffice.org-go-ooo packages in contrib (and on the Powerpack CDs), which work fine.

3) Openoffice 2.0 is actually not yet provided even to club members as the download site of Mandriva has now been dead for days.

Temporary RPM service migration issue.

4) The official openoffice 2.0 as shipped by the openoffice website does not do antialiasing correcly on Mandriva 2006.

Upstream issue due to changes in how font name replacement/matching is done AFAIK, bug the OO.o developers about it.

5) I have filed about 8 bug reports since I have installed Mandriva 2006. While mantainers have been very helpful and friendly providing me methods to solve most of the problems, I still have to see a single bug-fixing package on the Mandriva update site about these bugs.

Not all bugs necessarily warrant an update (depending on the severity vs risk in updating a package). If it does, it has to go through QA. A number of bugfix updates have been issued, and unless you provide the bug numbers, it is impossible to follow-up on them.