Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux [LWN.net]

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 19, 2007 22:09 UTC (Fri) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)
In reply to: Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux by moxfyre
Parent article: Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Actually, Mandrake around 2003-5 was really good.
The 2006 release was not so good, and I struggled rather a lot with it: http://www.richardneill.org/a22p-mdk11-0.php
Haven't tried out 2007.0, and have been very impressed by Ubuntu in the meantime.

However, 2007.1 promises to be a really good release - a lot of the development methodology problems which seem to have been the root-cause of my 2006-troubles have now been fixed.

Incidentally, Mandrake has had (for a very long time - at least since I started using it in 2000), the excellent urpmi package management tool. This is virtually identical to apt-get. Perhaps you didn't configure the package repositories correctly?

Lastly, Mandrake does very clearly beat Ubuntu in one area - system administration. Ubuntu relies on the GNOME (or KDE) admin tools, and they don't actually do everything right. Eg there is no GUI way to set up screen resolution(*), nor to correctly set up which system services run at boot (**).

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* Well, you can, but you can only _decrease_ resolution to smaller than the original config. If you have a display currently configured at 1024x768, but actually capable of 1600x1200, there's no alternative to manually editing xorg.conf.

** kde-admin-ksysv is worse than useless here - it doesn't actually configure the right thing, since it is unaware of rc.sysinit. (I did file a bug on this).

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Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 19, 2007 23:03 UTC (Fri) by moxfyre (guest, #13847) [Link]

Interesting... I believe urpmi was brand spankin' new when I was using Mandrake. I vaguely recall trying to set it up and having problems. Obviously the automatic dependency handling of urpmi was a big improvement!!!

In general though, I found Mandrake very rough around the edges... while it was innovative in terms of GUI admin tools, none of them seemed to work correctly enough of the time to make them preferable to the command line. By contrast, I find that while Gnome System Tools are a bit limited in what they can do... they do it very reliably and straightforwardly.

I'm glad to hear that they've improved the QC of Mandrake, though. I'll have to take a crack at it again.

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 21, 2007 21:27 UTC (Sun) by gfranken (subscriber, #22822) [Link]

Well, the first 2007 release was not good. You had to be a private
detective to get the repositories configured for urpmi to work correctly.
In fact, the version of the updater in the 2007.0 release was buggy and
didn't work. Turns out (near as I can figure) that the Mandriva developer
responsible for the updater went on vacation right before the 2007.0
release. He didn't return until just before the freeze for the Mandriva
2007 release, and the ultimately released updater was defective.

Typical keystone-cop Mandriva stunt--they manage to do so many things
well, but manage to screw-up just enough stuff to render their release
unusable to anyone new who might be trying Mandriva. I've been a Silver
Edition club member for several years, but when it came time to renew in
December, I didn't bother. I've moved on.

Maybe I'll come back some day, but Mandriva needs to realize that the
linux distro environment today is much higher quality and much more
competetive. They've got to do a better job.

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 20, 2007 4:15 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]

> there's no alternative to manually editing xorg.conf.

What about "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg"? (This works in 6.06; I've never used 6.10, so I don't know if it works there or not.)

> nor to correctly set up which system services run at boot

For 6.06 and earlier, there's "update-rc.d". (Again, I don't know if there's anything like that for Upstart, since I've never used it.)

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 20, 2007 4:21 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]

> For 6.06 and earlier, there's "update-rc.d".

Oops, I forgot you meant only graphical programs.

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 20, 2007 5:46 UTC (Sat) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link]

>> there's no alternative to manually editing xorg.conf.

> What about "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg"?

I don't think it would work - the original xorg.conf was generated by dpkg.
The LCD was mis-detected. (Actually, Mandriva got this one right!)

> For 6.06 and earlier, there's "update-rc.d".

sysv-rc-conf works very well. I don't mind a lack of GUI tools now, but I was glad of them when I was a newbie.

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 20, 2007 6:21 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]

> I don't think it would work - the original xorg.conf was generated by dpkg.
> The LCD was mis-detected.

Do you mean that it wouldn't allow increasing the resolution? When I ran "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg", it offered many different resolutions, most of which were larger than the maximum resolution of my LCD (1024x768). I did tell it to not autodetect the hardware, though, in order to reuse the previously-chosen settings.

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 22, 2007 6:55 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Maybe urpmi is excellent now, but when I had a brush with it around 2002, most certainly was not. There were several layers to the beast, none of them documented and all of them brittle. In failure conditions, the errors were often completely unindicitive of the problem, and failures were not that infrequent.

If it works flawlessly now, great, but the thing looked like someone's half-baked high school project at the time, and it was the centerpeiece for managing a whole distribution. It was one of the primary reasons I walked away from Mandrake after that contract and never looked back.

Other high points were the "high reliability server kernel" which would crash on boot if more than 4 gigs of ram were present, and the lack of posix shell utilities on default install.

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 23, 2007 14:39 UTC (Tue) by kpower (subscriber, #37136) [Link]

No exactly true, but it may depend upon other factors. Just two nights ago I reconfigured the display resolution on my CRT using the KDE Display Control Applet. Not only did it allow me to lower my resolution, but also raise it to higher than I had defined in xorg.conf. The nice part is it also changed the refresh rate automatically as I fiddled with the resolution slider. This was in Kubuntu Dapper.