Not happy with Mandriva-2009

[SkittleLinux18]

No LiveCD Destop Environment. At the boot screen, your only options are to boot from hard drive, install, and the usual others. So you can't see how the distro will run on your computer. The install command takes you to a GUI step-by-step process for installing the distro. Not to mention that it takes about two hours! And that is on a fairly decent/average system. WTF is wrong with Mandriva? 2008 screws up their OpenGL, and package manager. 2008.1 screws up their repositories. 2009 is huge and heavy, takes forever to install, and has no livecd option. There is one thing going for it: it looks pretty!

[oz]

ha... I've never tried Mandriva but need to do so when I get some spare time. I did use Mandrake for a while back when it was still called that and it was a pretty good distro back then. That's all been about 6 years ago, so I'm sure it's changed a lot since that time.

Thanks for the report on it.

[SkittleLinux18]

...Thanks for the report on it.

No problem! Since I started this thread, there have been some more, worse discoveries. Mandriva should really be called Corp-riva. The free version has a plasmoid-like window on the desktop when you boot into it. It's advertising the versions of Mandriva that you have to purchase. Every time I tried to close it, one of two things happened: 1) kwin crashed with an error message. 2) kwin reloaded with the plasmoid-like window still on the desktop. I have yet figured out how to get rid of it.

The distro is slow, laggy, and heavier than a sumo wrestler (no offense to Sumos, they do their job very well, but Mandriva doesn't).

I think this is the final straw for me regarding Mandriva. I left MS Windows, in part, because I am sick of corporate America and poor performance. I don't need it in Linux.

Please forgive me distro bashing. That really is not my intent. This is just really the impression that has been layed on me. Mods, if I crossed the line, please give me a chance to edit before you lock the thread.

[oz]

The free version has a plasmoid-like window on the desktop when you boot into it. It's advertising the versions of Mandriva that you have to purchase.

Nags to buy the corporate version being placed in the free version wouldn't go well for me, so I'll likely not bother to try it. Thanks for the tip.

Saying you don't like a distribution and giving the reasons why you don't like it is not necessarily bashing. Coming by just to say that this distro or that distro sucks and is totally useless would be considered bashing. Compliments such as yours about it being "pretty" always help to even things up a bit, too.

[Konner]

i loved mandriva 2008. o_o the CD had problems booting in my PC. ill give it another shot soon.

[rokytnji]

[QUOTE 2008 screws up their OpenGL, and package manager. 2008.1 screws up their repositories. [/QUOTE]

My story with Above quote was I installed 2008 Kde on my Amrel. I was impressed on how it ran and automatically detected and hooked up my Dlink wireless WNA 1330 PCMCIA card. I liked the fact I could run Thunderbird email on it and the KDE 3.5 worked like a charm. I decided to run Opera on it to speed things up a bit and used the tutorial to update repositories from the urpm site. After I had installed Opera a few days later my Update manager when I activated it said that a lot of updates couldn't be installed because of missing dependencies. I in my ignorance (thinking I knew what I was doing from my experiance with Ubuntu) decided to go ahead and enable some of the repositories I had added by clicking on the check boxes and see what that would give me. I didn't get any error messages anymore but package manager stated I had 600 new apps to install or update. I thought cool, my package manager would become comprable to my Ubuntu install . I said sure and went for it and waited. Checked back on about the 300th install and everything is cool. I come back later and my Amrel is now in Busybox screen asking for Something like user login, I can't remember the exact term, So I enter my user name and Password and am horrified when it just goes back to asking to login again. I spent a while acting insane (because the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over expecting a different result) untill I decided to Kill Disk and start over. Now I am not so confident with Mandriva as I was at the outset.

Thats why when I read Quote, I was reminded of that fact.

[daark.child]

Could your problems be hardware related? The KDE4 live disc works fine for me (laptop and desktop) and I have not experienced any of the problems you mentioned. On the other hand, Ubuntu 8.10 testing versions don't seem to want to play along nicely with my hardware.

[bigtomrodney]

Nags to buy the corporate version being placed in the free version wouldn't go well for me, so I'll likely not bother to try it. Thanks for the tip.

That pushed me away slowly from Mandrake years ago. I got really tired of being guilted into buying it and particularly at a time when the quality seemed to be going downhill. Think that was around LE2005, just before the changeover to Mandriva.

[oz]

That pushed me away slowly from Mandrake years ago. I got really tired of being guilted into buying it and particularly at a time when the quality seemed to be going downhill. Think that was around LE2005, just before the changeover to Mandriva.

Yeah, I was a Mandrake PowerPack'er for a few years, and even joined the Mandrake Club back when it was first formed, but saw no real advantage to it so dropped it after the first year.

[SkittleLinux18]

...used the tutorial to update repositories from the urpm site... I didn't get any error messages anymore but package manager stated I had 600 new apps to install or update... So I enter my user name and Password and am horrified when it just goes back to asking to login again.

That's very similar to my experience with Mandriva 2008. I had to download a chmod script to unlock the urpm's every single time I ran the package manager. Secondly, those automatic updates was what messed up my openGL. I had a huge thread on here about it back in January and it was not fun. In fact, it is because of Mandriva that I never do automatic updates with any distro now. Permanently scarred... lol

Could your problems be hardware related? The KDE4 live disc works fine for me (laptop and desktop) and I have not experienced any of the problems you mentioned. On the other hand, Ubuntu 8.10 testing versions don't seem to want to play along nicely with my hardware.

Oh absolutely! It is very possible. That computer though is my main linux computer. It currently has PCLOS-MiniMe-2008 on it. But I still like to boot to the liveCD and try out distros, which I couldn't do with this latest release of Mandriva. So I had to install on a VM, which I have also done multiple times on that computer with little to no problems. Especially where that last two versions of Mandriva "worked fine" on that same computer, I guess I expected more from the Distro. However, I'm glad that you had a much more positive experience with it and am more glad that you posted it on this thread. Whether the case may be for me, there are plenty of people who I suspect will have a good experience with Mandriva 2009. But as for me and my house, I will not worship Mandriva. haha... Just my honest opinion.

That pushed me away slowly from Mandrake years ago. I got really tired of being guilted into buying it and particularly at a time when the quality seemed to be going downhill. Think that was around LE2005, just before the changeover to Mandriva.

Old habits die hard... Corporate America. It's CEO is Microsoft. hahaha... the Assistant CEO is Microsoft's prodigy, Google.