Topic: Mandriva 2009 -The Ubuntu Killer

[sam]

The infamous Firefox + Youtube multitab clipathon. I am tired as I write this.... yaaaawn, why? Because I was up until 4am in the morning watching non-stop boxing videos last night. All my old favourites, Tyson, Benn, Eubank Naseem Hamed, I did a tour of the 80's through to the present day. Not a blip from Firefox. WTF!? have the Mandriva devs managed to do that Ubuntu and Debian can't?. So, a quick round up, I know this is a long post, but those things had to be said.

"Mandriva isn't the fastest distro around, and I haven't been playing around long enough to verify the stability of Kde4 but.... on newer boxes with 2+ Gb RAM and 2+ Gb processors I bet it flies

http://the.linux-hardcore.com/node/10

[Ted]

Not sure about Mandriva being a "killer" each to their own. KDE4, been using it for a while. first on Suse as a try out, and to be honest it really peed me off.
It comes as standard in Mandriva 2009 (my real world distro) which i installed recently so i decided to get stuck in. Once you get over the different way of working with the Plasma workspace, its actually very good, even with the widgets and the cashews It starts to become intuitive very quickly. Love the Dolphin file manager (no more konq) and the way it previews files.
Its the first incarnation of Mandy that i can actually say is point and click software. Even the PLF repos can be added from zarb.org with no more than a few clicks, no cut and paste into a root terminal, and of course all the stuff you really need is there. i.e, flash player, libdvdcss2, win-codecs etc.

Ah! rambling on a bit, i'll go now.

[sam]

ok, so it comes with all the proprietary codecs etc?

Is there a guide to installing extra things, say C compilers... e.g. there is the Ubuntu Guide which bloody excellent for Ubuntu, is there an equivalent Mandriva one that you have come across that you would recommend?

[Ted]

I use the community "free" version and that now comes with video drivers, for Nvidia at least but you have to choose to use them. They are also updated by the system.

TBH you don't really need a guide to install stuff the package manager is very comprehensive, although you can still use urpmi in a root session terminal. All the main repos are already configured, you just need to add repo for the proprietory stuff (PLF), make sure they are enabled and you're away.Easy Urpmi

Mandriva forums can be found Here

[sam]

cool.... I'll have a play later