May
10
2007
Mandriva 2007 Spring Edition (2007.1)
Posted by luna6
More than any other Linux release that I have encountered, the quality of Mandriva 2007 Spring Edition depends largely on which version you download. The choices are :
Free 2007 Spring – 1 DVD version that is free in cost and does not contain any proprietary software. (No Nvidia drivers, Skype, Google Earth/Picassa, Flash, Acroread software)
One 2007 Spring – Comes in either 1 KDE CD or 1 GNOME CD. Installer also includes “Live Mode” to explore the Mandriva desktop without writing to your hard drive (Live Mode includes 3d desktops). Includes proprietary software (Nvidia, install scripts for Google Earth / Picassa - click once and the programs are installed).
Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring – Discovery costs 44,00-Euro and includes Live DVD & web support. Powerpack costs 69,90 Euro and comes with standard installer, has more applications and longer web support. Powerpack+ costs 179,000-Euro suited for small businesses.
Mandriva doesn’t really go in detail about these different versions, usually promoting the versions that cost money. This is understandable but somewhat shortsighted for the company in the long run. Their business model seems centered around “sales through obscurity or confusion.” At first, I wasn’t sure what the differences were myself and didn’t even know there was a One 2007 Spring version. To make matters more confusing, late last year Mandriva released a “2007” version and this new version is actually “2007 Spring Edition” or “2007.1” or “Free 2007 Spring / One 2007 Spring.”
At first, I downloaded the Powerpack version (which usually costs money) and the Free Version from Mandriva via a press account. I decided to install Powerpack on one test machine and the Free Version on another machine to see what the differences were. The Powerpack installed fine and it well should have with its 69 Euro pricetag. The Free Edition, on the other hand, was a horrid mess.
Since the Free Edition did not come with NVIDIA drivers, I guessed that after the installation, I would get a garbled & frozen kdm screen. This happens often with most Linux installs on my computer (I think it’s due to the installer’s difficulty in configuring my 24” LCD Monitor). So with that in mind, during the post installation “Summary” part, Mandriva gave me a setup screen with settings used for various hardware components. Next to Hardware / Graphical Interface I clicked the “Configure” tab to see what options were available for my video card and monitor. There was an option to “Test” out the setup. I figured or hoped that if the test probe produced errors the installer would revert back to the basic settings and continue on with the installation. Unfortunately when I clicked “Test” my computer completely locked up. Ctrl-alt-backspace or Ctrl-alt-F1 didn’t do a thing and after a minute of hoping the computer would come back to life, I just hit the reset button on my computer case.
Since the installation did technically finish, I rebooted into Mandriva to see if it would still function without a reinstall. To my surprise I was able to get to a login screen, but then remembered that during the installation I didn’t get any options to add a user or make a root password . Yup, that part would have come directly after the summary part where my computer crashed. This meant that for all practical purposes I was locked out of my own Mandriva install without having a user account or root password. Since this machine was a dual-boot computer I didn’t think it was a huge problem, I would just reboot into Debian or Ubuntu. After one more reboot I got annoyed. REAL annoyed. I noticed then that Mandriva’s installer did not pick up the other Linux installs during the GRUB configuration part. The only other boot option I had from Mandriva’s boot menu was Windows. At this point not only did I get locked out of Mandriva, but had no way to boot into another operating system except Windows. I just gritted my teeth and chucked the Mandriva Free DVD into a (real) trash bin.
I then did a bit more research and found out about One 2007 Spring Edition. This was a live installer that fits on 1 CD. I decided to download the KDE version since Mandriva is a KDE’centric distro and decided to give it one more try. Fortunately, the One 2007 Spring edition was actually very nice. The live installer felt very fast and it was hard to tell that the computer system was running off of a Live CD. Furthermore, Beryl was enabled and NVIDIA drivers worked during the Live Mode. Very Sweet!
With the 2007.1 ONE CD, the install was virtually problem free. As with the Free Edition & Powerpack versions, Mandriva ONE did not pick up other Linux installations, but at least I was prepared for that this around. If you plan to install Mandriva One on a dual boot system (with another Linux distro) I would recommend that you don’t install Grub during Mandriva’s installation and manually edit the prior GRUB after a reboot. Easy way is to edit menu.lst (/boot/grub/) and add the necessary lines for Mandriva, which would be :
title linux
kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=/dev/hda7 resume=/dev/hda3 splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd.img
Obviously, root=/dev/hda7 should correspond to whatever root partition you have Mandriva installed (if installed on partition 4, then it would be root=/dev/hda3). The same applies to the “swap” partition (resume=/dev/hda3).
Besides the Mandriva installer not picking up other Linux installs, I didn’t have any further problems with the Mandriva ONE install disc.
Another reason why you would want to download the Mandriva One installation disc rather than the Free Edition or Powerpack Edition, is that the Mandriva One version installs a much more simpler KDE menu. This is very similar to the default KDE menu layout that you are probably familiar with. On the other hand the PowerPack and Free versions installs a more cumbersome KDE menu layout. Probably due to the DVD versions having a lot more applications that could be installed, the Free Edition and Powerpack versions breaks down the KDE menu from general categories to specific categories to the actual applications. While Mandriva One has a more efficient categories then the actual applications setup. To get a better idea of the difference view the two photos below. The menu on the left (orange) is from Mandriva One while the menu on the right (blue) is from the PowerPack version.
Mandriva still has their own Mandriva Linux Control Center to set up most things via graphical applications. Ideally I would like to see Mandriva’s Control Center incorporate KDE’s Control Center into their application. Having a “Control Center” and a “Configure Your Computer” icon that opens up another Control Center seems redundant.
One of the best features of Mandriva’s Linux Control Center would be the “Configure 3D Desktop Effects” application. An absolute painless way to setup Beryl, Compiz, or the interesting Metisse desktop. Metisse is not a true 3D application but it does some nifty window manager tricks. At the end of the day, I preferred Beryl out of the 3D Desktop managers, which worked great out of the box. One complaint I had with Mandriva’s setup would have been the need to log out of KDE everytime you switched between a regular desktop, Metisse desktop, or Beryl or Compiz. Ideally you should be able to change between these desktops without having to log out and back in.
*** Read more about Beryl 0.2.0 here.
The networking applications were more hit and miss in the Control Center. While Samba worked fine, the NFS application did not. In the “NFS Mount Points” application, when I clicked “Search Servers” the application could never find other NFS servers on my local lan. Interesting enough when I added the NFS directories manually in fstab, all the NFS drives mounted and worked fine.
Additional software applications were easily installed with Mandriva’s “Software Management” aka rpmdrake. The application is similar to Debian’s “Synaptic” but now has a much more polished look to it. Mandriva has stated that for this release the speed of urpmi has been improved and during software installation I did notice the speed improvements. Not as fast as apt-get, but a whole lot faster than Yum or Yast.
Two applications that stood out for me was VLC 0.8.6 and Gimp 2.13. Since VLC did not come installed by default with Mandriva One I did install the program via “Software Management.” Besides VLC there were quite a few plugins and “vlc-more-skins-0.1.3mdv2007.0.noarch” ..which would be skins for VLC. Since I use VLC often but always thought it could use a better gui, I installed the extra stuff and was pleased with the extra skins now available for VLC. The screenshot below shows three different skins that VLC is using (Default, Media Player, Vplayer).
Another application that stood out for me was Gimp 2.13. This would have been the first time I have used 2.13 and came away impressed with the new version. Since its an odd numbered version, technically 2.13 is a developmental release, but improvements were noticeable and the program was stable (never crashed).
Mandriva’s 2007 Spring Edition is a very good release depending on which version you download. The “Free Edition” is simply a pain to use (think prying your teeth out with pliers), while the “PowerPack” is expensive compared to Ubuntu or Fedora. The version to download would absolutely be Spring Mandriva One, which comes in either KDE or Gnome versions. Spring One has a nifty live installer, includes proprietary drivers, and a slimmed down KDE menu compared to to the PowerPack or Free Editions. The longer I used Spring Mandriva One, the more I liked the operating system. Default fonts looked great on a lcd monitor and quite a few applications had the shine of professional applications (like Software Management). The operating system itself feels responsive and runs stable. If you want a Linux distro that is easy to use and has a bright colorful look, Spring Mandriva One would make a great choice … just stay away from the Free Edition.
Download Spring Mandriva One here.
Pro’s :
Live Mode runs faster than any other Live Mode CD I have used.
Speed improvements to Mandriva’s package manager is noticeable.
Compared with PowerPack or Free Editions, Spring Mandriva One has a much more user friendly KDE Menu.
Default fonts look great
Con’s :
Installer does not pick up other Linux installations during GRUB setup
Logging in and out when changing 3d desktop managers is tedious.
Some components in the Linux Control Center did not work (NFS).
Users Rating: 8.63 
(8 votes)
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Comments
23 Comments so far
I’m 100% in agreement with you Chris. Love everything about Mandy, except urpmi. They do so many other things well, its disappointing to have to use the inferior urpmi.
“I wish Mandriva was based in apt-get instead of the propietary urpmi ..”
As fsckit stated, it’s not proprietary, but from personal experience, it’s dependency resolving isn’t as good as apt-get. That’s probably why PCLinuxOS chose to use it.
Mandriva one 2007 spring is workable for me where others are not because of the colors and resolutions used.
Due to an inner ear problem i am unable to watch many system installers do there thing.
Though i know that now days more and more installers run at a to me acceptable refresh rate and resolution with a viewable color scheme up till now i always pretty much gave in pretty fast (osx and osx86 worked uber though).
The one problem i can find would be that i installed it several times exactly the same only to find out i get different problems.
I re-downloaded the iso several times to.
The most consistant err would be that when i try to create a boot splash i get the question if i want to install netpbm clicking cancel obviously kills the request and clicking ok gives some seemingly no meaning err msg “could not install netpbm package”.
I tried manual install but the package seems to be installed already and up to date.
Some how i dont like the way it reports this problem i would like at least some suggestion as to why it cant install the package.
Maybe i am just to n00b though i some how doubt that.
On the other hand i am googling like crazy to find any clue and still cant find it … am i all alone with my problem ??
Try as I might, I am damned if mandriva one will recognise either of my ‘windows’ hard drives. Mandriva one is installed on separate internal hard drive. Other versions of Mandriva or other linux do not have this problem.
Is mandriva one only intended to be demo
“I wish Mandriva was based in apt-get instead of the propietary urpmi ..”
Proprietary indeed. It’s perl jackass.
vi /usr/sbin/urpmi
#!/usr/bin/perl
eval ‘exec /usr/bin/perl -S $0 ${1+”$@”}’
if 0; # not running under some shell
# $Id: urpmi 133612 2007-03-06 11:43:24Z tv $
#- Copyright (C) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 MandrakeSoft SA
#- Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Mandriva SA
#-
#- This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
#- it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#- the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
#- any later version.
#-
[snip]
And as for the complaint that the installer didn’t pick up previous Linux installations, please point me to a Linux distro that can. Detecting and configuring Windows is easy. There’s only one part of the boot sector to detect and the config for grub is always the same. To add a Linux it would have to determine if there is a /boot directory on any of the existing partitions, add an entry for every kernel in said directory since who knows which one you’re using, and hope to god it the filename of the kernel gave some clue as to what distro the kernel belongs to so it can guess the right options for grub.
I would like to second the notion about Mandriva dropping URPMI for Apt-Get. Although I enjoy using Mandriva 2007, I do find the package manager to be inferior to Apt-Get and that would be the main reason I boot more often into Ubuntu.
I wish Mandriva was based in apt-get instead of the propietary urpmi ..
Before trying Mandriva One Spring on my HP ZE1110 1 Ghz, 256MB laptop (obscure and crappy when new), I tried Ubuntu 6.0 LTS, most recent OpenSuSE, and Fedora. I was unable to get any of these to work no matter what I tried or how I configured them. However, Mandriva worked out of the box without a hitch. I was so excited, even though I thought I was getting a watered down version (far from it!). After playing with it for a few days, configuring Gnome, figuring out the package management and discovering PLF, I can easily say that this distro ROCKS! Very stable, visually appealing, runs pretty lean on resources, but has lots of excellent features that make it well worth looking at. I was concerned that my computer didn’t have enough resources, but it runs far better than it ever did under windows XP. Internet and home network connection was a breeze, codec installation no problem either.
fpeelo :
The Powerpack is good, but with the pricetag it’s worth it only if you need the technical support that comes with it. Otherwise the Spring One 2007 is nearly the same without all the extra packages that comes on the DVD. Also with other quality distributions that are free like Ubuntu’s Feisty Fawn its hard to recommend the Powerpack version so that was why I did not concentrate it on as much as Free and Spring One.
Again my hardware was particular but since the Free installer didn’t pick up other Linux installations and the Free version froze up for me on the final part of the installation it was something I could not recommend.
The Spring One on the other hand worked great (albeit if you want to dual boot with another linux os, be careful not install grub with Mandriva).
kseise: no, of course not :). He meant 179,00. Note that in most of Europe a comma is used to separate euros from cents, rather than the full stop used in the U.K. and U.S. So 179,00 means 179 Euros and no cents.
179,000 Euros? That’s like 243,000 US. Are those numbers right?
So, the Free DVD got binned, but the Powerpack is good?
You tried to install the Free version on a machine which you expected would give problems: “This happens often with most Linux installs on my computer”. And as you expected, the installer gave problems. You conclude that the distro should be avoided.
I suppose this is reasonable. Installers should be failsafe where possible, since it’s the first impression the customer gets, and you don’t get to make one of those twice.
But you say “The Powerpack installed fine”… did you try doing the same thing with it? i.e., install it on the machine with problematic graphics hardware, then lock it up by testing the graphics before completing the install?
It’s just that I suspect the powerpack would have been the one to hit the bin if you had swapped the computers before doing the installs.
If you did try the powerpack on the problem PC, that would be an important datum, which you should mention.
I decided to try out Mandriva 2007 Spring ONE and wow! Mandriva has come a long way. After installation KDETV was installed and had correctly setup my WinTV-PVR-150 tv card without any input on my part.
Only complaint I have is that Beryl seems buggy, but this might be more of a problem with Beryl. I just use Compiz for now or have it disabled altogether. Anyways great job Mandriva!
Like you, I haven’t touched Mandriva since it was Mandrake 9 or 10. I have been using SUSE and Ubuntu. I recently purchased a new Toshiba A135-S2276 laptop with the decision to immediatly remove Vista and install Linux. I tried Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) first. No sound. I tried SUSE 10.2. No sound. I tried PCLinux 2007 TR4 (yes I know it’s beta). It wouldn’t even install. So, on a whim, I tried Mandriva 2007 Spring ONE. I was simply amaved at how easy it installed and even more amazed of its beauty. And I had sound! Needless to say, I am hanging on to this baby. As far as I’m concerned, it blows away any other distro out there. My recommendation to you is to look for yourself. Be prepared though, you’ll probably change to Mandriva too.
The menu to add an user and root password does _not_ come after the summary screen AFAIK when installing Free.
It comes right after the installation of the files.
In the Free version, you can change menus to the simple One style menus by using drakmenustyle (also in Configure your computer). And in KDE, by righ clicking on program menu button, Configure panel, you can somewhere configure if it should show program names (konsole), descriptions (terminal program) or both (konsole terminal program).
I installed the Free DVD Spring so far on 5 different machines and had no problem at all. Loving it.
mandriva spring it’s very good!
if your graphic card don’t usually works well with free drivers that’s not a specific mandriva problem
and you have the option to ad extra OS to the bootloader on the installer
The different Mandriva editions and the differences between them are very comprehensively listed and explained on the Wiki:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Choosing_the_right_edition
This page was linked directly from the 2007 Spring release page:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2007.1
which in turn was referenced in all the 2007 Spring release publicity.
Couple of things you could have done with Free:
1) run through the installation again and don’t use the ‘Test’ button
2) boot in failsafe mode (it’s right there on the boot menu) and set the root password
Please note that the non-free drivers (NVIDIA, ATI etc) can easily be installed on Free from the public non-free repository. See here for instructions on setting up a non-free repository on your system.
We’re aware of the issue with not detecting other Linux distros, it’s something we may be able to fix for 2008.
Glad you enjoyed One :)
Mandriva Free is not “teriible”, it’s just not for you(r hardware).
I had a very similar experience with Mandriva Free DVD. The thing would crash over and over again and never completed the install. Mandriva One on the other hand worked without a hitch. The only thing DVD is good for is to use it as a software repository for computers with a slow network connection.
MEPIS 6.5 is also very good, I ran the 64bit edition before switching to Mandriva. It just works out of the box, including the proprietery codecs (MP3, DVDs, Windows media, Flash etc.). Beryl is included as well, allowing the switching between KDE and it. Still, I like Mandriva better, not that much difference under the hood, but Mandriva just looks so much better.
Thanks for the review I wasn’t sure about what the differences were between the various Mandriva versions. This helps me out! Now I’m off to install Spring One.
Great review, makes me wanna test it out….
So, when can we see a MEPIS review?