Mandriva 2009. Avoid.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

Every few years, Mandriva Linux, being a bleeding-edge distro, goes for the gusto and lays in a lot of very, very new and unproven stuff. What occurs can politely and accurately be called "mayhem".

With Mandriva 2009, it can easily be said that they have outdone themselves: not only did they make KDE 4.1.x the default KDE install, but they threw in with Pulseaudio and a lot of other things that can best be called "works in progress".

KDE 4.1.2, which is the present release number, is promising as all getout. But promises ain't a big help when you have work to do. It ain't ready for primetime, sadly. It is crashy and twitchy and has a hell of a long way to go.

Pulseaudio, when it works, may well be the finest sounding computer sound system on the planet, bar none. I cannot imagine what this would sound like with a great, high-end sound card and SPDIF. That said, getting it working is a crap shoot, with it sometimes showing no end of twitchiness that would give a meth user pause. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, sometimes it tries to work and fails. When they get it right, this will have everyone slack-jawed in admiration. But not yet.

Mandriva also shipped 2009 with an -rc version kernel that has its own, very special issues. They are busting their butts on getting out a new version. There are also significant issues in their "server" kernel, which is what gets installed when you have a multi-core machine and a lot of RAM, automagically. The server kernel is not playing nice with the Nvidia drivers. This is definitely a first: Mandriva and Nvidia drivers have always been a solid partnership.

For someone like me, who has been fiddling with Linux since 2001, ok, this could be entertaining. For the average person, who wants to get things done without a lot of drama, I suggest Mandriva 2008.1. It is an incredibly fast and incredibly solid distro that shows none of the idiot-syncrasies of 2009.

I expect the next version, 2009.1, due out in 6 months, will be a lot better, if the KDE 4 development team gets its shit together. But for now, give 2009 a pass, unless you are me or Roy or a few of the others who have been well-blooded on the field of Linux battle. If you are new to Linux, run away. You will only end up throwing the computer out the window.

[Fumesucker]

1. You will only end up throwing the computer out the window.

LOL, I've actually literally done that! :evilgrin: :mad: :mad: :mad:

Well, it was off my second story back deck via the kitchen door.. :)

Amazingly enough the computer still worked after that even though the case looked like it was designed by Salvador Dali.

[RoyGBiv]

2. Oh, NOW you tell me ...

:-)

This was actually next in my stack. I've been distro hopping again and was going to install a new one in the next week or two. Well, I still am. I may go for 2008.1 since it's been a long time since I've tried Mandriva.

I've been using Kubuntu for awhile. I wanted to get a better feel for a Debian based distro, and I must say I much prefer deb packaging and apt-get to rpm and yum.

But that's about it.

Kubuntu has been pissing me right the hell off lately. They've had something like four kernel updates in the last month, and each and every one broke something. Since I happen to be rather busy with some stuff at the moment I've haven't even figured out what the last update did. With the others, it was something relatively minor, such as not offering up a pre-packaged nvidia driver for the new kernel, which doesn't bother me since I usually compile that on my own anyway, but it'd really mess with the audience to which Kubuntu is marketed. After this last update, the system won't even boot. It hangs at hal, and I just really don't want to go there right now.

KDE is really mucking up the works. I'd go to gnome, but I hate gnome's desktop, and from what I'm reading, it's getting almost as bad as it tries to keep up. Several distros are making KDE 4.1.x the default, and as you say, it's not ready for production systems. Even if the whole system isn't default, some distros are making elements of it -- or things done alongside it -- the default apps, e.g. dolphin over konqueror for a file browser. I'll actually like dolphin once it works, but right now, it don't work. Damn thing crashes on me at the most bizarre times. Yesterday, I had three instances open, all of which had been minimized for 15 minutes or more, and they all crashed at once without my doing anything with them.

Kubuntu has many other issues that I've only rarely experienced with others and almost never in the ones I smash together myself out of pieces of different distros -- orphaned processes that won't die, config files for system processes that just don't work properly, missing elements needed in the PATH if you do anything but web browse (installing stunnel was a nightmare until I figured out it was a PATH problem, and it shouldn't be), misnamed devices, re-writing configs on upgrades of certain packages so that they no longer point to the proper directories. I could go on. It's a mess. My biggest gripe in the beginning is that it apparently forces you to use 64 bit Firefox if you have a 64 bit machine, i.e. gives no way to choose the 386 build on install. This means of course that flash is messed up. They're nice enough to automated the process of getting flash to work under 64 bit, but the reason I don't do this myself is because flash under 64 bit is *horrible*. I had to install the 386 version myself, then redo all the linkage and associations. Oh, thunderbird is messed up too ... wrong directory name in one of the config files.

Anyway ... just thought I'd join the bitch session. :)

My Slackware box with the SuSe kernel patches I ran for so long is still the most stable system I've ever put together.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. Well, I did a reinstall...

And things seem to have settled down. I have sound, things aren't crashing and I can email with TBird. Still, I would not think that this is a distro for the neophyte. You, on the other hand, might have some fun with it.

I have to say: Pulseaudio is the best sound system on any platform. It is breathtaking.

[RoyGBiv]

4. I may try it ...

Since what I'm doing is playing around anyway, it can't hurt nothing.

And I'm definitely interested in a different sound system. Of course if it's that good, I may be forced to go out and get new speakers to realize it. My cat chewed through my back left speaker wire, and this is the kind of wire that can't be spliced without a permit from NASA. He seemed to enjoy it. Me, not so much.

Just doing our part for the economy, I guess.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

5. I have a Logitech 5.1 system here...

That cost me $50 on sale at the Wally World. It is utterly delightful. Lemme see if I can find it:

This is as close as I can get. Specs are better than mine: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16836121126

I found the exact one I have: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16836121006 It sounds like a jillion.

[IDemo]

6. Don't know if it's related or not, but the audio control doesn't

I seem to have full volume, and trying to adjust it with the volume control icon in the panel has no effect. When viewing a Youtube video, trying to adjust the volume with the video player volume control leaves me with either no volume or full blast.

With Mint 6 (Ubuntu based distro) due out soon, I will likely remain with Mint/Gnome and let Mandriva/KDE catch up a bit.