Gord Nickerson

Mandriva Linux Diary

This documents the use of other Linux distributions as a comparision to Ubuntu.

Hardware

• Compaq A550
• Dual PIII cpus @ 773ghz
• 1 gig RDRAM
• U160 scsi controller and 36gig drive
• Nividia 2 agp video card
• Intel onboard ethernet and sound
• DVD-ROM
• NEC 15” LCD

Installation

Booted the DVD and choose the language and accept the agreement and choose the erase entire disk and install option. It formatted the drive ok. The next step is a bit silly – it copies the disc to the hard drive and offers you the option – but since this is required why offer it?

Once the copying it done we get to choose the desktop environment so we choose Gnome (never liked KDE) and it says installation will take 30 minutes, just time for an episode of Family Guy.

Done! So now we set the root (administratror) password and create a user and install the boot loader. We choose the proprietary driver for our video card.

It detects the sound card (Intel 8280) and the network (Intel pro 100) and the video (Nvidia TNT Geforce) and the display (NEC LCD 1560V) but the resolution is set to 1024 x 768 which is not the native rez of the display so we change it to 1280x1024.

Ooops – i forgot the native rez of this panel is 1024x768 so will have to reset it after boot. Actually the system was smart enough to ignore my choice and to set the desktop at the right resolution for the panel.

Next we install the updates.

This seems a bit odd – it lists about a 1000 packages and you can select some but not others which have to be upgraded. It does off to install server type packages like Apache and mySQL as well as the GCC compiler, joomla cms and python. This whole process would be a little off putting to a new user. The package manager also is not very smart – in several cases it would not install a program because the dependencies were not installated when it should just mark the dependencies for intstallation. This may be because the underlying package format is rpm instead of deb. I think that Mandriva is a red hat deriative and not a debian deriative like Ubuntu.

Ok we are rebooted. We decline all the register and other nags and log in. One neat thing about the login screen is that the Session option offers a number of window managers such as Gnome, IceWm, evilwm, drak3d, etc. The Actions menu also allows you to run the XDMCP chooser which reminds me of the days when I used to log into red hat 4 or 5 using eXceed from my windows box. That was a useful thing.

Well the startup sound works and we were able to browse the windows network and connect to Motha and see the files. However, the window behavior is annoying, as you drill down the network it create separate windows – sort of like XP does and i do not like overlapping or tiled windows. We need to change this behavior in the window manager settings.

We made a screenshot and uploaded it to the web site. Firefox is not quite as nice looking as on Ubuntu – the fonts seem a little off.

We found the screen capture program in a different spot but the menus are fairly similar thanks to the Gnome desktop environment.

There are some different programs installed for example:

Skype for making phone calls over the internet

Nice to see it has pre-installed Sun Java and Adobe Reader

It has the open office suite but version 2.2.1 instead of 2.3

It also has Scribus – a desktop publishing tool and the Gimp and Inkscape a vector illustration package. There and menu items for installing Google Picassa and Google earth which is a nice touch. Google does not allow these programs to be part of a distribution so this is a good thing for new users. There are lots of audio/video programs.

We decide to install the updates and then later take a look at the package manager. After the install is all done we will pull the existing disk and put in a new one to test out the Novell SuSe commercial distribution.

First impression – not a bad looking desktop and well organized. The install is a bit more complex than Ubuntu which may throw off novices. For some, the ability for remote X servers to connect to the machine will be a useful thing in a secure network as well as the ability to select from a bunch of different window managers (i should install fluxbox). And the fact that Scribus works here but not well on Ubuntu is also a plus. However, the overall impression is of a less well polished and thought out product that Ubuntu and since you are still running Gnome and pretty much the same applications the hard question remains of why would you choose this over Ubuntu which has more developers, more users and a fixed release schedule?

I guess this is the crux of the problem – unless a distribution has a real niche such as runs on old hardware with <>