Review: Mandriva 2008.1

Mandriva started life in July 1998 (formally known as Linux-Mandrake) as a KDE distro based on Red Hat. That was nearly 10 years ago and they've just released Mandriva 2008.1 Spring Edition so let's have a look at this release.

As always I'm interested in ease of use, out of the box functionality and intuitiveness. Mandriva 2008.1 uses KDE 3.5.9, Kernel 2.6.24 and Xorg 7.3.

New Additions of note
They've made NTFS partitions writable by default by including the NTFS-3G system with the base install, this means that NTFS managed partitions are writable (rather than just being readable as per previous releases). They've also added in updates for graphics card support but rather than list them all here check on their Wiki page.

Installation and LiveCD
Mandriva comes with a LiveCD environment which is good; upon loading the CD you're taken through a brief setup process to configure your location, time, keyboard and network options (to allow you to use the LiveCD properly). This is all pretty straight forward (although I didn't see an option to run Mandriva from memory, but that's not a problem). Opting to "Live Install" fires up a worryingly vacant yet easy to use installer. It's really a case of hitting "Go" and not being asked for any information until you're setting up user accounts. While this is a little uninformative there isn't anyone who could't manage it and that's a good start.



Even when you're selecting bootloaders it's all filled out for you so the uneducated can just hit "next" at every screen and the end result will be a fully working operating system. For this I cannot fault Mandriva.



First time confusion
It's not an unexpected thing to see a "first run" screen that offers you a tutorial or two, tips, pointers etc... The one in Mandriva did confuse me however. Despite having my location set to "London, UK, GMT", my language set to "English" and my keyboard set to "English UK" the welcome screen seemed to offer a combination of English and Spanish instructions.



Clicking next then gave me something that looked like Russian. So I decided to decline everything I was offered as Mandriva gave me a brief lesson in world languages. An inauspicious start then.



Aesthetics
Once you're passed the English/Russian/Spanish/German introduction you're presented with quite a cool looking desktop; nice icons designs, clean layout and quite a charming aquatic style background. It's quite a good looking release if I'm honest, the menus look okay, the fonts are nice and clear.



Networking and Configuration
The obvious first step for me is to check the connectivity. As always I'm working on a desktop machine with a wired connection so I can't comment about the wireless support but understandably it picked up the connection without issue. Loading up the configuration utility (helpfully located in the 'quick start' bar on the bottom left) gives you a nice graphical interface to configuring your system.



My main complaint with this utility is that too much useful stuff is buried away in it. In order to access your local network (Samba shares in this instance). This is something I use an awful lot both professionally and personally so having access to the shares hidden into a config panel (that requires root access) seems unusual.

Installing software
Using the config panel you can select to "Install & Remove Software" which leads you to your package manager. Mandriva is helpful and offers to update your list of sources which is 2-3 minutes of downloading but then you're good to go.



Accessing my Samba shares - ugh
I've taken this for granted over the past 12 months. Linux releases have become excellent at finding your samba shares over the network - which is all the more worrying when Mandriva recognises my network, has full connectivity but can't see any Samba shares at all. To access the shares you have to use the configuration panel (as explained above):



Yet when I've tried to access them I receive a blank screen where I imagine I should be seeing workgroups. There are no options, no filtering and clicking "Search servers" does nothing. I've had a dig around the system and can set up my own Samba server, but it seems inexplicable as to why my Windows-based Samba shares aren't available.



I actually can't remember the last Linux release that didn't allow me to see my Samba shares straight out of the box, let alone leave me scratching my head as to what's wrong. I can't be bothered wasting an hour of my life trying to work out what's going on (a bad habit I'll explain later) so I'll have to apologise that I can't say anything about Mandriva's multimedia support. Without Samba working properly I can't get any videos to watch (as I decomissioned my FTP server yesterday).

Software on offer by default
This is something Mandriva has no problems with; every need is catered for directly post install. You have multiple video players, Amarok for audio (the best audio utility ever), OpenOffice suite... Basically you've got everything. A regular user could be given the selection of applications that Mandriva gives you and not ever need to delve into the package manager. That's good, albeit questionable in this day and age (I'm undecided whether users would rather have 101 apps post-install or an intuitive package manager front-and-centre for them to cherry pick what they need).

Conclusions
Mandriva is okay but I can't recommend it because of it failing to recognise my Samba shares - something that a usable release would have to do. I'm willing to say a high percentage of users use shared folders (I certainly do) and it's not acceptable for releases to fall at this early hurdle. Every other aspect of Mandriva is great (apart from media support which I was unable to test). It looks good, the package manager works fine and the software provided is more than sufficient.

However a couple of things bother me, namely the shamless up-selling of the Mandriva Powerpack - a happy, bright icon that sits on your desktop reminding you of it's presence. Click it and Firefox takes you to a page outlining what lies within; for 70 euros you can purchase the "Power Pack". There's no real advantage to doing so explained on the page; all it seems to do is state everything that the base model of Mandriva does. 69 Euros ($109) is an awful lot for an enhanced Linux release, especially one that has done little more than underwhelm me.

Bad habits Linux has given me, and why I can't be bothered with Mandriva
I've become increasingly aware of Linux-enforced apathy on my part. If a release (such as this) makes something mundane difficult then I just can't be bothered. Sure I could have FTP'd around some media files to test support on this but why bother? Too many other releases do too much too well, Mandriva won't be making it into my top 10 because of this so why fight with it too much? If you fall at an early hurdle you won't win the race, so you better get back home, put on a tracksuit and get training again.

Maybe next time Mandriva, see you next year for 2009.0

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