If there is indeed a desktop Linux market, Mandrake Linux was one of the founding fathers, and up until their recent purchase of Conectiva Linux (and subsequent name change to Mandriva), they've reigned right along side other big-name contenders such as Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, Linspire, and Xandros... and you know what? They've done damn well, even surviving near extinction at one point when they filed "declaration de cessation des paiements" which is the French equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the USA. How does the future of their desktop look? Stick around. We're about to find out.
Every distribution is different, hence the hundreds of various distributions available out there. To get a grasp of this concept, visit DistroWatch and have a look through their distro listings. The numbers are staggering. Currently, Mandriva is sitting at the number two spot... second only to Ubuntu Linux. It didn't just arrive either. Since the beginning it's been regarded as one of the best desktop Linux distributions on the planet. In it's previous incarnation, Mandrake Linux, it hovered at the top of the charts ever since the morning Ladislav Bodnar woke up and said “I think we need a distro popularity chart on DistroWatch”. It got there by providing it's customers with a consistent and distinguished look n' feel, plenty of applications, and was well known enough for everyone to get good support.
“Mandriva is new. How could there be updates?” you ask. Well, Mandriva Linux Limited Edition 2005, if you're not already aware, is actually Mandrake 10.2. The developers were working on this release before the purchase of Conectiva and test releases were named as such until they neared completion and readiness to ship the final code. So why not just call it Mandriva 10.2 since everyone knows it's just Mandrake anyway? I suspect it might be for several reasons. The first might be due to management assuming that since they had “incorporated” another Linux company, they needed to change their name to reflect it. I disagree, but that's just me. The other reason might be due to their new release schedule. Mandriva has moved to a more business friendly annual release schedule. In other words: No more releases from Mandriva until 2006... which coincidentally is when we'll see them start rolling features from Conectiva into the product. This version is straight up Mandrake. No Conectiva code yet.
File monitoring & device management
They've dumped the fam (a daemon that monitored the file system for changes/creates/deletes to files residing there and reported back to the GUI. A more visible representation of this is while using an application such as Konqueror or Nautilus. When a file is updated on a drive, it's state is announced and reflected in a 'refresh of the current Konqueror/Nautilus view. This allows users to visualize changes to file attributes in real time) in favor of gamin, which supposedly will eliminate some of the problems inherent in fam such as device locking. Supposedly the use of gamin introduces higher %CPU when mounting /home over an NFS connection due in part to dnotify (in this case gamin can be configured to use polling). On the topic of monitoring, Magicdev has been replaced by gnome-volume-manager/HAL for handling removable USB storage. I must say that it has indeed made a huge difference, as the distro now properly handles my USB drives, where I had issues with the last release.
The K Desktop Environment
Although KDE 3.3.2 is not the latest and greatest desktop environment, Mandriva has backported many features from 3.4 to this release such as GDM theming support for KDM (this is like having your cake and eating it to) and the latest kpdf PDF viewer. Mandriva cites “maturity” as the reason for sticking with the later version of KDE and to be honest, it serves the purpose it was intended to just fine so I see no reason to complain for lack of the latest desktop.
X.org FX
For this release, X.org comes loaded with the xcomposite extension. It's disabled by default but can be turned back on by following the information provided by x.org. I played around with this feature and it's far to unstable for my taste, but if you have the desire to tinker, it's there and can be setup with relatively minimal fuss.
Samba does printers
Samba has been updated to automatically share CUPS printers. This is accomplished by changing the default scan time, or "printcap cache time", from 0 (disabled) to 60. This forces Samba to rescan every 60 seconds. It should be noted that when creating new printers, you must keep printer names no more than 13 characters in length or Samba won't share them. You can still print, but it will not be seen by other SMB-capable machines.
Package Management gets new features URPMI, Mandriva's package management system, has seen some updates in this release as well as some general enhancement to system updates borrowed from SUSE LINUX. First of all, URPMI has had new features added to it. First, a retry option is available to set how many retries you'd like for it to give a mirror before failing. This helps when using busy servers. It can now use ISO images as removable media. Lastly, gurpmi is now a native gtk2 application so there's no more urpmi –X. Thank the gods for that! Lastly, Mandriva has borrowed deltarpm from Novell/SUSE. Deltarpm allows for faster updates because full RPMs are not required, only difference RPMs, or DeltaRPMs. SUSE sums it up best: “A deltarpm
contains the difference between an old and a new version of an RPM,
which makes it possible to recreate the new RPM from the deltarpm and
the old one. You do not need to have a copy of the old RPM, because
deltarpms can also work with installed RPMs”
Installing and running Mandriva Linux
Installing Mandriva was a breeze. As a matter of fact it always has been, at least for me. Even installation onto a VMWare virtual machine drive is smooth. I consider the Mandriva installer to be one of the “big three”, which is comprised of Red Hat's Anaconda, SUSE's YaST, and the Mandriva installer. All of these installers were introduced years ago and have gradually been refined ever since. In Mandriva's case the installer was introduced in Mandrake Linux version 7.0. Since then it has seen much change on the desktop Linux front, but has remained fairly consistent all things considered.
L to R: Booting Mandriva Linux LE 2005
Recently, I demonstrated the installation routine to a curious new Linux user and I found that there was little that I really had to explain in depth to him. You can judge exactly how user-friendly any one program is by the amount of explanation is needed to make the average person understand how to operate it. The more time spent explaining something generally means there's not a simple task at hand and they may need additional hand holding later on down the line. In this case I found the only thing I really had to explain was Linux partitioning. Coming from a Windows-only world he didn't quite understand the whole directory/partition layout of Linux. Of course, at the time I was showing off the visual partitioning portion of the install, but also explained to him that he didn't necessarily need to worry about partitioning at all in most cases because there is a “do it for me” option just like most other major Linux desktops which would hide all that from him. Other than that he found that it was pretty straight forward and easy to follow. This is coming from someone who hasn't used Linux on the desktop in the past. I'd say that's proof positive that Mandriva is doing things right. On the other hand, it's also detailed enough to keep the more advanced users happy, since you can fine tune pretty much the entire installation right from the start.
Overall, the entire process is well planned out for the end user. Everything is labeled properly and presented in such a way that eliminates confusion. With this installer there's a fine balance that's been accomplished, which was designed to be less intimidating to the new user, but advanced enough to accommodate the more seasoned pros. They've accomplished that goal with the Mandriva installation, and I don't see it changing anytime in the near future.
)
)
)
)
)
)
