Last Tango with Manny Tux, or Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

One of my previous posts was about Mandriva Linux Spring 2010.1.

That time I booted this system from pretty old 1Gb USB flash drive.
The results were not as nice as they could be.
Manny Tux showed herself in slow mood.
After some thoughts I decided to give Manny another try. This time I took brad new 2Gb flash drive for experiment.
So, “burn” iso drive to USB stick with Mandriva Seed. Reboot. Select USB boot option. Let's go for second round!

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Where there any differences from first time?
Yes, there were.
+First of all, by this time I got more used to KDE4. It is because Kubuntu is installed on my HDD. I can't say I like it more, but  my cultural shock was not not so big this time. I still prefer KDE3 as a better option. To be honest, KDE4 in Mandriva 2010.1 is better for me that KDE4 from Kubuntu 10.04.
+Second, new USB stick made its improvements. Booting and general working speed became little bit faster. But still miles away from what can be considered as normal working speed. “Live” Mandirva boots from USB slower than Windows XP from HDD, and much slower than CD-RW run of Puppy or USB boot of SLAX. Saying that, I underline that this verion of Mandriva is not fast enough to become pocket operating system. Guess, it never pretended to be.

Also, I had a chance to dig further into functionality.
+I tested network drive connection. Mandriva mapped it without any problems, and I could browse Russian folders and filenames without any issue. I could even start playing music from those. And that is very good sign!
-Although, there was a problem in multimedia part of Mandriva. I tried to play MP3 files from network folder using the Dragon player. Result? X-server restart. Not nice, if you have some unsaved data!
-I could not find Chrome / Chromium browser in the list of available software. Chrome is my favourite browser since it was first released. It could be major reason “why not” to install Mandriva on my HDD if I had a choice of operating system.

Saying that, I assume that Mandriva Linux is not my cup of tea. At least for now. Linux world is too wide to concentrate on single distributive. There are more systems to try!

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