19 Oct 2010

Cooking the Manny Tux... Slowly...

Today's post will be brief.
My first acquaintance with Mandriva was brief too.
Mandriva site has a unique opportunity to download the full installer of Linux on a flash drive. Called Mandriva Seed.

I say "unique opportunity" because it is the only developer of complete (not pocket) distribution which has own tool for this. At least one I am aware of.
Of course, there is a utility at
pendrivelinux.com site that allows you to copy almost any distro to flash drive. But pendrivelinux is a third-party developer with respect to the distributions themselves.
Okay, I digressed a little.
My guinea pig was Mandriva Linux One Spring 2010.1 with the KDE4 shell. The process of copying the distribution on a flash drive took just a few minutes. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!



What pleased me from the start?
  • Graphical mode works from the very start of the boot.
  • It is multilingual. What unique dialect do you speak? Mandriva seems to have them all. :-)
What I did not like?
  • Speed!
  • Speed!!!
  • SPEED! That’s enough to cry. But the distribution is indeed very slow to boot and runs from USB-stick.
  • KDE4. This was my first acquaintance with this shell. Before that I definitely fell in love with KDE3 which smartly and clearly works on SLAX (www.slax.org). In the case of KDE4 on Mandriva I faced the same culture shock as "old timers" of Windows 95 or Windows NT do seeing all the graphical bells and whistles in the Aero theme in Windows Vista or Windows 7. 
Until now, I can not get used to this. In my opinion, the menu structure of KDE4 is too complicated, although I managed to try it on another distribution after Mandriva (more on that later).
On the technical side, the Mandriva easily detected WiFi network card, proposed to connect to it. As far as I remember, USB-version did not offer me to save changes. This is somewhat disappointing, since drops USB-version to the level of usual CD-R.
Proceeding from this I did not make any experiment with network drive,
Thus, the speed of the USB did not work for me. Therefore Mandriva was postponed until better times. But we’ll return to it...

In the next issue – let’s be the dog breeder!

More about Mandriva:
http://blog.mandriva.com/
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2010/07/16/mandriva-linux-2010-spring-farman-review/

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