Mandriva 10.2

[alcibiades]

Your review in the latest issue was quite negative, so I upgraded from 10.1 with a little trepidation. The upgrade went fine, took about 40 minutes after threatening to take 3 hours. Everything works just as it did before, which is what I really want. Whether one is on Gnome 2.8 or 2.10, or KDE 3.4 or 3.3.x, really, who cares? The nice thing about Mandrake has never been this, its been how easy it is to manage it. Compare it with Ubuntu, and you see at once the level of detailed work that's gone into the control centre stuff.

I have people on Suse, and I think its about comparable. I had problems with Mandrake 10.1 on some, apparently quite ordinary, hardware, and so moved them to Suse. But I have remained on Mandrake, and see little difference. I don't think there's any speed difference. Suse has some easier things and some harder ones - if you want an example, look at the way Suse obliges you to set up passwords for CUPS. Absolutely horrendous for a non-terminal happy user. But in the main, Suse seems stable and perfectly fine, as does Mandrake once you get it in.

I also don't think either that twice yearly updates are going to be the problem you suggest. In practice, for people who are just using their machines, there was at least a six month, more often longer, gap between upgrades. Because that was the gap between 'official' releases.

It is true that there doesn't seem to be anything very special in this release. But that's how it is now. There isn't anything very special in the latest Suse stuff, or the latest Knoppix stuff. Its called....maturity!

Welcome it.

Al

[Rhakios]

If Mandriva is so mature, can't they replace those peurile graphics? After all presentation is important.

[towy71]

I too have to say that the graphics are gawd awful, they must have at least one graphics expert that could come up with something better
Dick

[alcibiades]

bootsplash-themes is the quick and easy way to change it.

Al

[Rhakios]

"Hello client, this is the wonderful new Mandriva desktop, er hang on, just a minute while I change that amateurish boot splash theme."

OR

"Hello client, this is the wonderful new SuSE 9.3 desktop, yes I know, it does look professional doesn't it."

I am well aware that I can change these themes, the point is that I shouldn't feel it is necessary.

Mandrake have had a long line of daft-looking cartoon penguins, there used to be one that changed its expression as you booted, looking rather sick if something didn't initialise correctly. I've never thought a lot of them, but it seems to get more noticeable and intrusive. It isn't even as pretty as Microsoft's telly-tubby XPerience.

[gizzmo]

How do you get by the "localhost"
USERNAME
PASSWORD

[nelz]

Do you mean the login prompt? This means you didn't configure the graphical desktop during installation.

See http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/index.php? ... opic&t=482

[mrlonely]

ive ran both suse 9.3 and mandriva le 2005, i hate mandriva, i love suse 9.3 mandriva has made a BIG mistake with the 1 realese in a year thing and there are big differences between gnome 2. and 2.10 same with kde basically if u want a good control panel but old software , crap looks and u like looking at sick ugly and slow things fine if you want a real desktop stick with suse folks

[nelz]

There are other distros besides SUSE and Mandriva. Some of them even enable the shift and punctuation keys

[M-Saunders]

There are other distros besides SUSE and Mandriva. Some of them even enable the shift and punctuation keys

Bah! In my day we had to recompile the kernel just to get such basic functionality. On a 286, which I carried to work and back every day -- uphill BOTH ways. In the snow.

M