Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on November 02, 2006 06:08 PM
Stupid thing couldn't even recognize my standard Microsoft mouse and failed to detect the proper X Window settings, resulting in a failure to launch X on boot after install. Two hours of trying to fix the problem failed.
I concluded that the version I installed from the Linux Format DVD might have been a pre-release instead of the official release, so I spent five hours downloading the four CDs of Mandriva Free and did a clean install.
That worked more or less properly, except for a litany of stupid interface issues.
Popping in a video DVD causes Mandriva to pop up a horribly poorly designed tool to enable you to decide what to do with the media. Two hours spent trying to get it to run either KMPlayer or Totem resulted in utter failure. There appeared to be problems with whatever the utility was passing as the drive specifications to the player utilities, as neither of them could play the DVD, reporting unable to play disk on a device other than<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/dev/dvd. Both players had little trouble playing the DVD from the menu. The utility is badly designed - nobody could have figured out how to to assign playback to a utility to a video DVD with that thing. It's on a par with the ridiculous menu editor Mandriva uses.
That was last night. I spent all of today struggling to get Java, jedit, Firefox 2.0 (WHY doesn't Mandriva keep up with the Firefox releases? WHY bother supplying version 1.5.0.7 - and in a nonstandard file layout - when 2.0 is here? I had no trouble installing 2.0 on Mandriva 2006), and trying to find out why the iptables firefall was listed as "stopped" in the services list when it apparently was functional. It's impossible to find any documentation on the interaction between the Shorewall and the Mandriva Interactive firewalls and iptables, other than the obvious that Shorewall is used to configure the rules for Netfilter. Finally, someone mentioned in a post somewhere that it was mentioned in a Mandriva Club post that iptables is normally show as stopped as it is only run once at startup.
I'm a huge advocate of Linux, but this experience made me seriously consider dumping Mandriva and moving to Novell SUSE (which has had universally good reviews compared to Mandriva 2007), and even considered changing my mind about whether Linux was ready for the desktop (in most respects it is).
I've concluded that Mandriva has a problem - the company is too small to do the testing necessary to produce a quality distribution now that Linux has become nearly as massive and complicated as Windows. I think in the future Red Hat and Novell (and perhaps now Oracle and conceivably Ubuntu) will be the only companies large enough to do the distro testing necessary to avoid stupid bugs amd crappy user interface issues.
In general in the IT industry, there are a LOT of designers and developers who shouldn't be allowed near a user interface project. They should be limited to coding the bowels of a kernel or something, but never anything that might be used directly by an end user.
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Don't Try To Upgrade Mandriva 2006 to 2007
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on November 02, 2006 06:08 PMI concluded that the version I installed from the Linux Format DVD might have been a pre-release instead of the official release, so I spent five hours downloading the four CDs of Mandriva Free and did a clean install.
That worked more or less properly, except for a litany of stupid interface issues.
Popping in a video DVD causes Mandriva to pop up a horribly poorly designed tool to enable you to decide what to do with the media. Two hours spent trying to get it to run either KMPlayer or Totem resulted in utter failure. There appeared to be problems with whatever the utility was passing as the drive specifications to the player utilities, as neither of them could play the DVD, reporting unable to play disk on a device other than<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/dev/dvd. Both players had little trouble playing the DVD from the menu. The utility is badly designed - nobody could have figured out how to to assign playback to a utility to a video DVD with that thing. It's on a par with the ridiculous menu editor Mandriva uses.
That was last night. I spent all of today struggling to get Java, jedit, Firefox 2.0 (WHY doesn't Mandriva keep up with the Firefox releases? WHY bother supplying version 1.5.0.7 - and in a nonstandard file layout - when 2.0 is here? I had no trouble installing 2.0 on Mandriva 2006), and trying to find out why the iptables firefall was listed as "stopped" in the services list when it apparently was functional. It's impossible to find any documentation on the interaction between the Shorewall and the Mandriva Interactive firewalls and iptables, other than the obvious that Shorewall is used to configure the rules for Netfilter. Finally, someone mentioned in a post somewhere that it was mentioned in a Mandriva Club post that iptables is normally show as stopped as it is only run once at startup.
I'm a huge advocate of Linux, but this experience made me seriously consider dumping Mandriva and moving to Novell SUSE (which has had universally good reviews compared to Mandriva 2007), and even considered changing my mind about whether Linux was ready for the desktop (in most respects it is).
I've concluded that Mandriva has a problem - the company is too small to do the testing necessary to produce a quality distribution now that Linux has become nearly as massive and complicated as Windows. I think in the future Red Hat and Novell (and perhaps now Oracle and conceivably Ubuntu) will be the only companies large enough to do the distro testing necessary to avoid stupid bugs amd crappy user interface issues.
In general in the IT industry, there are a LOT of designers and developers who shouldn't be allowed near a user interface project. They should be limited to coding the bowels of a kernel or something, but never anything that might be used directly by an end user.
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