Fast forward about 10 years, after a name change I don't know why suddenly I felt an urge to pick up the latest version of Mandriva 2010 to give it the proverbial spin. After playing around with the bought version of Mandriva (yes I actually bought a copy!). I really started liking it. Let me just list down a few of the reasons why.
- There is a wealth of packages. I was not left wanting for any specific packages. Most of the packages I needed was there.
- For a rpm based distribution the package manager is blindingly fast and contains a couple of things done right I wish was in zypper and yum. One of them being the ability to pass as an argument the bandwidth that is to be consumed by urmpi (their package manager) during updates or installation. This I found to be very useful in my old office who was sharing bandwidth with another company! They also do some smart things to speed things up during updates such as by default not downloading the description of patches unless needed (when clicked on)
- The network manager is cool. I like how Mandriva does their network manager. It's independant of the DE. For example, if I am logged into XFCE and wanted to move over to KDE or some other DE, and I am already connected wirelessly, after logging out and in, I am still connected because the network manager is separate from the DE. Oh! How I wish the other distros would do this simple little thing!
- Their look and feel is quite standard across all DEs and WMs. Now the one small bug in the ointment is that I found that LXDE, the new favorite new kid on the block does not work correctly.
8 comments:
Indeed Mandriva is a top distribution. but I have found the fault that you were looking. As a python developer i've discovered that virtualenv conatains a bug (some paths are set incorrectly). I had to manually fix it
Good choice, i've rediscovered Mandriva at the end of 2009 and for me, it's still the better choice i've ever made after several trying of Fedora, Ubuntu, Chakra etc
Mandriva's an excellent distro and you've made the right choice. MDV has always been my "home" distro :) I triple boot between Ubuntu, openSUSE and Mandriva...and MDV has never failed me, when the others have shown their cracks. Yes, they've had their share of problems...but hopefully they're going away now. The forums are small, but friendly and you will be helped, once you ask a question. Do visit the forums :)
There's a packaged version of Chromium, just look it up through MCC and search for chromium-browser. I'd suggest you add the repositories of MIB (Mandriva International Backports- http://mib.pianetalinux.org) and also enable all of the /backports repository to get the latest and greatest packages. The /backports repo is not enabled by default.
You will find chromium-browser in the official MDV repos and google-chrome-unstable in the MIB repos.
Welcome to Mandriva (again). Anshul is right. There's a package for Chromium browser and the package name is chromium-browser. Not to confuse with chromium which is a game :).
#urpmq --summary chromium
chromium : Fast paced, arcade-style, top-scrolling space shooter ( 0.9.14-2mdv2010.1 )
Wonder how easy / hard is it to get flash working for chromium. I am having a good type figuring it out for Fedora. Most of the guides don't work.
what about memory usage ? I only have 1.2G in my laptop so every memory used matters to me. Recently I boot into my opensuse 11 and found out total memory usage after kde fully load is just 150M++. This is really surprising because ubuntu hardy (that I used everyday) total up to 200+M after booting into xfce !
I still prefer ubuntu these days but willing to look beyond it (as long as it doesn't hogged memory too much).
Ever since I started using Linux about a year ago I've benn using Ubuntu. Bur about a couple of weeks ago I started looking at other options available. The two distributions that I liked the most were Mandriva and PCLinuxOS. In the end I decided to go with Mandriva since I found it a bit more stable here. I also love their network management applet, it just works without fuss. Oh and the Mandrica Control Center is superb. And I also switched to KDE desktop, which I find a lot more modern and customizable than Gnome.
Post a Comment