Mandriva (when it was called Mandrake) was one of my first exposures to Linux. It was solid, it was pretty, and it made Linux feel welcoming and fun. If one thing can be said is the distribution has remained consistently pleasant to look at.

The LiveCD's partitioning tool gave me grief. I told it to use the whole disk and it errored out. I made my own partitions and it errored out. I gave it one large root partition and it said it needed SWAP, then errored out.

I supposed this might have been because I had failed to "reboot so changes could take effect", so I did. Now the LiveCD would freeze on me right after choosing the time zone.
I finally ended up zeroing out the whole drive using another distribution and telling it to "use free space". It had no issues with that.

First boot brought me to a blue Mandriva background and a message saying, "Please wait, adding media" that stayed up far too long. My harddrive light was blinking though, so I assumed something was going on. Some user feedback would have been nice.

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