Mandriva has just released their 2008.1 spring edition. This release promises a lot. Mandriva has really tried hard to make this release an extremely user friendly one. I tried the Mandriva One KDE edition and am very impressed with it.

The LiveCD:
The Live CD presents a beautiful looking grub screen with only one entry to boot Mandriva. It would be nice to have an option to boot in safe mode or to add any kernel argument.

While booting the LiveCD asks too many questions like choosing the language, country, keyboard layout, desktop effects type ( Compiz, Mettise or no Effects), date and timezone setting and accepting the Mandriva License. Why can´t they stupid questions while installing. I think the LiveCD should just boot with the default options - a la Ubuntu. LiveCD should just boot and leave the customizations for later part.

At the same time I was really impressed by the superb hardware detection. My graphics card ( NVIDIA 6200), usb mouse and an obscure web-cam was correctly detected and configured. They had also put up a decent screen resolution (1200 X 800), which I have changed to 1280 X 960.

Mandriva developers have made KDE beautiful.

part 1

part 2