First Mandriva’s live CD takes me through a few questions such as my language, location, keyboard layout, and even had me accept their terms and conditions. Then, the next thing I saw was beautiful! My screen was perfectly configured to the correct resolution and size. Plus, I was even able to have compiz running through a live CD. Marvaleous!! Mandriva’s 2008-1 spring live CD was the only Linux distro I’ve ever tested that was able to give me this. How so? The folks in Mandriva packaged the nVidia drivers in this live CD.

The visuals of the desktop and entire theme is very well designed and looks pretty professionally done. The desktop is the pretty familiar Gnome layout, with two panels and the “Applications”, “Places”, and “System” menus.

Hardware?

Monitor was perfect, it just worked. Microphone and speakers also worked very well. Since it seems Mandriva isn’t shy to place proprietary material in their distro, I guessed (correctly) that it would play mp3 files. Even Firefox did whatever I needed to do, including play embbeded videos.

All my partitions were visible, with read and write access.

More here