Review: Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring
Last month Mandriva announced its latest Spring edition. Despite a few minor glitches, after several weeks of testing the two Mandriva flavors, I have finally come across a distro that gives you the best of the GNU/Linux and proprietary worlds in terms of ease of use, range of software, and stability on hardware that ranges from old Celerons to newer multi-core machines.
I tested two Mandriva offerings. Mandriva's flasgship edition, Mandriva One, comprises a half dozen live CDs, three each for the KDE (verson 2.5.9) and GNOME (2.22) desktops, each of the three distinguished only by different Internationalization support. There is no DVD available for the One version. I also tried is the commercial Mandriva Powerpack edition, which is available for a fee ($59 for the download version and $89 for a boxed set) that includes support as well. Powerpack is an install-only DVD version.
Software selection
Mandriva One's single-CD distro is a throwback to the days before we had so many free software options, 3-D desktop add-ons, and 3-D games, not to mention multi-core hardware and fat connections to the Internet that allow users to grab 3.3GB ISOs in a couple of hours. Nevertheless, despite their small size, the two Mandriva One flavors have the best collection of software I've ever seen on a single-CD distro. On machines on which I don't need to play shoot-em-ups, the default list of bundled software serves all my purposes, from browsing the Internet to typing documents to editing images and video. Both the Mandriva One and Powerpack editions run a modified Linux 2.6.24.4 kernel. Sound is handled by PulseAudio, video by Xorg 7.3, and 3-D effects by Compiz Fusion 0.7.2 and Mandriva's own Metisse.
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