Checking out the Neighbors, Part V

Back to distro-checking-outing! A sort of second chance for Mandriva – I give Mandriva Live ONE a once-over!

Others in this gripping and dramatic series:

Part I (Fedora 10 , PCLinuxOS 2007, Mandriva Powerpack 2008)
Part II (Arch Linux 2008.06, CentOS 5.2)
Part III (SliTaz, Puppy Linux)
Part IV (Gentoo)

Mandriva Live ONE 2009

Mandriva – I already gave this distro a look back in Part I of this series, and was not happy with what I saw. The main thing was all the shovelware that came with the “Powerpack” flavor. However, I was pointed at the “Live ONE” as both a more recent and more Free edition, and learned Powerpoint Powerpack was like a commercial offering, so I figured it’s only fair to give them another go with adjusted expectations. Just want to put my bias out there from the start.

Pre-Installation

I had the .iso from a torrent a while back; at 702.5 MiB it is the largest CD .iso I have. (The next largest is Gentoo at 688.5 MiB.) This is the KDE4, i586 edition. My plan is to install it on my second hard drive on my laptop. I’m keeping Gentoo on the main disk – more proof that no one quits using Gentoo because of the enormous time you put into it!

The very first thing I noticed as I looked at the CD in Gentoo, is that the README is a PDF. Of course, I haven’t gotten around to installing a PDF reader on my Gentoo box yet. Something wrong with a frigging text file here fellas? The first interaction I want with the advertised-to-me-as-being-more-Free version is not a damn proprietary format, even one as common as PDF. -1 point.

Since I didn’t want to install a PDF viewer yet in Gentoo, and I didn’t want to move the CD back to my Ubuntu box, I just rebooted to start the install.

LiveCD

I usually like to boot into the LiveCD first, just to see how the distro looks and if it can autodetect hardware, that sort of thing. The boot splash is nice and then you select your language.

… and then you see the EULA. -10 points. (I think this is the EULA, it looks the same – but I haven’t compared every word.)

Now, unlike many people, I read EULAs. In this EULA for example, Mandriva says:

If you disagree with any portion of the License, you are not allowed to install, duplicate or use the Software Products.  Any attempt to install, duplicate or use the Software Products in a manner which does not comply with the terms and conditions of this License is void and will terminate your rights under this License. Upon termination of the License, you must immediately destroy all copies of the Software Products.

Hmmm. Later on it says:

The Software Products consist of components created by different persons or entities. Most of these components are governed under the terms and conditions of the GNU General Purpose License …

But I thought the GPL did not restrict use in any circumstances, only modification and subsequent distribution? In any case, I haven’t gotten 5 minutes into this thing without being pissed off disappointed twice.

That being said, the EULA doesn’t seem too odious and I can’t hardly throw Mandriva in the trash a second time – I’ve got to see it through this time. So I clicked on “Accept” like a good little consumer drone and continued on.

One interesting choice during this process was 3D desktop effects, where I could select none, Compiz Fusion, or Metisse. I’ve never heard of that last one, so I picked it! That was nice to  see an interesting new choice. +1.

Soon I had the LiveCD desktop up:

Mandriva ONE 2009 KDE 4 Desktop

It doesn’t look too bad. Note the resolution is 1024×768, rather than the target native resolution of 1440×900.

Mandriva was able to pick up my wireless and connect to my WPA-protected access point right out the box – +1 there. Another interesting choice was Open Office 3 is included on the LiveCD. I like that choice – another +1.

There’s actually a pretty good range of applications overall available right from the LiveCD. A few choices are a bit strange — do you need an RSS reader on a LiveCD? — but it is comforting to see a complete desktop offering. +1.

I didn’t notice any fancy 3D effects from my Metisse selection as I played around with a few of the applications and explored the LiveCD side. The way they have laid out KDE 4 is very nice – superior to Kubuntu’s choices. +1.

Alright, enough with that – it was time to move on to the money maker: installation. I had 2 main concerns in my mind:

1. Will this install easily and cleanly on a second hard drive? Don’t screw up my Gentoo install!
2. How hard is it going to be to get the right resolution?

Installation

The “Live Install” icon is right there on the “Desktop” plasmoid. Let me note here that having a “Desktop” plasmoid with some icons, but a “Trash” icon on the “real” Desktop is disconcerting. I’m not sure this is Mandriva’s fault. what do you call the “real” Desktop?

The partitioning is done by DrakX. It has a few “modes”, and I chose “Advanced” because I wanted to be sure where things went.  Some problems here:

1. The slider to select partition size is difficult to use accurately. How about a text box to enter size?
2. My partitions jumped from sdb1 to sdb5-7. What happened to 2-4 and how could I renumber them? This worried me a bit, but I proceeded on.
3. Put in an “Are you sure you want to exit the installer?” dialog. Twice somehow I was closing an “Advanced” screen and managed to exit the whole installer. Maybe it was a too sensitive touchpad or something, but it was very annoying. -1.

That being said, overall the DrakX is a nice GUI for partitioning, and I like it better than GParted.

The installer has a nifty “Unused hardware support”, where it attempts to remove support for hardware you don’t have plugged in. Nice feature and gives a positive impression of keeping bloat down. +1.

A side bar of some interest

I joined the #mandriva channel while I waited — it’s quite a bit smaller than #ubuntu or #gentoo. #mandriva had 123 people, where #ubuntu had 1293 people and #gentoo had 883 people. This would worry me a bit if I was seriously considering moving to Mandriva. Hell even #kubuntu was sporting 274 people and Ubuntu does everything it can to kill off Kubuntu.

The installation process is pretty boring because you just get a progress meter under a graphic of the Mandriva Product Range 2009. Take a note from CentOS and display interesting information and tips here – you’ve already got a whole DE up, seems a waste not to use something here. At the very least, display messages about what is going on. This is a prime opportunity to inform and/or educate the user.

GRUB-a-riffic

During the “Bootloader” step of the installation, you get a few options on where to put GRUB. I thought this was a good chance to see how helpful the IRC channel could be. The problem was there wasn’t any option to simply NOT install a bootloader. I wanted to use my exisiting GRUB, and didn’t want Mandriva to do anything. Two people were quite helpful and friendly, and one was a dick.

Finally, I decided to just cancel out of that Bootloader screen, reboot into Gentoo, set up my GRUB there, and hope I could get it going that way.

This worked, and setup continued. So -3 for not having the GRUB option I needed, but +1 for having a nice robust way to pick up an “aborted” installation.

A bit more installing…

As part of the now-resumed installation there is an optional registration step which I skipped. There is a survey that takes a few minutes – this one I filled out. Next is a chance to upload the details of your system. However, you need a user account to do this. That’s too mad, because I would have done this. Why can’t the data be anonymously gathered and aggregated? Another missed opportunity.

At last! Installation was done and I got my desktop!

Real Desktop

I noticed the wireless was picked up straight away here – that was nice. I also noticed a few problems:

1. Still wrong resolution (1024×768)
2. No window decorations (borders, title, buttons, etc.)
3. Keyboard doesn’t seem to work in the applications? Very strange. I can type in my password and hit a key for an underlined menu option. But I can’t type a file name to save a screenshot to, nor can I type any text in the text editor.

There were some updates available, so I went and grabbed those. The package manager is very simple and easy to understand.  There were about 390 updates. It was here I noticed Mandriva comes with some nice photographic screensavers. I like them.

After the updates, everything looked fine – keyboard worked, there were window decorations, and I was able to go into the Control Center and set the screen resolution. I had to reboot, but when I came back I had the right resolution – I just needed to resize the panel across the bottom, and things were starting to look pretty good:

Mandriva Linux Control Center

The only problem I noticed here is that I could not take screenshots with the Metisse 3D desktop effects turned on. The effects were working – windows went translucent when being dragged, and had animation effects when minimizing and so on – but any screen shots came out solid blue. It was a nice shade of blue, but not very helpful as a screen shot.

File sharing

One thing I wanted to try to setup was my NFS share.  I have a “Library” share for my media and wanted to take a look at the media players in Mandriva. I saw a “Network Sharing” section in the control center, but I wanted to make an entry in /etc/hosts first.

Shock! Mandriva does not come with nano – it has vim. Oh well, falling back to a GUI editor! But, that won’t work because I couldn’t launch kwrite from a root account:

[root@localhost jason]# kwrite
kdeinit4: preparing to launch /usr/lib/kde4/libexec/klauncher
klauncher(20138) kdemain: No DBUS session-bus found. Check if you have started the DBUS server.
kdeinit4: Communication error with launcher. Exiting!

Alright then, I went to install nano from the “Install & Remove Software”. It wasn’t a very smooth process – searching on “nano” didn’t give any results – I had to scroll to it under “Editors” myself. Then, there were a few messages about needing to start RPMDrake. nano was eventually installed, but it was  a little confusing — if RPMDrake did need to be started, it didn’t require anything but me pressing the “OK” button, so why not just do that in the background? Oh well.

Once I added the appropriate entry in /etc/hosts, I went to “Access NFS shared drives and directories under the Control Center”. Help on the menu doesn’t show anything – there is a big “Search servers” button. Which never showed any shares.

Not much help here

Dropping down into Konsole, I was able to mount it straight way. So this is a non-working feature I guess? -1

After the mount, I was able to stream movies off the share – audio and video were both fine. Interesting that Totem is included here, it’s a pretty mixed bag of desktop apps in the Mandriva desktop.

Bluetooth

Another thing I like to check is bluetooth. One of the things I like about my laptop is it has built-in bluetooth, so I don’t need a USB dongle. I went into the Hardware setup in the Control Center, and it asked to install several packages – among these were bluez-gnome and gnome-bluetooth. I guess bluetooth is still broken in KDE? At least Mandriva is picking up on the GNOME fall-backs – which is an area Kubuntu failed.

I couldn’t find a GUI to set up the bluetooth mouse – it didn’t appear in the devices in Control Center, only the Bluetooth adapter. There is a KDEBluetooth menu item, but it just appears in the tray – the  Bluetooth Device Wizard doesn’t do anything – only the “Cancel” button is available.

Again, dropping down into Konsole, I was able to connect is straight way with a hidd –search (as root). -1

Summary

Mandriva ONE is a pretty solid offering. It’s hard to judge it harshly in some areas, because KDE 4 is such an epic fail that to even get it half-way working is a major accomplishment. There are some interesting application choices on the desktop, like Firefox, Open Office, GIMP, and Totem all being included by default. I think this is a good sign that the Mandriva team has really tried to both supply a wide range of applications and to provide “best-of-class” applications in each area. This is a much better approach than just going blindly with a “pure” KDE desktop, and it pays off right away.

Mandriva ONE is also several steps up from the last Kubuntu I tried – the selection of applications, and the more traditional menu go a long way to making the desktop useful. Obviously, I still don’t think KDE 4 is ready for prime time, but that’s hardly Mandriva’s fault. Knowing that, if you are in the market for a KDE4-based distro, Mandriva ONE is a good choice.