Review: Mandriva 2008 Spring

UNLIKE the Scottish weather, I’ve warmed a lot toward Mandriva in recent months.
The thaw in relations began when I reviewed Mandriva’s excellent 2008 Flash distribution (read it here) and has continued with their just-released desktop offering, Mandriva 2008 Spring.
There are three editions of Mandriva 2008 Spring: One, Powerpack and Free.
‘One’ comes on an installable live CD which contains non-free drivers, firmware and browser plugins.
‘Powerpack’ is the commercial DVD edition, complete with traditional installer.
It contains some commercial software the other editions don't have, but no free/open source software you can't get in the other editions.
‘Free’ is the version aimed primarily at FOSS diehards.
It's a DVD or 3-CD set with a traditional installer and only contains free/open source software.
That means no NVIDIA or ATI drivers, no Intel wireless firmware, no Java, no Flash, none of that really useful but morally problematical stuff.
If you install Free then have a sudden moral collapse, all that useful stuff can be installed later.
I think it would be appropriate to mention here, too, that Mandriva claim 2008 Spring is the first mainstream Linux distribution to come with extensive customised support for the hugely popular Asus Eee PC.
Bear in mind that I haven’t personally tried this, but Mandriva say:
“If you install 2008 Spring on an Eee, it will work really well without any messing around.
“The wireless will work (with One or Powerpack), suspend and resume will work, sound will work, webcam will work, the screen resolution will be correct, the special keys will work, and all the Mandriva tools have been checked and tweaked where necessary to make sure they play nicely with the low-resolution screen.”
Mandriva also promise improved support for synchronisation with Windows Mobile 5, 6 and 6.1 devices, Blackberries and most Nokia phones – again, I don’t own any such devices so I can’t comment on the veracity of these claims.
For my review of 2008 Spring ‘One’, I was using a Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo P computer with a 3.4Ghz P4 processor, 250GB hard drive, 1024MB of RAM, ATI X600 Radeon graphics card with 256MB of dedicated memory, DVD and DVDRW drives, an Acer AL1912 19inch LCD monitor and wired networking.
Mandriva have both KDE and Gnome versions of 2008 Spring available – I’d gone with the international KDE version, which uses KDE 3.5.9.
Once you’ve installed 2008 Spring to hard drive, it’s possible to install KDE 4 from the Mandriva repository – just grab the ‘task-kde4’ package – but 4 isn’t yet considered stable enough to be the default desktop environment.
As mentioned earlier, my 2008 Spring One install came with the latest ATI proprietary drivers included, which meant that once I had the live CD running, I was able to switch on the Compiz-Fusion 3D desktop effects (you also get the option to use Metisse, or no 3D).
I don’t need a 3D desktop but it’s good to know it’s available for those who like that kind of thing.
My network had been automatically detected and configured by the live CD, as had my sound card.
Ah, the sound – I must applaud Mandriva for tweaking KDE’s default start-up and shutdown sounds, they’re very tasteful and distinctive.
2008 Spring also uses the PulseAudio sound system, the most apparent benefit of which is the ability to have different sound settings for different applications.
Kudos, also, to the Mandriva art team.
2008 Spring looks lovely, from the initial stylish boot screen to the restrained but effective desktop, elements of which change colour as the day progresses.Mandriva have gone with the Crystal SVG iconset, married to La Ora Windows decorations and widgets, which work nicely with the default wallpaper.
I’d seen enough of the live CD to want to go ahead and install to hard drive.
The installer is a very polished piece of work with little in the way of complex options for new users to stumble upon.
It’s also very quick – about 15 minutes from start to finish. Now to the nuts and bolts.
Strangely, once I’d rebooted into the hard drive install, Mandriva went straight to my KDE desktop – I hadn’t asked it to, so what happened to the login panel?
This happened several times until I manually switched off ‘auto-login’ - easily solved, but bizarre nonetheless.
Equally strange, each time I selected ‘End session’ from the logout panel, my screen went blank and hung like that, forcing me to do a hard re-boot.
Again, puzzling, but not a deal breaker.
Now let’s take a look at 2008 Spring’s default software selection.
It’s good, but not exceptional. You get: Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP, digiKam, Amarok, Kaffeine, K3b, KPDF, Akregator (RSS feeds), Kopete and the usual K-prefixed KDE applications.
There’s an interesting little item in the K Menu called ‘Codeina’ which launches a link to the website of Barcelona-based codecs/plugins outfit Fluendo.
If you’re OK with spending some cash, this is where you can get all the multimedia plugins you’ll need to play MP3s, Windows-based media and the like.
Of course, all of these plugins and codecs can be freely obtained from third-party sites, of which more later.
Whether you like the idea of Codeina will depend on how you view the media codec issue.
Some see it as a philosophical, free software argument, but there’s the parallel view which focuses on convenience and ease of use.
You decide, because Mandriva allows you to take either approach.
The release notes for 2008 Spring claimed it includes all the browser plugins you’ll need, and by that they mean just Java and Flash.
The reason I know this is that I was able to watch YouTube videos, but unable to play any movie trailers on the Apple website or BBC radio streams – both of which I regard as fairly critical online activities.
Which brings me to the 2008 Spring package manager, Rpmdrake.
One of my previous Mandriva gripes focused on the problem of knowing which repositories to enable in Rpmdrake.
In 2008 Spring this is handled much better.
The official Main, Contrib, and Non-Free repositories are added to the media manager when you answer ‘yes’ to the dialogue which appears the first time you run Rpmdrake.
It’s wonderfully simple and efficient.
With the repos loaded, I set about installing Virtualbox OSE 1.5.6, Mozilla Thunderbird, Elisa (a new media center app written in Python) and the VLC media player.
I knew from previous Mandriva experience that the best way to solve my browser plugin problem was to visit the Easyurpmi website, where it’s a breeze to enable the Penguin Liberation Front repositories.
From the PLF repo I installed Mplayer and the Mplayer browser plugin, which fixed both my movie trailers and radio streams problems, along with a host of multimedia codecs.
Mandriva’s system updater keeps right on top of things – Day 2 of my Mandriva experience saw it reporting a few dozen programs which needed updating... I happily let it do it’s thing.
My experience with Firefox plugins leaves me a little concerned as to 2008 Spring’s suitability for new Linux users.
How are they to know how to go about solving this issue, with little or no guidance other than on Mandriva websites?
Plus, there are plenty of Linux distros already out there that come with these plugins pre-installed.
I couldn’t let this review pass without mentioning how impressed I am by Mandriva Control Centre.If you’ve used PCLinuxOS, you’ll already be familiar with much of what’s in MCC as Texstar and his team have been using it as the basis for their control centre for some time.
It’s far better suited to the job than, for example, openSUSE’S Yast – just three simple software management options guys, this is how it’s done! - and as a one-stop shop for system management it’s hard to fault.
One new item in 2008 Spring’s control centre is drakguard, a parental control tool which lets you block access to certain websites, and disable your internet connection at specific times – very handy if you share your PC with your kids.
The one task I’ve still to take care of is configuring my printer, though I’m assured by Mandriva that in Spring 2008 most USB printers are automagically detected and configured by printerdrake.
To conclude, Mandriva 2008 Spring came like a breath of fresh air at the end of a long, cold winter.
It’s a stylish, professional-looking operating system that’s easy to manage, with a great selection of software available for download.
I really like the new look and sound of this distribution, and with the added functionality offered by official downloads like Virtualbox, I can see it making a very useful workhorse.
There’s still a little work to be done on clarifying the plugins/codecs issue for new users.
But then Mandriva scores points for including things like Windows migration tools and integral NTFS-3G support, allowing for easy access to Windows partitions.
Don’t be surprised if this particular Spring starts breaking out all over...

Read more on Mandriva 2008 Spring at the community wiki

Postscript
I mentioned in my review that I had downloaded and installed Virtualbox 1.5.6 OSE (Open Source Edition) from the Mandriva repository and just wanted to add that it works flawlessly.
In an earlier blog post (here) I reported running into all sorts of problems when trying to get Virtualbox running on openSUSE and Windows systems, so it made a refreshing change to have it all done and dusted with just a couple of clicks.
Although the OSE version doesn't include USB device support, I've now got a Linux Mint 4.0 virtual machine running at full screen, 1280x1024 resolution (after installing the Virtualbox Guest Additions and editing my xorg.conf according to the excellent Virtualbox user manual).
The ease of installing Virtualbox alone is enough to make Mandriva 2008 Spring worth a look!