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After the success of Ubuntu 8.04 on my Asus EEE PC it was brought to my attention by Klopus there are interesting happenings going on over at Mandriva. I was directed to a thread on the EEE PC User Forum discussing Mandriva on the EEE PC. After reading through the thread I was convinced I would give Mandriva a try. A swift download/burn/format/install later Mandriva was installed on my EEE PC.

The install was straight forward. The disk partitioning software Mandriva uses is a bit awkward to figure out. In advance mode there was a listing of over twenty different file systems to chose from – I did not see EXT2 on this list. This was my first disappointment as “journaling” file systems have a high read/write not good for the SSD in the EEE PC. Therefore, EXT2 would have been my first file system choice to install. However, as it was not an option I ended up choosing EXT3. The partition manager also enjoyed harassing me about not having a swap file – it took me an additional few clicks to assure the partition manager I was aware of said issue.

Out of the box all the software/hardware were supported as discussed in the forum. I greatly enjoyed the WPA2 LEAP support out of the box (compared to Xandros). The Compiz support out of the box was a treat as never having experienced “3D” Linux eye candy before. However, this did take an amount of CPU power/memory to perform (Compiz can always be disabled).

As with Ubuntu there were minor issues with the ACPI settings. The wireless would not come back up after resuming from standby. The battery monitor was inherently wrong. I was told I have 2% battery power when the machine is first turned on (and plugged in) – this then jumps to 100% telling me I have 19 hours of battery life. The battery meter then sits at around 2.5 – 3 hours while jumping up and down erratically.

I found the sound to be even stranger than the ACPI support. The sound level has two modes – at max volume or mute. There is no variability in the sound levels. Either scare everyone around you when the machine boots up or disable the system sounds – I did the latter.

The biggest issue I found with Mandriva was memory support. The EEE PC BIOS sees 2GB of memory, the Mandriva hardware manager sees 2GB of memory physically installed. However, the actual operating system only makes use of 1GB of memory. I tried researching this and found no information on it. I assume it’s a relatively new issue. During the setup process I was prompted to specify the maximum amount of memory for the operating system – the max was 894MB. There was no option anywheres to increase the allocation.

Edit: Clarification on why Mandriva does not support more than 880MB of memory in this release. (source: damchi)

All this being said I am pleasantly happy with Mandriva. A comment Klopus made to me via our e-mail correspondence caught my attention:

“The fact that Mandriva Eee support is official and thus guaranteed to propagate upstream with changes is also critical. Compare this to Ubuntu for example where Eee support is some persons hack which may be broken at any time by some official Ubuntu update which’s totally unaware of Eee related mods.”

I found this interesting as there is conscious work over at Mandriva to in time have full support for the EEE PC. Whereas support in Ubuntu is by luck or by the work of Linux enthusiasts making the release compatible.

Conclusion: In time I’m sure we can look forward to Mandriva possibly being as fine tuned to the hardware as is Xandros now (minus the issues) or as Mac OSX is to Apple hardware. Mandriva is still in “release candidate” mode and there are many changes to come just as Ubuntu 8.04 is still Alpha. It will be an interesting spring/summer season of development for the Asus EEE PC.

Update (19 March 2008): Once again I’d like to thank everyone for their feedback and discussions about this article on the various forums. I would like to clarify the premise of this article was to insight discussion going on in the area of software development on the EEE PC. Based on the hits, downloads, and forum discussion I’d say this was accomplished. I’ve learned a great deal from the Linux community in the past few days and continue to encourage feedback (positive and negative). Again, discussion is my primary objective with this article.

Further developments:

• Clarification on why Mandriva does not support more than 880MB of memory in this release. (source: damchi)
  
• Mandriva 2008.1 is due to be released 1 April 2008 and is supposed to be the first release specifically targeted for the EEE PC hardware.
  
• 21 March 2008: Mandriva 2008.1RC2 has been released. I am having unconfirmed reports 2GB of memory is now being utilized.