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Mandriva 2008.1 RC2 has been out a few days and the reviews are coming in. Personally, I haven’t had time to test it as it was released along side with Ubuntu 8.04 Beta. I have decided to play with Ubuntu 8.04 Beta instead as my last week has been spent with Mandriva.

My biggest concern with Mandriva was the memory issue. There has been a great response from Mandriva regarding this issues and it has been throughly addressed. Mandriva is listening, and they have responded. Below is Adam, from the Mandriva forums explaining the “memory issue”.

“To clear up the memory issue:

Mandriva has several kernel ‘flavours’.

‘desktop’ supports any i686 or later CPU, and up to 4GB of memory.
‘desktop586′ supports any i586 or later CPU, and up to 1GB of memory.
‘laptop’ supports any i686 or later CPU, up to 4GB of memory, and has tuning for better power consumption on laptops.
’server’ supports any i686 or later CPU, and up to 64GB of memory. it has some tuning appropriate for server use.

the Free and Powerpack (and Mini) editions all detect what system you have, and install the appropriate kernel. So unless you actually have an i586 CPU, they will install kernel-desktop or kernel-laptop, or kernel-server if you have more than 4GB of RAM, and all your RAM will be recognized.

One can’t do this. One’s installer is completely different from the other editions. All it really does is dump the running One itself, as a big image, onto the hard disk. It’s copying a big pile of bytes. It has no concept of packages, actually. So it can’t detect hardware and then install the ‘correct’ kernel. All it can do is install the kernel it uses itself.

We use the desktop586 kernel for One to give the widest possible hardware compatibility. We don’t want to use one of the other kernels and have One unable to boot on an i586 machine.

So, that’s the reason. We could, in theory, change the desktop586 kernel to support 4GB of RAM, but we’re unwilling to do that because supporting over 1GB of RAM does cause a measurable performance loss, and most machines that actually need kernel-desktop586 don’t have more than 1GB of RAM, so it would put people trying to keep their old Pentium systems alive needless pain.”

(source: Mandriva Forums)

A great first impression by delboy711 from over at the eee User Forums. From what he says it looks like the RC2 might be worth the install.

“A few tips for others trying out Mandriva 2008.1

When setting up your wireless be sure to be connected to the Internet by Ethernet. Mandriva needs to download some packages for the Atheros Wifi. If you go into the software install GUI first, online software sources will be automatically set up for you. (If you install from a ‘Mandriva One’ CD the drivers are already on the CD)

If you find wireless still does not work after the drivers have been installed and you have configured your wifi correctly, do not panic. Reboot and the wireless connection will start working.

No matter which edition you installed, you can install the ‘Powerpack’ themes from the online repositories. Simply search the software install GUI for any package with the word ‘Powerpack’ in its name. The default Powerpack desktop background is really nice, and slowly changes through the day.

The eee trackpad will automatically be set up by Mandriva to support both vertical and horizontal scroll bars.

Metisse in my opinion is awesome. It perfectly complements the small screen of an eee. To scale a window just point the cursor at the top of the window and run your finger up and down the trackpad scroll bar.

If when you are trying to install software you find you get an error message saying “urpmi is locked”, it is because the Mandriva update applet is locking you out from the online repositories. It is the little orange or green circle in the system tray. I find it best to simply stop the applet running. (right click on it) (urpmi is Mandriva’s equivalent of apt-get. Enter ‘man:/urpmi’ in a konqueror URL line to learn about it.)

And finally a word about kernels.
If you install using a Mandriva One CD it will install the kernel-desktop586 This kernel is chosen because it will run on almost any hardware including a Pentium I. To use a full 1 or 2 GB of memory upgrade the kernel after installation to kernel-laptop-latest Do this and reboot **before** setting up your wifi if you want to save yourself some effort.

If you install using the ‘Free’, or ‘Powerpack’ editions, or perform a network boot with all.img, then Mandriva 2008.1 will install kernel-laptop straight away. This kernel will recognise up to 4GB of RAM and will be the most suitable for most eee owners.

If you ever update your kernel, do not install a specific kernel release, always upgrade the kernel-laptop-latest package and it will pull in the latest kernel with it. At the same time upgrade the madwifi-kernel-laptop-latest package and you will get the latest driver. Also make sure the dkms-madwifi package is installed and after a kernel upgrade the madwifi driver will be automatically recompiled on the next boot.”

(source: eee User Forum courtesy delboy711.)

After having used Mandriva on the eee PC for the last week and getting to know it I’d say it’s not perfect – but it’s getting there. I have about ten burnt discs sitting in front of me (Linux distributions) and there is still a lot more testing to be done. This has been a quick overview of the first few days of what users are saying about Mandriva 2008.1 RC2. Take note of the “release version” you download as there is a notable difference in what each release has out of the box (IE CD version vs DVD version).

UPDATE: 22 March 2008: AkBrian over at the eee User Forums has some important information when installing Mandriva 2008.1RC2 regarding 3D support.


“A couple of things I noticed on RC2. There were a number of updates that came out in the last day or so after RC2 came out, including KDE updates. IF you added sources during the install (cooker ftp) you may have gotten “file not found errors” during installation. This would be due to the nature of cooker files changing during the install, not a bug. Could this have been your problem Tinny?

>>Don’t run the 3d setup from the login manager on first boot. You need to go into your normal desktop, and uncheck the launch at boot of the “whats new in 2008.1″ screen first. It’s too large for the 3dsetup screen that lauches from login manager, and it can’t be closed, requiring an to get back to the login manager. I’ll search for a bug report at qa.mandriva.com , and file one if necessary. This is an easy work around until it is fixed. Or launch the 3d setup from within MCC.

>>At this time it appears to be NECESSARY to use either mettisa or compize to see some of the KDE specific screens, like the one for customizing your desktop. You can install them both and switch back and forth between them to see which one you like. I oddly enough, like the heavy weight compize better myself, as I think it renders fonts better, but mettisa is much less complicated and resource intensive. No reason to not try both.

>>Mandriva seems to have been really responsive to fixing properly submitted EEE specific bug reports. Remember, the Devs don’t have time to read forums around the Internet, they are hacking code to get the release out on time with the fewest bugs possible. People, next stop is gold, when the bugs get baked in! If your going to take the time to beta test, which is what we are doing, then read the documentation, and post detailed reports of whats wrong.”

Happy testing!

Justin