Nice Review...But Mandriva Is Still Number One For Me
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| zenarcher Jun 26, 2008 2:22 AM EDT |
I was an OpenSUSE user for about 2 years, but have been back to Mandriva for over a year now. I'm not highly proficient with Linux, but I like it and am still learning, after about four years of "Linux Only" usage. During that time, I've tried several different distros, but always come back to OpenSUSE or Mandriva. While I run Mandriva 2008.1 Spring on my main systems, I did install OpenSUSE 11.0 on my test box, just to give it a try. The install did go fairly easily, however I had just the opposite experience with wireless hardware. I use Atheros wireless cards in four systems here and with Mandriva, a couple of mouse clicks...the necessary packages are automatically installed and wireless is up and working. Not so with OpenSUSE 11.0. After a forum post, it was found there is a conflict in packages for Atheros wireless. Someone on the forum found new packages we could download and install right from the forum post...and step by step instructions to make it work properly. After following the steps, my wireless began working and worked fine for about four hours...then, just quit. I couldn't seem to get it working again, so I just reinstalled Mandriva and with a couple of clicks of the mouse, wireless was working flawlessly, once again. Right now, I'm waiting for the first Alpha release of Mandriva 2009 and will relegate OpenSUSE to the history files again. Likewise, my laptop uses Broadcom wireless and after copying the Windows driver over to the Home directory...a couple of clicks of the mouse and Mandriva 2008.1 had the Broadcom wireless working properly. I've installed Mandriva 2008.1 for several real LInux newbies and all have been pleased with it and able to learn quickly. I'll be staying with Mandriva. |
| thenixedreport Jun 26, 2008 2:29 AM EDT |
Mandriva is pretty good from what I hear. Helios himself likes working with it himself. Then again, he finds good things in many distros. |
| tracyanne Jun 26, 2008 5:06 AM EDT |
Mandriva is number one with me as well. For one thing OpenSuse still has that crappy Yast. |
| rijelkentaurus Jun 26, 2008 5:44 AM EDT |
I used SuSE 9.1 when I first got started in this stuff, and I liked it a lot. SUSE 10.x was not bad, but quite heavy-feeling to me. Mandriva kicks some butt, runs great, and on my Dell Vostro 1700, the media keys work perfectly and standy mode works great when I close the laptop lid. I give Dell some credit for that, they really do try to make their machines Linux-compatible even if they don't push the Penguin like they should. I'll take Mandriva any day of the week over just about anything. Best move I ever made. |
| helios Jun 26, 2008 7:16 AM EDT |
I never "advocate" a distro any more officially...I can't but I can say that every problem I've ever found to be niggling and nagging...has been dealt with in Mandriva. I install the "3M" 's on my client's computers, depending on hardware. Mandriva, Mepis and Mint. I have to say though, Mandriva is enjoying a resurgence in popularity and it has everything to do with WWD. Working Without Drama Some of us may enjoy the course of the problem and tracking down the solution but the majority of computer users just want to install and get on with it. The fact that the first cloudbook would refuse to auto mount new devices was the biggest factor in the "dis-satisfied" product returns at Walmart. There is absolutely no excuse for a distro to make you physically mount a drive. I just went through a two session, 7 hour marathon customer support call with one of Zareason's customers (we do their carryover support). The problem it turns out is that the concept of "mounting" a drive is completely foreign to him..as it is with most computer users. Seems there are those who still have some things to learn from MS. |
| jdixon Jun 26, 2008 8:49 AM EDT |
> I never "advocate" a distro any more officially Well, I'm perfectly willing to tell any and all which distro I think is best. Of course, I'm not vain enough to think that makes it the best for everyone or for all purposes. And I tend to get somewhat irritated with those who are, though which distro gets mentioned the most in that regard is best left unsaid. |
| jdixon Jun 26, 2008 8:51 AM EDT |
> There is absolutely no excuse for a distro to make you physically mount a drive. Even Slackware automounts CD's/DVD's/USB drives now, and puts and icon on the desktop for you, so I have to agree. Now, automounting additional hard drives is another matter, but few newbies are going to be doing that. |
| zenarcher Jun 26, 2008 9:20 AM EDT |
I would agree about advocating any specific distribution, as well. One aspect I really enjoy about Linux is the broad range of distributions available....it's about choice. Some distributions just seem to work easier for some people, while others are easier for other people. I've read about the ease and simplicity of Ubuntu for a long time and have tried for three years to get a successful install, without success. Never, have I been able to get all my hardware working correctly, trying with several different computers. But, I know that other people swear by Ubuntu....so whatever works for them, is great. I did have to take exception with this article, however, in respect to wireless in the new OpenSUSE vs. Mandriva. Mandriva has just always been easy to deal with, in respect to wireless, at least for me. Looking at the OpenSUSE forum, in respect to wireless in OpenSUSE 11.0, it's quite obvious that I'm not the only one who experienced a lot of frustration: http://forums.opensuse.org/network-internet/wireless/ Conflicting package versions in a final release, for something as simple as madwifi just was not acceptable to me. At least with Linux, we all have a lot of choices for distributions, desktops and such and I find many Windows users, once they have looked at my Linux systems, to be much more open to change...especially when I mention all the choices they can have. |
| NoDough Jun 26, 2008 10:36 AM EDT |
I haven't had time to play musical distros for the last year or so. I really miss it. |
| rijelkentaurus Jun 26, 2008 11:49 AM EDT |
I haven't been tempted to play musical distros since I installed Mandriva 2008.1, I don't miss it a bit. At first it was to try out new things, but then it became "how to get one thing working", which was fixed in one distro but not another. Or I didn't have the programs I wanted in all of them, whatever. Mandriva fits my ticket. Mint? Too much like Ubuntu for me, h, but Mepis has been a truly rocking distro for a very long time...it's just ugly, LOL. To each their own and all the better for it! |
| herzeleid Jun 26, 2008 1:43 PM EDT |
When I switched to suse in 2004, I thought I'd found the ideal distro - it's still not bad in the server room, but I was disappointed at the problems I saw in 11.0 - not a total loss, but nowhere near the level of quality I had come to expect out of nuremburg. In contrast, when I installed ubuntu 8.04 I was delighted to find that every gizmo and widget on my laptop works perfectly, package management is a breeze, and online updates always work, every time. If suse 11.1 isn't a significant improvement, I'll be thinking seriously about moving completely to debian/ubuntu, as well as recommending that to my clients as well. |
| tracyanne Jun 26, 2008 3:22 PM EDT |
Quoting:I haven't been tempted to play musical distros since I installed Mandriva 2008.1 I don't currently have a spare machine to play musical Distros with. I like to try different distros, even if only to confirm my current choice. |
| jdixon Jun 26, 2008 4:06 PM EDT |
> I don't currently have a spare machine to play musical Distros with. Well, as I noted in the thread about Vector Linux, the best solution to this problem is to use virtual machines. With both VMware Server and Virtualbox being free downloads (and Virtualbox has a Free version too), there's no reason not to use them. |
| salparadise Jun 26, 2008 8:54 PM EDT |
Talking about automounting drives..... Does anyone know why Kubuntu 8.04 asks for the root password whenever extra partitions (locally installed) need to be mounted in a new session? I've not seen this before, no other previous version did this (and frankly it sucks - and was the biggest reason I moved on to other distros). |
| herzeleid Jun 26, 2008 10:19 PM EDT |
> Talking about automounting drives.... If you actually mean automounting, that shouldn't require root access - but perhaps you really don't have autofs set up after all, and are really trying to manually mount partitions from a local disk, which is a superuser activity and has historically been so in unix since the beginning. Could you describe your scenario in more detail? |
| salparadise Jun 26, 2008 11:18 PM EDT |
Yes. I installed Kubuntu onto a machine with 3 hard drives. This was not a new setup hardware wise and I was replacing the previous version of Kubuntu at the time. As is my want I set up root and home partitions only, leaving the rest of the partitions till after first boot. I duly added all appropriate partitions to fstab, created mount points and ran mount -a. No problems so far. Upon next boot, expecting to find all partitions mounted I found instead that whilst the mountpoints were shown in /media/ that none were actually mounted. (Odd because I added them as I always do). So I clicked on one at random in dolphin. A "password required" box appeared. After inputting the password the partition mounted and all others mounted after being clicked on. On shutdown I get another box asking me to put the password in again in order for the partition to be unmounted. Next boot - same again. This is new. No other version of Linux that I've ever used has asked for my password to mount local partitions before. Why do I need to input a password to mount a drive that's correctly added to fstab? And why again on shutdown? This is some new security model? I couldn't find anything obvious on the Kubuntu site nor could I find anything in a search on the Kubuntu forums. |
| herzeleid Jun 27, 2008 2:03 AM EDT |
> Upon next boot, expecting to find all partitions mounted I found instead that whilst the mountpoints were shown in /media/ that none were actually mounted. That is bizzarre, and I've never seen it either. I'm running ubuntu 8.04 on machines with multiple miscellaneous partitions. If it was em in that situation, I'd look closely at fstab, and look for mount-related messages in the system logs. Any funny mount options, encrypted partitions, anything out of the ordinary? |
| salparadise Jun 27, 2008 7:14 AM EDT |
Nope, all exactly as it was when I rebooted from Kububtu 7.10. Tis no matter, I have a different distro on there now. It is a distro surfing partition really. I did wonder whether the Kununtu devs had gone mad or not but the lack of response from searches made me wonder if it was some freak incident. That said - I installed it afresh twice and both times it exhibited the same behaviour. |
| helios Jun 27, 2008 7:23 AM EDT |
OK...This is off topic a bit for the thread but it validates my point...AND shows just how far we really have to go...and people wonder why I say the 'buntu's aren't at all suitable for new users. Case on point: "I duly added all appropriate partitions to fstab, created mount points and ran mount -a. No problems so far. Upon next boot, expecting to find all partitions mounted I found instead that whilst the mountpoints were shown in /media/ that none were actually mounted." What? Added what to fstag...fstop...f-something or other...how do I do that? WHY do I do that. I'm supposed to plug in or install the hardware and it's supposed to work. I have to edit a text file? Screw this.....Windows may be raping me but at least they know that I'm a computer illiterate. Absolutely ridiculous to say that a distro is new user friendly when one has to edit a text file to add a hard drive. To be honest though...I've found the "media" phenomenon in several distros. I solve it by going into my partition tool and add them there. There is also a tool called kde-guidance that allows this to happen as well. It's a bit buggy but workable. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jun 27, 2008 9:09 AM EDT |
I've spent a great deal of time hacking into xorg.conf, fstab and GRUB's menu.lst Yeah, I can do it, but easy GUI ways of dealing with them are essential. |
| jdixon Jun 27, 2008 9:09 AM EDT |
> AND shows just how far we really have to go... I don't think any distro out there will handle adding a new hard drive painlessly. Even Windows won't (I can't speak for the Mac, not having touched one in years). To be fair, that's not something your average newbie will be worrying about. They'll want someone to install a new drive for them. |
| tuxchick Jun 27, 2008 9:56 AM EDT |
Sal, did you use the 'user' or 'users' option in fstab to allow non-root users to mount/unmount the partitions? In Kubuntu, system settings -- advanced -- disks and filesystems gives you a nice little graphical tool for managing partitions and mountpoints. Throw in GParted for super-EZ partitioning and filesysteming, and you have nice graphical goodness. This whole /media thing is kind of an odd idea that I guess made sense to somebody. When HAL detects a partition that's not listed in fstab, it's automatically mounted in /media. So this would mostly apply to removable media, but hard disk partitions get swept up in its net too. It's kind of funny that the brainiacs behind HAL/udev didn't realize that most folks don't want a completely dynamic mounting scheme for storage media, but need consistent naming for storage devices. For example, when I run my personal backups to an external USB hard drive, I don't want to hunt down whatever random name it has every time. So there are elaborate udev hacks that should be enabled by default to ensure persistent naming for a lot of devices, and I use the UUIDs of devices to make sure they stay nailed down the way I want them. |
| herzeleid Jun 27, 2008 11:03 AM EDT |
Quoting: What? Added what to fstag...fstop...f-something or other...how do I do that? WHY do I do that. I'm supposed to plug in or install the hardware and it's supposed to work. I have to edit a text file? Screw this.....Helios, I've installed ubuntu server and desktop on a number of boxes recently, and have never need to manually edit fstab, create mount points, issue mount commands etc. Everything was handled during the install, with a nice intuitive GUI. Sal may have tried doing things the hard way, but that doesn't mean it was the only way, or even a good way to go about it. |
| salparadise Jun 27, 2008 1:15 PM EDT |
I honestly thought it was some new fangled security model and was prepared to launch a broadside at the narrow mindedness of it. Unless the Kubuntu default installer has added an option I missed then it was nothing that I did. One thing that does drive me up the wall is the way that fstab has moved from the good old /dev/blah to hardware labels(?) which result in long strings of letters and numbers (like I'm supposed to know which drive is ATA23D65779830980). Sometimes, it seems, people change stuff because they can rather than because it needs changing. |
| tuxchick Jun 27, 2008 2:17 PM EDT |
Using /dev names doesn't work any more because of udev, which creates /dev names dynamically. So with a USB stick, for one example, one time it's /dev/hdd, and another time it's /dev/hdc, and then there is a change in the kernel and there are no more hd names, but everything is sd. Wheeee! So. The moral is, use a unique identifier that lives on the device itself. You can find UUIDs easily, with the vol_id command, like this: # vol_id -u /dev/sda2 1c390791-bd8a-4655-b722-6d0bcbbdf547 How do you find the /dev name? In the output of dmesg, if you can't find it anywhere else. Instead of UUIDs, you can create your own nice short friendly labels. This article spells everything out: http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6472/1/ Corraling Linux Hard Disk Names This is the kind of thing that there should be a good universal GUI configurator and detector for. As it is, we need a hodgepodge of different utilities. |
| azerthoth Jun 27, 2008 4:50 PM EDT |
TC, that command assumes you know the /dev/ ID to start with # blkid spits it all out nice and neat. Static devices can safely be renamed to /dev/??? in both fstab and grub, and you can set your udev rules so that specific removable devices are always assigned the same, so with a little forethought /dev/??? works just fine. On an aside, other than ripping out the blkid identifiers any place that I find them, I have to date, neer had an issue just plain ignoring them and staying "old school". |
| tuxchick Jun 27, 2008 5:15 PM EDT |
mm, blkid is full of tasty goodness :) |
| azerthoth Jun 27, 2008 5:31 PM EDT |
yikes. I think the nicest thing I have ever said about blkid is "ooh, ick" With the majority of the rest of the comments more fitting to adult films. |
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