Install part 3.

As I type this I’m downloading the ISO of Mandriva one (http://www.mandriva.com/en/community/mandrivaone) with a view to further evaluation.

Why Mandriva?

My first intentional LINUX experience was Mandrake 9.0, which came free on a magazine cover CD in 2003 or 2004. I slapped together a dual boot trial install on a work machine, and was impressed with how well it ran, decoding DVD video output in a 600X800 box glitch free through a 233MHz processor. Web browsing was a pleasant experience, and although fonts left a little to be desired, it wasn’t too bad with a Voodoo 3 card.

So I installed it as a dual boot on my home machine.

This machine had 2 CD drives, and it quickly became obvious that little thought had been given to how LINUX should handle such a situation: I couldn’t install software or watch DVDs by popping the appropriate disc in a drive and using it. Now to anyone experienced WITH LINUX would have solved this in a jiffy, but coming with more than 15 years apple and PC experience, I was completely lost. On top of that, my modem wouldn’t work without specific drivers (which were more expensive than the modem!) and ditto printer. LINUX sites were full of jargon and since Win 2000 (already installed) worked great, there was absolutely no reason to continue with it, and it was abandoned.

I’ve since tried various live CDs. Knoppix was a favourite, and I was so impressed with the way this ran I even sent Randall a CD a couple of years back. Ubuntu was also tried, but in common with some distros, it’s dull, clunky and crude looking. However I still remember just how cool and smooth that original mandrake install was. I also noticed that with my recent Fedora install, file management, hardware compatibility and general handling seemed much improved, even though screen fonts are lousy (probably due to the ATI graphics chip – ATI doesn’t offer proper LINUX driver support).

As part of trying to support people here I’ve been reading up about Vista, since I know that sooner or later someone will get a vista-based machine and need help. However it turns out that 3D desktops aren’t that new after all – Mandriva (as mandrake has been renamed) has had them for a couple of years. My curiosity was piqued, and so instead of installing fedora as I’d planned, I’ve decided to try Mandriva again instead. It will be interesting to see if this OS is as cool as the earlier version *appeared*, hopefully with most of the LINUX command line based silliness ironed out of regular useage. This one, while at no charge, also comes with proprietary drivers, so hopefully it will recognise my graphics card and actually manage a decent display. I’ve also gone for the KDE interface, as I remember that being somewhat cleaner than gnome, although they both presented effectively the same information and settings. We shall see.