Mandriva

Voordat ik verderga met het eigenlijke onderwerp van dit blogje, even aandacht voor het feit dat de Egyptische blogger Kareem alweer een jaar achter de tralies zit.

Dan is er goed nieuws voor computeraars die alles uit hun pc willen halen zonder aan de leiband van een megabedrijf te lopen. Mandriva Linux 2008 is uit, waarmee deze gebruiksvriendelijke Linuxdistributie nog een stuk verder is verbeterd. Voor overstappende Windowsgebruikers is er nu een wizard die documenten en instellingen migreert. Uiteraard is Mandriva 2008 voorzien van de recentste grafische werkomgevingen KDE en GNOME en kan het overweg met heel veel gangbare computerapparatuur. De communicatie met mijn digitale camera, mobiele telefoon (via Bluetooth) en iAudio mp3-speler gaat moeiteloos. Zeker niet onbelangrijk is dat de Nederlandse vertaling staat als een huis en een Taalunie-goedgekeurd spellingcontrole-woordenboek wordt meegeleverd bij de dvd-versie. Belgische gebruikers zullen het kunnen waarderen dat zelfs software voor het uitlezen van hun eID-pas standaard aanwezig is!

Mandriva Linux 2008 is gratis te downloaden.

 

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Currently I am trying out Mandriva 2008.0, OpenSUSE 103 and Ubuntu Gutsy in the hope of writing a detailed comparative review soon. Don't expect it soon, as I'm currently still collecting basic information, and I have not started writing yet. And from my experience I gathered with the "What's new in Mandriva 2008.0" article, I know that the writing alone will take a long time...

Anyway, here already some early observations:

• The Mandriva installer is by far the best. OpenSUSE's installer crashes in Virtualbox, and Ubuntu's live installer requires a system with 320 MB of RAM and the alternative installer is text only.
• Mandriva has the best support for running as a Virtualbox guest: it will configure the Virtualbox X drivers by default. OpenSUSE is worst here, because it refuses to run at a 1024x768 resolution inside Virtualbox: it just says the VESA driver does not support this resolution...
• Performance wise Mandriva feels the fastsest, OpenSUSE the slowest. This is very preliminary though as I have not yet tested OpenSUSE and Ubuntu on real hardware yet, but only in Virtualbox.
• I had hoped Mandriva 2008.0 to be a nearly perfect release and that it would be very difficult to find any real bugs during normal use. Unfortunately, some rather visibile bugs are still present, while several of them were reported before final release.
• OpenSUSE's GNOME application menu (originally called Slab) is terrible. Most applications are hidden in a seperate browser window, which actually contains a huge list of applications in a few main categories shown in the left. You can add a normal application menu, but its structure is very bad.
• At first sight, the graphical presentation in OpenSUSE is the most impressive, with Mandriva being a close second. Personally I don't like at all Ubuntu's brown look.
• Ubuntu seems to have a very limited GNOME installation, with a much more limited amount of applications installed by default, compared to Mandriva and OpenSUSE. All in all, probably a bit too limited.

As there are very early observations, some of them are maybe totally wrong, so take this all with a grain of salt for now.

This is for anyone getting NOKEY errors trying to install packages from the online repositories for Mandriva Linux 2008.

The problem was that the pubkey files, which contain the keys used to sign packages in each repository, were missing from the media_info directories in the 2008 tree, so when it was adding the repositories, Mandriva could not get the key for each repository. Since the repository seemed to have no key associated with it, but the packages were signed, when you tried to install any package, Mandriva would give you the NOKEY warning.

This has been fixed on our master mirror around two hours before this post. I have checked several mirrors and found that at the time of writing this post, a couple of mirrors have synced up with the fix already, but most have not.

Once all the mirrors sync up with the fix, the problem will not occur again for anyone adding repositories. However, if you have already set up your repositories, the problem will not be fixed automatically. You must remove your repositories using the repository configuration tool, which can be found in the Mandriva Control Center, or the urpmi.removemedia command line tool. You can then set the repositories up again (using the repository configuration tool, or urpmi.addmedia) and you should no longer see the errors.

I will post a follow-up message when my checks indicate that most mirrors are synced up with the fix.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

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This is for anyone getting NOKEY errors trying to install packages from the online repositories for Mandriva Linux 2008.

The problem was that the pubkey files, which contain the keys used to sign packages in each repository, were missing from the media_info directories in the 2008 tree, so when it was adding the repositories, Mandriva could not get the key for each repository. Since the repository seemed to have no key associated with it, but the packages were signed, when you tried to install any package, Mandriva would give you the NOKEY warning.

This has been fixed on our master mirror around two hours before this post. I have checked several mirrors and found that at the time of writing this post, a couple of mirrors have synced up with the fix already, but most have not.

Once all the mirrors sync up with the fix, the problem will not occur again for anyone adding repositories. However, if you have already set up your repositories, the problem will not be fixed automatically. You must remove your repositories using the repository configuration tool, which can be found in the Mandriva Control Center, or the urpmi.removemedia command line tool. You can then set the repositories up again (using the repository configuration tool, or urpmi.addmedia) and you should no longer see the errors.

I will post a follow-up message when my checks indicate that most mirrors are synced up with the fix.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

Salut lecteur,

Je sais que je suis en retard pour l’annoncer, mais Mandriva Linux 2008 est sortie officiellement hier ! Franchement c’est une énorme réussite et bravo à tous les contributeurs, les développeurs et même les utilisateurs et les décideurs qui ont posé leur petite pierre à l’édifice. Et puis aussi merci aux animateurs du forum, aux contributeurs sur le Wiki (qui comporte déjà plus de 200 articles en langue française et 450 en anglais !).

Bon pourquoi ce retard ? Et bien je ne me base pas sur des ragots de comptoir pour dire que c’est une excellente distro, mais je l’ai vraiment testé toute la journée : pas un seul petit problème

On peut dire quand même que c’est l’une des distributions que j’ai le plus testé. En effet, j’ai fait une mise à jour depuis la 2007 Spring vers la 2008 RC2 lorsque cette dernière était sortie. Puis, j’ai remonté les bogues et les requêtes d’amélioration avec un assez bon retour : 5 bugs (33569, 34147, 34025, 34326, 34323) ont été corrigés (bien sûr, c’est sans compter ceux qui m’affectaient mais que je n’ai pas rapporté le premier). Un gros couac m’est arrivé lors de la mise à jour car je manquais de place sur le disque et l’install s’est donc arrêtée en plein milieu… Heureusement, un petit upgrade vers cooker m’a sauvé la mise. Et là, je me suis retrouvé avec un système très stable (sans doûte grâce à la recompilation de tous les paquetages qui a été effectuée en bonne partie par Adam Williamson), rapide (grâce au nouvel ordonnanceur CFQ dans le noyau et aussi l’amélioration des scripts de démarrage), le bonheur. Et j’ai pu profiter des nombreuses nouveautés de la 2008.

Et aujourd’hui, j’ai fait une installation complète de l’édition Powerpack en conservant mon “/home”, mais en formatant mon “/”. Je me suis dit que ça n’allait pas m’apporter grand chose étant déjà en 2008, mais je me suis bien fourré le doigt dans l’oeil ! J’ai été très content des applications et des nombreux petits “plus” qui ont été installés par défaut dans firefox, par exemple (je vous laisserais en juger vous même). C’est tout bête mais c’est parfois à des petits détails (remarquer la copie d’écran et son commentaire dont je suis l’auteur) qu’on reconnaît une grande distro et là, c’est vraiment un excellent cru.

Tout à marché out-of-the-box et je n’ai même pas eu à configurer mon écran dans l’installeur ! Il a directement été détecté et la résolution choisie automatiquement : 1400×1050 sur mon laptop, c’est le maximum. Mon wifi a été aussi configuré directement (la version powerpack, ça aide : tous les pilotes sont inclus dedans). En milieu pro, je dois me connecter à Microsoft Exchange et la dernière version d’Évolution inclue dans la Mandriva 2008 me permet de faire pratiquement la même chose que mes collègues sous Outlook : partage du calendrier, interrogation de la liste d’adresses globale, et bien sûr réception/envoi du courrier. Configurer les effets 3D avec Drak3D a été l’affaire de 2 clics et ça marche parfaitement :). Les nouvelles améliorations apportées à drakrpm et urpmi sont aussi bien pratiques pour l’installation de paquetages !

En fait, avec 2008, on sent qu’on a affaire enfin à une distro solide et je suis très déçu… depuis que je l’ai installée, je n’ai plus de bogues à rapporter !

Je parlerais des petites améliorations de la Powerpack dans un prochain billet ainsi que des nouveautés pour Mandriva-compagnie, Mandriva-club et Mandriva-web… car toutes ces facettes vivent un profond changement.

(Vous remarquerez aussi que pour quasiment chaque phrase dans ce billet, il y a un article associé dans le wiki, c’est bien la preuve qu’il commence à avoir un contenu très intéressant malgré son très jeune âge !)

Well, I’ve decided to move the blog to wordpress instead of serendipity. I liked serendipity a lot, but… well, wordpress is more popular and I wouldn’t to see if I could make trackbacks actually work. Seems a little simpler and straightforward, once you get used to the different layouts, etc.

Anyways, have to do some cleaning… the serendipity converter that I used brought across all comments and entries, but missed the categories completely so most of them are unfiled right now… will fix that in the next few days.

Just a note that the RSS feed url is different now, although I’ll probably employ some apache magic to make it transparent.

finally, it’s done (and I greatly resemble a zombie right now) - 2008 is out. really happy with this release, it’s going to be a stonker, I hope. also up, you will note, is the new mandriva.com . Still a bit rough around the edges, but it now has big green download buttons. I hope you’re all happy!

2008 release story is here. Please, Digg it, Slashdot it, spread it all over the known universe if possible.

I am going to go buy some milk. Milk is good.

First of all, i'm working in a Linux company, i use Linux for almost everything in my life except gaming.
Second, my company sold like hundred thousand of linux machines all over the world.
Third, it's obvious for any smart person that actually read regular information about computer world see that linux is growing A LOT.
Then, suddenly, the bank that i use ( and many of my fellows co-workers ) decide the very smart move to include an security applet that simply makes mandatory the use of Microsoft Windows. And they tell this explicitely.
They provide a telephone to users of "other operational systems" to inform then that they're not using MS ( maybe to tell then to use telephone operations ). Ok, would be barely ok if..
..i'm outside my country. The only way i have to pay my accounts is by internet banking, as my family lives away from my city. And will not back until the terminal date od back change, 19 October. So, if some issue happens during my stay out my home, like pay the credit card debts, that i'm using here, to avoid lock, i'll be helpless, or use some non-personal computer with Microsoft Windows to deal with my money.
Nice, huh ? To have security, i just need abandon my current security in favor of a use unsecure computer that i can't assure if is reliable.
Maybe can i ask ABN to give me R$ 500,00 in my account to buy a copy of some non portuguese Microsoft Windows here to solve my issue

Of course, who cares about Linux users ? Not ABN Amro. Should we include Santander in this too ?

Hi All…

I’m not having much time to work on my personal projects ( pychord by example ) cause I’m having a lot of tasks to do ( and to learn ) on my college and on my new job.

But I’m here to talk about pychord, so let me do it! =)

Tim wrote a lot of good suggestions on garage’s foruns. So, I’m working on their ideas now. I need to say “thanks” to Tim cause he gave me a lot of good suggestions to make pychord better. Thank you Tim!

On this last weekend I worked in “Zoom IN/OUT ” feature and change the font of the chord’s screen. I think that pychord is a little better now.

You can get it here, or do a “upgrade” on your device.

That is all!

Have a nice week!

We’re proud to announce that Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site, and on the network of public mirror servers.

The result of six months of heavy development and testing, 2008 includes all the latest software and many enhancements over previous Mandriva Linux releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, a solid kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, cutting-edge 3D-accelerated desktop courtesy of Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, and everything else you’ve come to expect from the latest Mandriva Linux release. We have integrated a reworked hardware detection sub-system, with support for a lot of new devices (particularly graphics cards, sound cards and wireless chips). Also, the addition of new features and ongoing improvements to the renowned Mandriva tools continues, including a wizard to import Windows documents and settings, the new network configuration center, and improvements to the Mandriva software management tools.

You can read about the most exciting new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The Release Notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The Errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them.

Mandriva Linux 2008 was developed by the Mandriva development community, based around the Cooker development distribution. This open, community-driven development system has been in place since 1998, making it one of the longest-standing open source development communities around. The involvement of the Mandriva development community helps us to make Mandriva Linux one of the largest, most up-to-date, integrated, internationalized and standardized distributions available, for which we thank our contributors greatly. We’re proud of the standardization efforts included in Mandriva Linux 2008, including support for the Freedesktop.org XDG menu, user directories and icon theme specifications.

Mandriva Linux 2008 is available for download free of charge at the Mandriva website. The One installation CD is the recommended download with everything you need to start using Mandriva Linux 2008: it comes with a full KDE desktop and application suite, NVIDIA and ATI proprietary video card drivers, Intel wireless firmware, Adobe Flash and Sun Java browser plugins, all included.

Enjoy your brand new Mandriva Linux 2008 system!

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I always like the week or two before a release. While the other developers are busting their butts trying to get things finished for the upcoming release, I actually get to take a bit of a breather, largely because I don’t like duplicating effort so any non-essential updates get to take a bit of a break until the next version comes out, so I can do an update once, instead of twice.

Of course, once the release is out and the developers get to take a bit of a breather, my workload doubles (sometimes triples) because not only do I have to deal with those updates that had taken a break for a few days, but the inundation of bugfix requests really comes in. It’s no secret that the bulk of bugfix updates come out in the 2-3 weeks post-release.

So… welcome Mandriva 2008! You’re a very pretty beast (and now that you’re out I get to play with you some more and see what you’ve got hiding up your sleeves (I don’t have an opporunity or the time to fiddle with cooker too much)), and I’m sure I will be cursing you before the week is out. =)

Cursing in a good way, of course (well, I hope).

Anyways, congratulations to the development team on what looks to be a fantastic release (I’ve installed the RC’s on two systems and despite some X quirks that I worked around (using my old xorg.conf), it looks pretty solid.

Help spread the word by digging the news!

This week’s TechRepublic tip is Synchronize computers with Unison which introduces the multi-computer synchronization tool known as Unison.

I downloaded the OpenSUSE 10.3 DVD to test it out and compare it with Mandriva 2008.0. I was interested in reviewing the current state of this distribution and maybe also get some inspiration for improvements I can propose for Mandriva 2008.1.

The artwork in OpenSUSE is very nice. There are some interesting ideas we should really consider in Mandriva: possibility to read the release notes during the installation of packages, some interesting yast modules (the firwall module is way better than Mandriva's),... But I discovered already a lot of problems by just quickly testing it out in Virtualbox: the installer (actually yast) just crashes completely when detecting the network configuration, there was no possibility to use a 1024x768 resolution in Virtualbox, some strange choices of default applications (especially in GNOME: Brasero is currently still a bit too buggy, and Skencil is extremely ugly),...

So currently I have a strong feeling that Mandriva 2008.0 will be a better and especially more stable distribution than OpenSUSE 10.3. I'll continue testing out OpenSUSE a bit and noting my remarks, and I'll probably install it on an old laptop I have here, to see how it works on real hardware. I'll do the same with Mandriva 2008.0 and I'll maybe post a review comparing Mandriva 2008.0 and OpenSUSE 10.3 (and maybe Ubuntu Gutsy too?). Well, time will tell.

By the time you read this, there is much chance that Mandriva 2008.0 final is out and downloadable. Go check the Mandriva download page now to check it out!

Following the port of xmp to QNX6 I wiped out Neutrino from the test machine and installed BeOS Max Edition. A new BeOS sound driver was written, based on the OSX CoreAudio driver and documentation found in the Internet. Some tweaking was required to build the driver since the SoundPlayer API is in C++ and the rest of application is C.

Sound quality is fine, terminal settings work correctly and latency is decent. Should we try Plan9 now?

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Well, I called the idiots AGAIN today. And they suddenly found out “hmm, we can’t get parts for it”. So, they’re sending back the box without a working mainboard. How fun. So I’m still without a proper laptop, and it seems like it’s going to stay that way.

So, they can’t get parts for a laptop bought 22/08-05. Wonderful.
So I’m pretty much screwed. Yay.

And now for something completely different…

if Lewis Hamilton doesn’t win the Formula 1 world title this year there’s no justice, as the man is some kind of saint. He had to leave the Chinese Grand Prix while in a position to clinch the title after ditching his car in a gravel trap while trying to drive into the pits on a set of tyres that barely existed any more, they were so worn down. Not twenty minutes later - at a point where just about any other driver, and indeed any other person you could name with the possible exception of Buddha, would still have been breaking things in the garage and throwing a full-blown hissy fit for not being called in for a pit stop sooner - he’s doing the rounds of his engineers shaking hands and slapping backs, and giving an interview to the BBC in which he took full responsibility for missing the corner and said he was looking forward to winning the next race. The man’s incomparable.

Found another site running a ‘what’s your favourite distribution’ poll - ReviewLinux. You know what to do!

We got 2008 (mostly) finalized today. Well, tomorrow morning, Paris time. Lots of very tired people on the internal IRC channel juggling final-final-final ISO generation, torrent organization, and watching France beat New Zealand in the rugby World Cup quarter finals. The Powerpack and Free editions are done, and just One needs finishing up. The early seeders are now getting access to the torrents, so we’ll be able to do the public release early next week.

I’m really looking forward to the next few weeks - 2008 is shaping up to be a really killer release, and we have some really nice news about the Club changes to go with it. The reduction in the range of products for 2008 is also a great positive thing, and the effective reduction in prices that comes along with it. I’m hoping we’ll be able to make some significant advances in mind- and market-share with this release, it certainly deserves it! It’ll be an interesting ride for sure.

Well, I just found out about another site running a ‘what’s your distribution’ poll - ReviewLinux. You know what to do!

For those of you who are impatient to get started with Mandriva Linux 2008, good news: the Free and Powerpack ISOs are finalized and are being made available to the early seeders program right now. We need a few days for the early seeders to get downloaded and set up to seed, so the official public release will happen at the start of next week. Watch this space! The One ISO is taking a little longer to complete, but will be available for the official release at the same time as the others.

Et maintenant, pour les francophones (traduction par Damien) :
Bien, je viens juste de découvrir un autre site proposant un sondage sur le thème “Quelle distribution utilisez vous ?“. Vous savez que faire !

Pour ceux d’entre vous impatients de plonger dans l’univers de Mandriva Linux 2008, voici de bonne nouvelles : la Free et la Powerpack sont terminées ; en effet les ISOs sont validées et mises à disposition pour le programme “early seeders”. Il suffit de quelques jours pour que les “seeders” téléchargent les ISOs et soient prêts à commencer la diffusion, l’ouverture des téléchargements publiques se fera donc en début de semaine. Surveillez le blog pour en être informés ! La One nécessite encore quelques tests afin d’obtenir sa validation finale mais sera disponible en même temps que les autres ISOs, lors de l’annonce officielle de Mandriva Linux 2008.

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I received this today :

From: tezz hurt Reply to: tezz_teco@yahoo.com Subject: i must kill you Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2007 16:09:00 +0000 (18:09 CEST)
I am clifford avrus the murderer who lives in united kingdom. but i was paid 100.000.000 to eliminate you,but i decided to let you know where exactly your death is coming from.
Did you ever offend your friend who planned now as i am mailing you to kill you.Anytime from now i will be at your family home first to kill number of your family,and thereafter you and so close to you.
All your contacts and families contacts are with me now,i just felt that i should let you know before coming after you.
E-mail to contact me:tezz_teco@yahoo.com

Google does not know this message, and that's the first time I see it. It was sent from an IP in Nigeria...

What do they expect with such message ? Just getting a reply ? Did any of you get this too ?

www.hardware4linux.info website has now reached 1500 reported Linux systems. It can now be considered as a serious user database which grows everyday and allows everyone to compare objectively support of its various peripherals with the other users.

All components of the system are inserted into the database and can both be ranked and commented so that you’re even able to give little tips like “my SD card reader isn’t working about of the box, but by using X or Y, it’s working perfectly”.

So don’t hesitate to :

• Report your system if you have not done so already
• Update your hardware4linux collector if you have an older version (less than 0.9.4)
• Update your configuration if you have reported it before and has changed it. In order to do that, you just have to give your machine the same name than for the previous report.

For those interested, here’s my laptop configuration.

It’s possible as well to subscribe to the comments RSS feed.

Ah, one last word : try to be fair. Reporting something is working perfectly out-of-the-box (rank “5″) and then indicating in the comments that it doesn’t work, it’s giving wrong input to the database and it won’t help anyone…