Mandriva 2009 Linux Review

Mandriva 2009 Linux Review

Posted on October 14th, 2008 linuxandfriends 4 comments

Mandriva has released yet another polished Linux distribution. Called Mandriva 2009, this is made available in different formats namely :
1. Mandriva Linux One 2009 – This is a live CD which comes with all the proprietary multimedia codecs, Nvidia graphics drivers and Adobe Flash installed. So you get a pleasant out of the box experience in using Mandriva. Mandriva Linux One 2009 is available as both KDE and GNOME CDs.
2. Mandriva Linux Free 2009 – This is a purely Free as in Freedom Linux CD sans the proprietary drivers and codecs targeted at Free software enthusiasts who shun anything that is not-Free.
3. Mandriva PowerPack 2009 – This is available for a price or as a subscription. It has all the applications that are there in the above two formats and additionally, it also provides access to many closed source applications such as Codeweavers CrossOver products, commercial games targeted at Linux and so on. And lastly …
4. Mandriva Flash – The mobile and installable Linux desktop on a USB key.
I decided to download Mandriva One 2009 KDE edition and give it a try. To put it simply, I was really impressed with the polished look, the speed and stability of Mandriva 2009. KDE is of version 4.1.2 and it is very stable. The Plasmoids (also called widgets) are a joy to view and use.

KDE 4.1.2 Widgets on Mandriva One 2009

Mandriva has its own unique Control Center. A user can do all the system and network administration tasks from within the Mandriva Control Center. It is well designed and has options for all the scenarios any desktop user is bound to face.

Mandriva One has everything that a home PC user should require, including a graphics suite (GIMP), document viewer (Gwenview), Office suite (OpenOffice.org 3.0), audio player (Amarok), Movie player (Totem) and latest version of Firefox web browser. Of course, I need not say that Mandriva 2009 comes bundled with KDE 4.1.2 or GNOME 2.24 depending upon the live CD you downloaded. So you get all the applications that are part of these fabulous desktop environments.

Mandriva One 2009 KDE 4.1.2 Desktop Effects

Mandriva specifies a minimum of 512 MB memory to run Mandriva 2009 but recommends 1 GB if you want to turn on all the special effects. On my 512 MB machine, it ran flawlessly. The hard disk space requirement is a minimum of 2 GB with 6 GB recommendation. 3D acceleration is supported on most capable hardware. If you have any of the NVIDIA or ATI graphics cards, you are in luck as Mandriva One 2009 bundles with it the proprietary drivers for these cards and you can use the 3D acceleration capabilities out of the box without any further tinkering. Of course Mandriva also has out of the box support for Intel, SiS, Matrox, VIA and many other graphics cards too.

This year, Mandriva is celebrating its 10th year of innovation. It has a long history of rolling out robust Linux distributions. The latest release namely Mandriva 2009 is another feather in its cap for a job well done.

Related Posts
Uncategorized
4 responses to “Mandriva 2009 Linux Review”
- Adam Williamson October 16th, 2008 at 02:31
  
  Thanks a lot for the review!
  
  Just one tiny nitpick: only ATI and NVIDIA cards use proprietary drivers. Intel, SiS, Matrox and VIA cards are supported via the standard, open source X.org drivers. Actually we support pretty much every graphics card that has a driver available for Linux, we just mention those manufacturers on the release notes because they’re the most commonly used ones.
- Hari Sankar October 21st, 2008 at 15:40
  
  Thank you for the review.. i thing am gonna download it right away.. I’m really impressed with all those gadgets.. and also, am very happy to hear that the distro is very stable… (in my pc, KDE 4.0 Was not stable and i had to re-install all things)
- CURTIS October 23rd, 2008 at 04:56
  
  This is by far the best Linux distro I have ever tried. I would not hesitate to recommend Mandriva 2009 to anyone. If I had to point out a negative it would be the inclusion of Amarok 2 It’s still in beta and not very usable yet.
- Peterson Spaceport October 31st, 2008 at 04:27
  
  I tried and I loved it while in the LiveCD, and I considered recommending it to newcomers. But I decided to keep recommendation’s focus to Ubuntu. The LiveCD and therefore the fresh installation has a serious (serious because it’s annoying) bug when you try to remove a plasmoid clicking on the red button in the desktop – this seems not to be a lot, but such a simple task coudn’t ever fail – it gives a very bad impression.
  
  There are several other things that really disappointed me. there were erros updating the packages – kdebase4-workspace simply wouldn’t finish downloading even if rpmdrake said it was ok – I had to restart the app three times to get it right… Totem can’t activate plugins at all and can’t play properly .wmv files – and, as I saw on the terminal, the matter with plugins is that gconf is missing – I believe this is a must-have, innit? I don’t realize how couldn’t they miss that and leave Totem without its YouTube functionality.
  
  And the language is not proper: at the first time run, it would say something like “kill the X if this configuration doesnt’t work properly” – I mean, a newbie would never know what the hell is X. Awn, almost forgot, the liveCD couldn’t mount Windows Partitions properly. I had to do it by konsole and my father didn’t like it (I installed it in his computer last night, I was eagerly waiting for an opportunity to try the distro )
  
  I think these problems make it a really dangerous deal recommending it to new users. I’m sticking with Ubuntu for a while – although I really loved Mandriva Control Centre, found it much better than YaST and the look and feel is really polished, nice,’explosively nice’ if Compiz is on.