Mandriva LE--The Drake Flies South for the Future
By: Bill von Hagen
Monday, May 2, 2005 11:14:15 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5839/1/
The Obligatory Lawyer Razzing
If you happen to read Linux magazines that are not printed in the United States, you will recognize Mandrake and Conectiva as the names of two popular Linux distributions that have made large contributions to Linux and the Open Source movement.
Among other things, Mandrakesoft pioneered friendly installers and X Window system configuration utilities that do not require a PhD in Electrical Engineering. Similarly, Conectiva has a place in my heart forever for Synaptic, a graphical interface for system updates that has liberated thousands of aspiring Linux users from apt-get and associated xterms, all while working on an even friendlier Smart Update tool.
Recently, these two distributions merged to form Mandriva, which means "The Hearst Corporation can go perform a physically impossible act" in Esperanto. (OK, I'm lying about that.) However, regardless of whether you think that Mandrake refers to Mandrake the Magician (these three words copyright King Features), a misguided reference to a male duck, or a poisonous root that occasionally looks like a human, and whatever you think that Conectiva meant, a new name was needed to reflect the new company and its rekindled spirit.
Mandriva is a straight-forward combination of the names of the two companies. Frankly, I like the new name if for no other reason than it will prevent the destruction of future CDROM drives through mistaken attempts to boot the comics section of the local newspaper on Pentium systems everywhere.
After a massive query-replace across its Web site, the first product of the new unified entity is a Limited Edition release of what will eventually appear as Mandriva Linux. Let's see what's inside and thus what the future holds for Mandrake/Conectiva/Mandriva lovers everywhere.
Installing and Starting Mandriva LE
The first thing you'll notice when booting from the Mandriva installation CDs and then on every subsequent boot of your system, is Mandriva's updated mascot, which I have named "Tuxzilla." This graphic, shown in Figure 1, is like the album cover you would see if Tux joined the Insane Klown Posse. Personally, I like it, but don't say you weren't warned if you have killer Tux nightmares after installing Mandriva--all it needs is some teeth.
Beyond its graphics, the friendliness and usability of the installer developed by the company formerly known as Mandrakesoft has always been one of the distribution's most attractive features. In many ways, the quality and user-sensitivity of an installer is reflective of the perspective of an entire distribution.
Mandriva's installer is still great--it's best features is its support for jumping between phases of the installation process, which is especially nice if you need to change some installation option that appeared a few screens back. No need to click the Back button an irritating number of times--just click on the appropriate step of the installation on the left-hand side of the screen, and there you are.
Mandriva's installer offers the standard types of options, including a nice mechanism (shown in Figure 2) for customizing the groups of packages that you want to install, and then further customizing individual packages within those groups. Quite nice.
After completing the install process, I experienced another slight shock when Tuxzilla appeared again, with a LILO boot menu superimposed on his face. LILO? How retro! I'm not aware of anything that you can do with LILO that you can't do with GRUB except to forget to update the boot block. However, the recent flame-fest on the fedora-test-list about Fedora's decision to drop LILO from the Fedora Core distribution has been so inspirational that I'd like to suggest that Mandriva demonstrate their commitment to the future by punting LILO in favor of GRUB. If you're an SG-1 fan, you'll know what I mean when I say that I am now closing the iris over my mailbox...
What's In the Box?
Figure 3 shows the default Mandriva KDE desktop with a single xterm displayed. Mandriva provides a nice theme and background with easily interpreted and attractive icons.
The following table shows the versions of some of the most popular GNU/Linux software packages found in the Mandriva Limited Edition release. As the release notes for this release state over and over, this release focuses on installing stable, patched, and tested versions of popular Linux packages, not necessarily the latest and greatest. For those new to Linux, this table lists the versions of the Evolution mail client, the binutils, GCC, GDB, and Glibc packages for compilation and debugging, the GNOME and KDE desktop systems and their graphical underpinnings in the X Window System, the Perl and Python scripting languages, the Open Office desktop productivity software package, the Linux kernel itself, and the RPM package management system.
| Package | Version |
| binutils | 2.5.1a-1 |
| Evolution | 2.0.4 |
| Firefox | 1.0.2-3 |
| GCC | 3.4.3-7 |
| GDB | 6.3-3 |
| GIMP | 2.2.4-5 |
| Glibc | 2.3.4-8 |
| GNOME | 2.8.3 |
| KDE | 3.3.2 |
| Kernel | 2.6.11-6 |
| OpenOffice.org | 1.1.4 |
| Perl | 5.8.6-6 |
| Python | 2.4-5 |
| RPM | 4.2.3-9 |
| X Window System | 6.8.2-7 |
As you can see from this list, Mandriva LE provides an interesting combination of stability and hot-off-the-compiler software, which I think is a wise move for the first branded release by what is essentially a new company. Having the latest and greatest of everything isn't as important as demonstrating a stable release that improves upon past products, while demonstrating a commitment to the future. Though by default a KDE-oriented distribution, Mandriva installs a fairly recent and complete version of GNOME--something that many KDE-oriented distributions fail to do.
Though the version of KDE used in Mandriva is somewhat old in Linux terms (i.e., it wasn't compiled yesterday), Mandriva has also made some interesting improvements in core functionality. For example, the version of KDM used on Mandriva is theme-able in the same way that GNOME fans have been able to theme GDM. While not earth-shattering, this is a nice improvement that is both fun and can be quite useful in academic or enterprise deployments.
Customizing and Updating Mandriva
As shown in Figure 4, Mandriva offers a nice, customized Control Center to enable you to customize your system's appearance, behavior, and configuration. It offers some truly cool features that I haven't seen in other control centers, such as the ability to set up an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for power monitoring and to define WebDAV mount points for accessing Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning sites as filesystems.
Like all modern Linux distributions, Mandriva offers an online update service that automatically checks your system against various mirror sites and downloads and installs updates. Figure 5 shows the default RPM Drake screen after selecting a mirror site.
I have to confess that I was somewhat disappointed that I couldn't find Conectiva's Synaptic tool in Mandriva LE. Synaptic provides a graphical interface for traditional Debian updates using apt-get, and was originally developed by Conectiva. Though Mandrake was historically been an RPM-based distribution, I'd hoped that their merger with Conectiva would bring these far superior package management tools to Mandriva. Maybe next time. As I've said before, apt-get and Synaptic are what RPM and its graphical front ends want to be when they grow up.
Wrapping Up
Mandriva's Limited Edition 2005 release is an excellent step in the right direction for the merged MandrakeSoft and Conectiva companies. I hope that this merger helps Mandriva prosper and expand its presence across different markets. Conectiva's rulership of Linux in South America and Mandrake's substantial European presence give the new company an excellent installed base to start with.
Though the new company plans fewer releases, I actually see this as a good thing. A steady, predictable release schedule of well-tested, well-integrated distributions will benefit their Enterprise customers by enabling them to better plan and schedule deployments of this promising Linux distribution. For home users like myself, a steady stream of updates and a slower release schedule should ease the strain on my pocketbook as well. If you haven't committed to a Linux distribution yet, Mandriva is well worth a look.