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.

Next: Wrapping Up »