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Mandriva

Mandriva Linux (earlier Mandrakelinux) became extremely popular among new users of Linux, switching from MS Windows, mainly due to its ease of use. Mandriva is a very up-to-date distribution, it consists of the latest software which can occasionally cause stability problems. For desktop use it is acceptable for most users and it's a simple tradeoff for being very up-to-date.

Feel free to edit the Mandriva description on our community Wiki!

Pic 1. Mandriva - random desktop

Mandriva is regarded as one of the best distributions (together with openSUSE and Ubuntu) for Linux newbies. It provides lots of useful graphical wizards for configuring most of the system settings. Lots of them are not found in any other Linux distribution.

Mandriva uses RPM as their package format, but is not compatible with Fedora's or Suse's RPM-s. The default package manager is urpmi, but the new powerful tool Smart is also supported. The default desktop is KDE. Gnome is also included and configured.The latest stable version, Mandriva Discovery 2006 includes a few novelties like an interactive firewall or a search tool KAT (like Beagle or Google Desktop Search).

Mandriva is very well localized — it can be installed in all the popular languages. It fits great for newbie users, but t's also used by lots of experienced ones, who don't like to fight with Debian, Slackware or Gentoo.

After the latest merges (with Connectiva and Lycoris) it changes its name from Mandrakelinux to Mandriva and this is how we call the system now.

External Mandriva resources

News

Documentation, guides and tips

Package management

Software — packages, mirrors configuration

Repositories
Easy Urpmi — tool for urpmi configuration
Mirrors finder
HOWTO add easily officials and third parties repos
PLF — Penguin Liberation Front

Help, forums, community

Mandriva Club Forum
Mandriva subforums: OSDir.com, LinuxQuestions.org
Mandriva Users
Mailing lists

LiveCD and derivative works

Reviews

openSUSE vs Mandriva

Interviews

Anne Nicolas

Download

Screenshots

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3 Comments

R.B. Monday, 8 January 2007 o godz. 4:25 am # Add karma

While I now use openSUSE, I’ll always have something for Mandrake/Mandriva because it’s the first distro I ever installed on my computer. What most made me feel comfortable installing it was the attractive and fast installer (Mandriva 2006). I had trouble learning how to use the urmpi/package management interface, but mostly because I was more of a newbie back then. After trying their 2007 liveCD I’ve seen that it’s greatly improved. I absolutely love the control center application and think it’s one of its strongest points.

What I don’t like about Mandriva is the whole club thing. Don’t get me wrong, I have no qualms against supporting what I think is a good product, but there just don’t seem to be too many benefits for such a high price.

Other than that, I like Mandriva and continue to follow up on their progress along with other distros derived from it like PCLinuxOS.

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P.J Wednesday, 26 September 2007 o godz. 12:37 pm # Add karma

After trying to get Suse 10.2 to work which it fails to do due to NvIDIA card. I went back to have a look at Mandrivia One 2007 Gnome Metisse.
It doesn’t mind the video card like Suse.
Which I assume should install it appears to want to work but dont have any instructions anywhere.
I set up the hard drive using partition magic and it appears you open the terminal if I recall correct to install and then comes up with error extracting files saying no space avaliable when it has about 12 gigs and 8 gigs on another partition plus a swap file.
Does the swap file have to be in any particular place as I am dual booting with Win Xp.?
Anyone point me to a installation page. Thanks

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Joey Sunday, 30 September 2007 o godz. 5:15 pm # Add karma

RE: I went back to have a look at Mandrivia One 2007 Gnome Metisse.

I too downloaded that same disk. Don’t use it. Better to use this one:

(MCNlive - you can install it too)

ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/mandrakeclubnl/mcnlive/Toronto/

which is based on mandriva, but will even run in ram. It is bullet proof though you might not be able to get the 3D stuff running. Everything else runs great. The Mandriva One 2007 Gnome distro was pretty buggy (there’s a kde version that works better - the 64 bit one was the one I used. Baring that get the Mandriva Live 2007.1 distro from the company. (ALSO they have a Pre-Release 2008 Release Chg 2 available at this site:

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