Mandriva Linux 2010.1 (Spring) Released - Finally!
After a considerable delay from the originally published target release date, and a lot of uncertainty about the release in particular and Mandriva Linux in general, the final release of Mandriva 2010.1 (Spring) is now available for download. Both the Mandriva Free and Mandriva One versions are available for free download, as well as a variety of purchase/subscription versions such as the well-known Powerpack distribution and some others that I don't recognize.
The Mandriva One download file is a "hybrid" distribution, which means that in addition to being able to write the ISO image to a CD-ROM, you can copy it directly to a USB thumb drive, and then boot that drive to install it. If you already have a running Linux system of any kind, you can just dd the ISO image to the USB device - the only trick is to be sure that you find the correct device, and Mandriva has a nice "http:="" www2.mandriva.com="" downloads="" ?p="seed"">Mandriva Seed utility program to help you with that. Windows users can download the WinImage utility for this purpose.
I have installed 2010.1 on my Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 (Core2 Duo, 965 graphics, Intel 5300 WiFi), and it boots up looking like this:
That should look very familiar to Mandriva users, because they have done a very good job of maintaining consistency, even across the KDE 3.5 / KDE 4 transition. The desktop looks the same, and for the most part works the same. There are plenty of changes in the actual software and package versions, though - Linux kernel 2.6.33, KDE 4.4.3, X.org X Server 1.7.7, OpenOffice.org 3.2, Firefox 3.6.6 and lots more. The One distribution, which I have installed, includes a huge amount of software - of course, all of the KDE utilities (KOrganizer, Kontackt, Kopete and so on), GIMP, Gwenview, Amarok, Dragon Player, and of course a lot more.
Now comes the slightly bad news. I always seems to say "installation was smooth and fast", or something like that. Well, in this case it wasn't quite so. For whatever reason, Mandriva still insists on creating an xorg.conf, and both of the laptops that I have tried it on so far this morning cause it to get confused. On the Lifebook S6510, it just gets the screen resolution wrong, at 1024x768 rather than 1280x800, but at least you can ignore that and complete the installation. The solution is to simply delete or rename the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then reboot. (For advanced users: during installation, go to a text console login, delete or rename xorg.conf, and then kill the X server. It will restart the X server and get the resolution right, and the installed system will already have this problem fixed.)
Installation is even more difficult and tedious on my HP Pavillion dv2-1010ez (AMD Athlon Neo, ATI Radeon, Atheros WiFi). First, it is so unhappy with the graphics that the LiveUSB/LiveCD won't boot. After I found a simple way to get around that, either it hung with a black screen during boot, or the keyboard/mouse would not work. I finally got it to install by booting to single user mode, then deleting /etc/X11/xorg.conf, then using init 5 to continue the installation. Messy, I know, but it then works, the installation completes and the installed system boots and works normally - and at least it only has to be done once.
jw 9/7/2010