Mandriva Spring 2008.1 is no doubt a great distribution. It has good collection of default software, has excellent hardware detection, has proprietary drivers and software and an overall great out of box experience.
People, including me, often complain about its Package manager. With 2008.1, Mandriva has greatly improved RPMDrake. Its fast, has good number of packages and beautifully handles dependencies.
Lets have a little detailed look.
We start it with the nifty "Install and Remove Software".
It first opens to a welcome screen and confirms if we want to use the tool, want to add media source, if update only or full sources,
After this it presents the list of servers for us to select the appropriate one and proceeds to add media.
Finally we are presented with the RPMDrake GUI.
I like the layout, we can either search through the search box or select depending upon the groups. I selected libopenmotif and Applied to start installation.
NOTE:: RPMDrake does not displays information like percentage install complete or size of remaining packages to be downloaded. However, after "some time" the packages get installed successfully.
One funny thing is that if I search for Quanta Plus there is no KDE 3 package for it. However, we do have a KDE 4 package. Searching kdewebdev displays KDE3 package which has quanta as one of the files to be installed. Not sure why Mandriva chooses to list quanta as a KDE4 only package when it is also part of kdewebdev in KDE3.
Coming to the Update Manager.
When an update is available, a red colored icon displays in the KDE task bar. On clicking again it takes you through numerous questions and answers, however, again at the end you have a fully updated system.
Finally, If we play a clip in Totem for which we do not currently have a codec installed, Codenia automatically detects the correct codec for it and gives an option to either install the Fluendo package ( Paid) or install the freely available codecs from PFL repos. Luckily I do not stay in the US of A, so I am not compelled to pay for Fluendo package, I can do away with free codecs.
RPMDrake presents a nice looking interface and performs its job well. I never faced even a single dependency problem.
However, it does not give enough information regarding install progress. I mean I would like to be told that the install will go on for X more minutes and still X Mb of data needs to be downloaded. One more problem I faced is that RPMDrake and its Updater cousin ask too many unnecessary questions during first time startup.
Imagine it asking is it OK to continue in the welcome screen -- Dude I have started this application, so I really want it to continue. This will only give me a GUI, if I dont want I can anytime close it. I can understand that this is to deter a user who does not know about pacakge manages and has unknowingly clicked the icon, however, Clicking OK 10 times before a pacakge manager GUI starts is a little overkill.
People, including me, often complain about its Package manager. With 2008.1, Mandriva has greatly improved RPMDrake. Its fast, has good number of packages and beautifully handles dependencies.
Lets have a little detailed look.
We start it with the nifty "Install and Remove Software".
It first opens to a welcome screen and confirms if we want to use the tool, want to add media source, if update only or full sources,
After this it presents the list of servers for us to select the appropriate one and proceeds to add media.
Finally we are presented with the RPMDrake GUI.
I like the layout, we can either search through the search box or select depending upon the groups. I selected libopenmotif and Applied to start installation.
NOTE:: RPMDrake does not displays information like percentage install complete or size of remaining packages to be downloaded. However, after "some time" the packages get installed successfully.
One funny thing is that if I search for Quanta Plus there is no KDE 3 package for it. However, we do have a KDE 4 package. Searching kdewebdev displays KDE3 package which has quanta as one of the files to be installed. Not sure why Mandriva chooses to list quanta as a KDE4 only package when it is also part of kdewebdev in KDE3.
Coming to the Update Manager.
When an update is available, a red colored icon displays in the KDE task bar. On clicking again it takes you through numerous questions and answers, however, again at the end you have a fully updated system.
Finally, If we play a clip in Totem for which we do not currently have a codec installed, Codenia automatically detects the correct codec for it and gives an option to either install the Fluendo package ( Paid) or install the freely available codecs from PFL repos. Luckily I do not stay in the US of A, so I am not compelled to pay for Fluendo package, I can do away with free codecs.
RPMDrake presents a nice looking interface and performs its job well. I never faced even a single dependency problem.
However, it does not give enough information regarding install progress. I mean I would like to be told that the install will go on for X more minutes and still X Mb of data needs to be downloaded. One more problem I faced is that RPMDrake and its Updater cousin ask too many unnecessary questions during first time startup.
Imagine it asking is it OK to continue in the welcome screen -- Dude I have started this application, so I really want it to continue. This will only give me a GUI, if I dont want I can anytime close it. I can understand that this is to deter a user who does not know about pacakge manages and has unknowingly clicked the icon, however, Clicking OK 10 times before a pacakge manager GUI starts is a little overkill.
0 comments:
Post a Comment