Mandriva Spring 2008.1

Mandriva has just released their 2008.1 spring edition.

This release promises a lot, some of its new features are

1. Parental control utility. This can be very useful for people having young kids who do not want their kids to access ¨improper content¨ .
   Now I read this as pornographic sites and sites which deal with excessive violence. An added feature is to limit the time of computer usage.
2. Elisa multimedia center - A one stop tool to manage photos, music and videos.
3. PulseAudio- Well most new distributions now come with Pulse Audio.
   
4. Codeina Framework - For our US based friends who want to pay for the codecs. Thankfully I am not in US, and like Linux, codecs are also free for me :).
   
5. Improved Package manager
6. Enhanced KDE.
   
7. Coherence - A media server that allows sharing video and audio.
8. KDE 4.02 ( now 4.03 is available) in repositories.
   
9. Full support to Asus EeePC. Now this is rather remarkable. A general purpose distribution having out-of-box support for the latest Linux based ultra mobile Laptop -- amazing.
10. Synchronization with Windows based and Nokia Mobile phones.
11. Out of box support for Flash, MP3 and NVIDIA and ATI binary graphic drivers.
12. NTFS write enabled by default.
    

Mandriva has really tried hard to make this release an extremely user friendly one. They provide three different editions

1. Free - This does not include any non-open source software. Purist might find it to their taste, I would pass it.
   
2. One - The edition for normal user. It is designed to provide out of box functionality for most common computing tasks.
3. Power - Its like One, but you would have to pay for it :)

I tried the Mandriva One KDE edition and am very impressed with it.

The LiveCD:
The Live CD presents a beautiful looking grub screen with only one entry to boot Mandriva. It would be nice to have an option to boot in safe mode or to add any kernel argument.


While booting the LiveCD asks too many questions like choosing the language, country, keyboard layout, desktop effects type ( Compiz, Mettise or no Effects), date and timezone setting and accepting the Mandriva License. Why can't they ask these stupid questions while installing. I think the LiveCD should just boot with the default options - a la Ubuntu. LiveCD should just boot and leave the customizations for later part.


At the same time I was really impressed by the superb hardware detection. My graphics card (NVIDIA 6200), usb mouse and an obscure web-cam was correctly detected and configured. They had also put up a decent screen resolution (1200 X 800), which I have changed to 1280 X 960.

Mandriva developers have made KDE beautiful; look at the default KDE screen on boot-up.

I would have preferred if they did not have the icons for ¨Join Mandriva¨ and ¨Upgrade to power¨. I normally check the user friendliness of any LiveCD and I must say that Mandriva Spring 2008.1 topped my list. Come on, with out-of-box support for my graphics card and thereby compiz-fusion, I had the most beautiful LiveCD experience. Flash plugins for Firefox are enabled by default, so that I can watch youtube videos while the LiveCD installs to hard disk and I get the all the easy to use GUI configuration menu that I am used to of (courtesy PCLinuxOS).

The install to hard disk could be described in one word - Fast. It was a very normal hard disk installation, which we are used to of courtesy PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu and Mint etc. The installer asks for Super User password and creates a Normal user too.

Hard Disk Boot:
The grub with the hard disk boot, thankfully had the boot to safe mode option


There was a First Time run wizard ( a rip-off from Linux Mint ??) which welcomed me and asked me to register with Mandriva, participate in a survey and lastly Contribute to Mandriva.



Unlike OpenSUSE, Mandiva does not gives the option to enable auto-login of a user during install, so we have to do it manually in the Mandriav Control Center. Trivial things that makes life easier for a single user desktop.
Once past the KDM we are greeted with a professional looking desktop, good icons and beautiful looking wallpaper. Again wish the icons for joining Mandriva or to upgrade to power were not there. The welcome screen gives an overview of all three editions of Mandriva.



Mandriva still employs the default KDE Menu, unlike most other distributions which have shifted to the new SUSE Kickoff Menu.



Configuration:
I have always liked the Control Center of PCLinuxOS. Its a great tool and provides for easy GUI configurations. People at Mandriva also acknowledge this and are proud to state that the Control Center was developed by Mandriva. Mandriva Control Center is a pleasure to work with.



Parental Control:
Within the Mandriva Control Center we can enable Parental Control.

Here I have added ¨sex.com¨ to the banned list and enabled Parental Control.
It requires two packages to be installed squid and dansguardian.

On Clicking OK the packages are automatically downloaded and installed.


Finally when I try to access the site sex.com from Firefox, I get this error.

Pretty neat and easy. I think many parents would love this feature.

Package Management:
Mandriva is not famous for its package manager, however, its not bad either. Actually I liked the GUI of RPMDrake, Its very similar to most common package managers like Synaptic and YAST ( from a casual user point of view -- they might be hugely different otherwise).
I found it to be reasonably fast and performing its function well. Though I would have loved to have RPMDrake indicate the actual time and size of remaining install. But I am still OK with RPMDrake.

Multimedia and Conclusion in Part-2.

NOTE:
Many screenshots have been shamelessly copied from The coding studio and HowToForge. I would be thankful to them if they allow me to use the screenshots; else I might have to remove them.