I finally did it! Been talking about ditching Ubuntu for ages and never found the time (you know… backup, new install, restore, get familiar, etc.). It turns out that last Thursday while extending my /home partition with a LiveCD, for some reasons something went wrong and I ended it with my bigger partition having the same remaining free space as before being extended (I had a 20GiB unused space on the disk initially). Thinking I had been lucky not to lose anything, I backed up and installed Mandriva One. It’s a bit like going back to my first love Mandrake (second actually, started Linux with Red Hat when it was free many years ago)! Of course I preferred the name back then, but for obvious reasons they couldn’t keep it.
So Mandriva has actually a specific ISO file for Asia which can be downloaded from a Chinese mirror maintained by our good friend Funda. It includes all the necessary files to support Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Malay and a few more languages I think. Installation was almost ok, couldn’t do it in 3D mode but hey, I can live with that (the install button just wouldn’t click).
The first 6 hours using Mandriva where a bit challenging in the sense that I had to get familiar with urpmi and how to do things. They do have a great Linux Control Center (mcc) where you can find all the things to be configured in one single location. Their network manager is also very powerful and has all the options one should expect from such a tool. Had a little rendering problem with my Chinese fonts (using English desktop with Chinese enabled) which was due to a conflict with the Japanese fonts. Well in short after two days of discussion with Patrick who visit us regularly, Funda and Freeflying on #mandrivacn I got everything fixed, missing applications from the repositories backported and a service that really impressed me: Kudos to Mandriva and its community.
Now an other reason for supporting Mandriva is that they’ve been trying to build a community here, have hired people to improve Chinese support and are even building the operating system that will run on the Gdium (the Loongson based general purpose Chinese CPU). So definitely an interesting distribution worth following and encouraging.
I again extend a big thank you to Funda, Freeflying and Patrick for their help, and recommend everyone to give it a try.
Welcome back, you were away from Mandriva during a good time to be away, and now you’re back in a good time to be back. From around 2008, the swagger has come back for sure. I just hope they don’t go bankrupt now…
I totally agree. Ubuntu and its derivatives is definitively missing a _central_ point of administration. However I am stuck with Xubuntu for now and ‘personalized’ my version already in a really intense manner and will maybe[1] if at all move on when (X)Ubuntu 9.04 will be released.
[1]: ‘Maybe’ because I currently tinker around with Mandriva One preparing for my contribution considering the GDIUM-OLPH-Project. http://www.gdium.com/en/node/888 or http://www.gdium.com/en/user/744
Hey Fred,
Patrick (Sinz) wrote me already the payment-request. Currently I am waiting for the tool. 🙂
I want to contribute a “Journal” actually. Something similar to the Almanah Diary @gnome but using python, tough encryption and some GTD[1]-tooling. Currently I am finishing two other projects[2] while my studies require quite a bit of time, but after the 25th of February I’ll have more time reserved to focus on gdium and of course its educational aspects. They interest me, as a physicist which appreciates Dick Feynman’s[3] impact on teaching, too.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_things_done
[2]: One of them is a GPLed development of myDMS to myPMS which implemented some project-management
[3]: Nobel laureate and for most physicists something like a popstar of physics
Dear Roland,
yes I deleted my comments (mentioning that I didn’t see you as a OLPH member on Gdium.com). It seems there is a slight bug and 20+ OLPH members only appear in the webform result page and not as group member. So my comment didn’t make sense anymore. I reported the problem to the Gdium.com team and am very happy to hear about your project. For GTD I used to use tiddlywiki which is licensed under an Open Source license (BSD). I also wanted to add your BLOG to the OLPH planet, unfortunately the RSS feed is empty so I also reported the problem. Sorry about all those mishaps and welcome to OLPH!
Fred.
Yesterday I spent 5 h because powernowd sent my laptop down to sluggish speed. Actually no speed at all. I tinkered for hours to find out it was powernowd – DAMN it. An ACPI-update was it.
In my research for “slow harddrive ubuntu”, “extremly slow boot ubuntu” and so on I found out that many *nix-Users struggle with “slow Ubuntu” actually and not only temporarily slow stuff. Pushing in a livecd of Mandriva my let my jaw drop.
I already “dpkg –get-selections | grep -v install”ed all the s*** and printed that list to kick out ubuntu. I wanted to wait till 9.04. No way. This week there will be a new HD in my laptop and I install Mandrive One from the scratch, with the old distribution as an option until I got my workspace back the way I want it. This will be work… :-/