Review : Mandriva 10.2 64 Bit

[moonwitch1405241479 0]

Mandriva 10.2 64 Bit - Powerpack - Limited Edition 2005 (DVD Download)In case anyone needs to know - Comp Specs to test :AMD Athlon 64 3400+MSI K8N8 Neo PlatinumMaxtor 120GB @ 7200RPM1024MB RAMATi Radeon 9250 128MBThe installer itself is simply beautiful, I was astonished by it, mind you I am used to Fedora Core, Red Hat, Ubuntu (ugliest install I've ever seen) and then yes, Windows XP Pro (and Win 2K Pro). What first struck me as intuition, the installer nicely asked me if I wanted to upgrade my Fedora Core 4 install. Since I had decided to dive in with a clean install to see how the customization worked out, I opted for the fresh install and not the upgrade. Then I had to partition, or at least note which partition could be reformatted The partitioning went smooth, as always in Linux. I know some have encountered issues with this aspect of Linux, but honestly I never have had any problems and I usually have a dual boot. Though I must admit, back in the high school days, I did run Red Hat 7.3 exclusively and I spent even more time on the partitioning (I gave every directory - swap, /, bin, var, tmp, ... its own partition). I think I could have let my n00b mom (who has no idea on how to send emails) do the partitioning and it would have gone smooth. Where Fedora only lets you know the partition labels and the filesystem, Mandriva actually gave a bit more information and I loved it.With me being the über configuration and zillions of programs chick, I always go for individual packages, instead of just selecting Work Station. (I am very picky LOL) It's very nice, you first get a screen where you select the categories, after which you do switch to individual packages, which again are classified in categories. It's pretty much the same as Fedora, yet the lay-out of the package selector is quite different. The explanations given for each package is the same as it is in Fedora, not much new or innovating there. What strikes me as a big plus, is the method of package selecting itself (the look). One big minus for me personally, is the expanding feature for the categories, it makes you scroll all the way back to where you were, and even though scrolling is a part of life nowadays, it was very annoying for me. I also missed the "Expand All" button. Now on to the install itself, as most know this is the most boring feature in any OS installation. So I didn't really write down that much The install time displayed is accurate, which is more than I can say from Fedora installs (maybe it's just me of course). Now, the biggest difference (and I am not sure whether I like it or not) but in Fedora you can see which package is installing during the install, Mandriva doesn't bother with this feature, they do use very nice "to read" images during the process, even though a lot of those images were in fact advertisements for their stores, their training, their tech support etc (all paid features), however one "ad" was nice. LPI.org... A few other things I was glad to see in Mandriva, was KDevelop (which I believe is an extra on Fedora), it's a beautiful all-round development environment. I found the internet setup - post install config - to be very confusing. It asks for a few pieces of data that most will not know by heart ( DNS 1&2, login, password, gateway etc) In the end it turned out PPP had to be set up because I did select my ISP from the list (ADSL) and that was wrong LOL.Updating also goes through the installerm which I felt was a wonderful touch. The boot-up sequence worked like a charm. (though PPPo failed - obviously as it was wrong)Mandriva 10.2 has KDE3.3 and Gnome 2.8, which is nice to know. I was sad to learn that to install my ethernet internet, I needed the install DVD - which for some reason had to be placed in my CD - Writer and not my DVD writer. Mandriva would NOT have it any other way. (mind you, it asks for the installer DVD and opens the CD writer, after which the tray would NOT close. I close it with the button and the bloody thing opens again - quite frustrating)A lot of settings and config screens just froze up, though my system could easily handle Mandriva. I couldn't get the hardware browser to actually work in order to change the drives DVD and CD, which seemed to be wrong.Then I decided to give up and go to bed, I shut down the machine, and boot it up the next day, straight into Mandriva. KERNEL PANIC! Not Syncing : CPU Context corrupt.At that pointm nothing I tried helped, rebooting just gave the same error, so I loaded FC4 again.