I've been trying different Linux distros since I installed my first Linux in 1997. My quest for the perfect Linux distro continues. Today I tried Mandriva 2007.1. It was release just recently. 2007.1 (aka 2007 Spring edition) is apparently an update for the 2007 version of Mandriva distro. I had 2007 installed at some point. It was OK, but had some problems with my hardware. The hardware was pretty new for that time (late 2006). I have Intel DP965LT motherboard and Core2Duo processor. Back at that time surprisingly many Linux distros failed to install on this motherboard. It generally required kernel 2.6.19 or later to work.
I read about Mandriva 2007.1 on slashdot. Many people left favourable comments. So I decided to give it another try. I downloaded a free edition DVD, burned it, and started the installation.
The installer launched from the DVD and the installation generally went smoothly. The installer informed me that it failed to load pata_marvell driver, but it didn't seem to have caused any problems. The installation proceeded.
Mandriva partition manager is very good. It was quite easy to choose a partition to install linux on. By default it created an extended partition on my hard drive, so I had to switch into "expert mode" and force it to create a primary partition instead. Then I proceeded to format and copy packages to the installation partition.
Mandriva gives you a choice to copy the whole content of the DVD to the hard drive first and then install from the hard drive. I chose that option. But I'm not sure whether it sped up the installation. Just copying the DVD to the hard drive took at least 20 minutes.
Then goes the hardware configuration. Mandriva detected most of my hardware correctly. I have two sound cards, one onboard is Intel HD and another is SB Audigy. It suggested driver modules for both sound cards. I was mainly interested in the SB Audigy card, so I had to choose between snd_emu10k1 and some audigy driver. I chose snd_emu10k1, since this was a driver I encountered before. I turned out to be a bad choice. The sound from the speakers was very noisy. The installer doesn't offer to test the driver so I had no idea how it would work.
Then goes a video card. My machine has a PCIE card, ATI Radeon X700. The installer detected it as ATI card and suggested the ati driver. There is an option to test the X server with that driver. I tried it and the X server couldn't start for some reason. Thinking that it will be resolved after the installation is complete I proceeded with that driver anyway. Again, it was another mistake as I learned later.
Then it was the time to configure the wireless card. I have a Ralink based PCI card. The installer suggested two options: the native rt61 driver and the ndiswrapper over Windows driver. I wanted to go with the rt61 driver, but it wasn't available in the free edition. I got the error message, saying that the driver needs a firmware which is only provided in the paid edition. Too bad. Especially considering that the firmware is essentially free (maybe not GPL'ed though). Now I had to install the ndiswrapper. The installer asked for a CD with the Windows driver. Unfortunately the CD drive was locked, because I had the Mandrive DVD disk in it. There was no obvious way to unlock it, so I gave up on the wireless and opted for the wired connection.
The rest went smoothly. But on the first boot X server didn't start. Having checked the log file I found that it tries to find a PCI card which doesn't exist. My video card is PCIE. Alrighty then. I've searched the internet using a text browser named lynx and found some mentioning of fglrx driver. Unfortunately this driver didn't exist on the system. Perhaps it's also availabe in the paid edition only. Which I thought was a pity, because it severly limits my options.
At the end I checked the kernel version that comes with this distro. It was 2.6.17-13mdv. Quite a disappointment. Why does Mandriva stay with that old kernel when others have kernel 2.6.20 already? I have no idea.
After two hours of my experience with Mandriva I already had multiple problems to resolve. This definitely wasn't something I was looking for. Besides, another popular distro was just released - Ubuntu 7.04. So I decided to erase Mandriva and try Ubuntu instead. Hope it gives me less problems.
