Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring – First Impressions

A few days back, Mandriva released the newest version of its operating system, Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring. As I had already taken a

Mandriva Logo

look at the Release Candidate 2, I know pretty much what was in store. I wanted to setup this new release and get it running as quickly as possible even though the previous version Mandriva 2009 was working like a charm on my laptop. It was by far the most stable OS to have run on my laptop.

Live CD

I downloaded the Mandriva One GNOME Live CD. GNOME has been my default desktop for a few years now and that is what would eventually reside on my laptop. I also downloaded the Mandriva One KDE Live CD to see what changes have gone into KDE 4.2. The Live CD booted pretty fast. The speed bump was already visible in the RC and I was glad to see it stayed that way.

Installation

The installation took about 12 minutes on my laptop. This machine is a 2 year old, Dell Inspiron 6400, with an Intel Core 2 Duo clocking 1.73 GHz, 1 GB RAM and an Intel 945 GMA graphics chip and an Intel 3945 Wireless. I chose the new ext4 file system for the root and home partition. The post installation step of updating the media is where I met my first stumbling block. It seemed to take forever to download the media, but once I pulled my ethernet cable out, things proceeded smoothly. I had to update the media later.

Boot Time

I timed the boot with a stop watch. It took me 36 seconds from the grub menu to the desktop. I don’t have any complaints here. I can see that a lot of improvement has gone into the boot process and it really shows. I guess the ext4 file system would also have helped in this regard, though I have no means to measure it.

Desktop

There is no denying the fact that Mandriva has one of the best looking default themes around. I rarely changed the theme or the window

Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring - Customized Desktop

decoration on Mandy. The only thing I change is the icon theme, since the default GNOME icon theme has become old and boring. Carrying on the tradition, the desktop was slick. The fonts were crisp and have been improved from what existed in the previous version. An idle desktop after boot, consumed about 285 MB of RAM. I also did not install AWN since the auto hide feature did not work well and ended up being intrusive at best. The Mandriva Control Center remains one of the best control centers on the Linux desktop and serves as a one stop shop for all configuration requirements.

Applications

Mandriva comes with kernel 2.6.29.1 and a regular array of software that comprises of the GNOME desktop. However, here are the specifics for a few of them

• GNOME 2.26.1
• OpenOffice.org – 3.0.1
• Mozilla Firefox – 3.0.8
• Pidgin – 2.5.5
• The GIMP – 2.6

Flash is available in the One edition. However, Java runtime, audio and video codecs have to be installed as is the case with most distributions. Additional software is a always a couple of clicks away in the Install and Remove Software section.

The KDE Edition

I also had a quick look at the KDE edition. Last time around Mandriva’s KDE implementation was very polished compared to the rest. This

Mandriva Spring 2009 KDE Desktop

time too I would say the same. They have also put the desktop which everyone is used to – where one kept files too – back into KDE 4.2 in quite a clever way by using Folder View. The KDE desktop also uses the default Mandriva theme instead of the KDE default Oxygen theme. This edition comes with the regular KDE applications, Kontact, Konqueror, Kopete, Kwrite to name a few.

Conclusion

One of the biggest improvements in my opinion is, I never had to consult the Errata. Also, never once was I required to visit the terminal (command line) for any accomplishing any task whatsoever. Almost all the things work the way they should. The One CD image was only 633 MB for the Africa and Asia edition. The available CD space could have been packed with something useful. On the whole, Mandriva Spring 2009 is a solid release with a great blend of stability and polish.

Screenshots

Here are a few screenshots of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring – GNOME

I just Slax’d my USB drive

After trying out Slax yesterday, I did the obvious. I wanted to carry it around with me and so I Slax’d (did I coin a new term? ) my almost three year old Kingston Data Traveler 2GB drive. I emptied the drive contents on another drive and installed Slax on it.

I extracted the TAR ball to the drive and executed bootinst.sh but there was a problem with the installation. I moved the /boot and /slax directories to the root of the drive and then ran bootinst.sh and this time everything went well. I booted the Slax from its new home and voila I had an OS with the most necessary tools at my finger tips.

However, there were a few hiccups. I downloaded two modules, Firefox and Amarok. The modules came with warnings that they may not work properly but I still went ahead and installed both of them. Amarok refused to start but Firefox behaved well. I set the network IP as mine is a static IP and played around a while. I was really curious about the settings getting saved. So I rebooted with my USB drive again.

Firefox was nowhere to be found. Amarok would still not start. Well, these modules are add-ons and may not work well and I was indeed warned ahead. But what surprised me was the static IP, Subnet mask and Gateway addresses had disappeared leaving only the Primary DNS IP intact. I am not sure what is wrong but I am definitely going to investigate. I could live with Konqueror, if, I was only going to use Slax as a recovery/emergency OS but since I am planning to use it as a regular OS on my older computer, Firefox becomes a necessity. I also need a good music player and JuK by no stretch of imagination is comparable to Amarok.

I still have to try the other included programs. Will keep posting about my discoveries on Slax

Slax – Tiny, beautiful, functional

I had downloaded Slax a few days ago. But due to work commitments, I could try it out only today. I should say, I am

Slax

very impressed with this little distro.  Slax is a Live CD distribution meant to run from a CD or a USB drive. The default package is just 190 MB and the site offers iso images for those wishing to run Slax from a CD or a tar archive for those wishing to run it from a USB drive. An iso image can also be made from the tar archive and the iso image can also be used to run Slax from a USB drive. It works both ways and it is pretty convenient.

The best feature of Slax is Modules. Modules can be added to the default pacakge before download. Modules include additional programs, tools and utilities. Modules can also be added or removed at a later stage. This makes the distribution very versatile. Slax makes for a very good recovery or emergency OS.

Live CD

I tried the Live CD flavour of Slax. It booted up quickly on my laptop running an Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 processor with 1 GB RAM. I did not time the boot sequence, though. Another nifty feature of Slax is it can be loaded and run completly from RAM without the CD in the drive. This is very useful for people who have just one CD drive on their desktops or people using laptops.

Included Software

Slax is a KDE based distribution and it runs KDE 3.5.10

Other packages include

K3B
KolourPaint
Kopete
Konqueror
KOffice

plus other utilities a couple of games and tools for the Internet. The packages are not bleeding edge and this helps greatly in the stability of the distribution. There is no OpenOffice.org or Firefox in the default package. I figured out that Firefox can be downloaded from the modules, but did not check on OpenOffice.org

Conclusion

After running this distribution for a while, I immediately thought it would be a great fit on my very old PIII 1.1 GHz with just 256 MB of RAM. Currently this machine is chugging along with Win XP and Ubuntu with Ubuntu replacing Mandriva since the drive containing Mandriva failed. It is a stop gap distro and I was searching for something light to replace Ubuntu. From the time I discovered Slax, I have been researching how to install it on a computer. Since it is a Live CD distro there doesn’t seem to be a direct way to install it. All in all Slax is beautiful, minimal and functional.

I am still trying to empty my flash drive to run Slax on it and to see if my other files can happily co-exist. If I manage to do that, I will do another post.

Screen shots

Here are a few screen shots of beautiful Slax

Bluecurve Classic

About 8 years ago, this time of the year, I used Linux for the first time. I had read about how stable, versatile, open, configurable it was. I tried my first Linux distro. It was not one of the biggies. It was PCQLinux a derivative of Red Hat Linux. Fedora was still sometime in the future. I installed the distro on the same machine that I still have and use. My old and reliable P3.

The first thing I was impressed was the looks of Linux. Belive me or not, I liked Bluecurve, the theme and the window decoration more than Windows look and feel. And here is a screenshot of how Bluecurve looked then. It changed a bit in Fedora Core 1 but I still like the classic look.

Bluecurve

Times have changed and today we have a lot of new themes and styles, but the “curve” has its special place in my heart. It is a great feeling to look back and see how far Linux has come

Giving Intrepid Ibex a pass

Well, the delay I had in laying my hands on Ubuntu 8.10 aka Intrepid Ibex lead to something else. In the mean time I was able to get Mandriva Linux One 2009 and I decided to give it a try. I was sceptical at first because I have been using Ubuntu for almost two years now. But Mandriva blew all that away.

The installation of Mandriva One 2009 GNOME was completed in about 10 minutes. The quickest Linux install on my computer so far. Also, the Mandriva iso for GNOME was pretty small at 607 MB. This meant a few applications were not included. At first glance I could see there were no games and there was no Tomboy something which I had grown to use more frequently. No big deal, I was able to install them from the Add and Remove Software tool.

As expected, there was no support for some audio and video formats. This too was fixed by installing the gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg-0.10.5-2mdv2009.0.i586 package from the net. So everything was set. One major positive I noticed was Mandriva never froze when watching videos as Ubuntu did. I had to do several reboots if I am watching a bunch of videos on Ubuntu. This stability of Mandriva impressed me the most.

AWN seemed to work fine although it was bare-bones. I was able to easily install the extras from the AWN Wiki and get things going. Here again the stacks applet worked perfectly while it did not work on Ubuntu. There were a couple of more applets which worked on neither distros.

So I am going to hang on with Mandriva as it is serving my needs perfectly well. The Mandriva Community is also very friendly and helped a lot when I faced any issues. Mandriva may not be as huge as Ubuntu but the stability and polish of the OS is unmatched. I can say that Mandriva 2009 is the best GNOME desktop I have run so far.

That effectively also means I would give the Ubuntu a pass this time and wait for the next iteration to see how things have improved.

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex – Not so soon

Hm, as everyone is eagerly awaiting the release of Ubuntu 8.10, aka Intrepid Ibex, I would not be able to lay hands on this release until early next week. So I am going to be late to check out the latest and greatest linux distro

How do I convince myself? There is a positive in this delay too. By then most of you would have downloaded, installed and given your feedback and possibly fixes are out for some annoying bugs – if any.

So, a round up and screenshots can be expected next week. I just cant wait to compare the newest Ubuntu to the Mandriva One 2009 which I am already running.

Thank You

I was greeted by a pleasant surprised today when I checked my blog stats. There was more than usual traffic and the reason is that my post on Mandriva Linx 2009 is one of the today’s most popular contents on tuxmachines.org.

Its a great feeling and I am relishing it. Thank you srlinuxx for publishing my post on your site.

And, to my readers, Thank You

How to install AWN on Ubuntu Hardy Heron

Though this is a topic that is widely documented, this is one of the searches that land people on this blog. So I thought it is only logical that I write a post on how to install Avant Window Navigator aka AWN on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. I would just stick to this version and keep the post simple.

Step 1: Add the repositories

Go to System > Administration > Software Sources.

Enter your password when prompted.

Click on the tab named Third Party Software Click the Add button

Software Sources

Add the below lines one at a time, clicking the Add Source button after each line

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ubuntu hardy main

Click Close button

Click Reload button on the new window that pops up and wait until the update is complete. Once this is complete, the Software Sources window would close on its own.

Step 2: Install AWN

Go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal and type

sudo apt-get install awn-manager-trunk awn-extras-applets-trunk

Press ‘Y’ to confirm the installation

Step 3: Enjoy using AWN

Once the installation is complete, go to Applications > Accessories > Avant Window Navigator. The dock would start at the bottom of the screen. So you would have to remove the panel there (if you still have it there ) and move the items elsewhere.

You can drag and drop any program from its menu. For example, if you want to add Firefox to AWN, go to Applications > Internet > Firefox Web Browser and drag it to AWN and drop it once a “+” would appears on the cursor.

You can also install or change themes from the AWN preferences. To access preferences either right click on AWN and select Dock Preferences or go to System > Preferences > Awn Manager

References:

1. AWN Wiki

2. Softpedia – With tips to install cool plugins

Disks from a bygone era

While I was shifting my house, I remembered that I had some CDs from the days when the Internet was starting to boom. Here is a photo. Pardon the photo quality as I had to use a cell phone camera.

Disks from a bygone era

I saw a CD for the first time in my life in 1995 when I was in Class 7. It took me three more years to actually pop it in, into a friends PC and see what it contained.

The photo below contains three CDs one each from 1995, 1996 and 1997. These are from the Indian IT magazine PC Quest which started distributing CDs every quarter at the time when little was known about computers or CDs in the country.

1. The earliest one is from 1995. It contained fully functional demos of OS/2 Warp and PC DOS 7 neither of which I could try. OS/2 required 30, 1.44 MB, 3.5″ floppy disks or a fresh hard drive to install and I could afford neither at that time. Compare that to the multiple DVDs that pack a single software or a game today.

2. The one in yellow and black is from 1996. It contained Netscape Navigator 3 as the star product along with demos of AutoCAD and 3DS Max and some localized software from India’s CDAC

3. The last one is from 1997. Though I don’t remember what multimedia and graphics it contained, the star attraction is MSIE 4. In about 10 years, IE has only increased by 3 versions (leaving out the IE8 beta)

We have come a long way since then. But nostalgia strikes hard when I look at stuff like this. I even have a couple of 5.25″ floppy disks, but could not get a chance to click a photo of them.

Mandriva Linux One 2008.1 Spring GNOME – Screenshots

As I promised in my previous post, I finally managed to capture a few screenshots of the lovely Mandrvia Linux One 2008.1 Spring – GNOME edition.

Go here to enjoy the screenshots. I could not resist including the Mandriva Control Center screenshots since the Mandriva Control Center is a great piece of software that differentiates this distro from the rest out there.