And it was day one — or "hour one in night one" — with Mandriva Linux 2007 Free!

After having cursed the torrents, I downloaded the CDs through FTP — complete mirrors: [free.fr], [contactel.cz], [warwick.ac.uk] (but I got my CDs from [roedu.net]).

— § —
The first question was: why four CDs instead of the announced three?

Actually, there are 3 "installation CDs", the 4th is dubbed "installation i18n CD", and it's common to both i586 and x86_64. The disc label contains "x86_64", so I have to admit this is rather confusing. You should be able to get Mandriva 2007 Free installed even without the internationalization CD, I suppose.

The installer has nice graphics (hey, it's Mandriva!), pretty much like the Corporate Server 4.0. If I remember correctly from the last Windows install I performed, the left-side bullets uses to be Microsoft's style of Setups, so I would have preferred to have it not so "Microsoftish".

I have not chosen to copy all the CDs to the hard drive during the install, because I installed Mandriva 2007 in a 6 GB partition, and selecting everything already takes 3670 MB. Even so, the install speed was good.

The only stressing moments were the ~3 minutes of total inactivity following the configuration of the ADSL (using rp-pppoe-3.8)! The network was set up properly in the end, but the installer was doing nothing from the user's point of view: no screen refresh, not even messages to the third (Ctrl+Alt+F3) console!

— § —
I was puzzled to see that I was offered the choice of a 3D desktop ("Graphic Card & Monitor Configuration", the "Options" button). I already knew that an ATI card gives me as options both AIGLX and Xgl (see this schematic diagram), however I thought my crappy ATI Radeon 9200SE card is less than suitable for this job!

First of all, this card has anything but performance when comes to OpenGL and 3D.

Second, I knew it's "a little broken in the hardware" (How ATI can freeze your Linux), because:

• AGP speed was... "Off" in Windows, and OpenGL performance was lame. Nothing I could do about that.
• With DRI enabled, the PC occasionally freezed in either an OpenGL screensaver or "just like that", with Hoary, SuSE 9.3 and SusE 10.0. As a consequence, I use to comment out "dri" under Debian, to make sure my system will kep beeing stable.

Now, guess what? I could have 3D desktop effects with Mandriva 2007, with this crappy card, and in full stability!

So I checked during the install:

• 3D hardware acceleration
• Enable Translucency (Composite extension)
• Use hardware accelerated mouse pointer
• Use EXA instead of XAA (better performance for Render and Composite)

As reported by Esfa, the update during the install failed, but after the first reboot, RPMdrake was able to deal with a mirror (free.fr) with no problems.

— § —
Time to reboot. Well, the Mandriva Linux 2007 Errata is not there for nothing (see my digest of the errata).

Simply put, the parallel init (pinit) sucks. The system was dead after the line:Using pinit, the network was not up at that time, but I couldn't possibly know what was causing the deadlock.

Booting linux nopinit offered me a "classical", sequential sysvinit, which was rather fast! Why are people stubbornly trying to gain 20 seconds at boot, with the risk of completely breaking the init?!

By the time ALSA and the mixer were initialized, the network (eth0, eth1 and the pppoe connection) were already up! With the old-style init, of course...

— § —
Choosing drak3d as the Session Type allowed me to configure the 3D desktop. I did not touch anything in gset-compiz, all I did was to switch between AIGLX, Xgl, and "No 3D desktop effects", then Ctrl+Alt+Backspace and login in a GNOME (or KDE) session.

Oh, and I was asked for the permission to install mesa-demos and task-3ddesktop. Granted.

I am not into the 3D, so I don't know where to look for the "cube thingie", nor what the "MESA demos" actually are. I don't care about that (I can't fix a Rubik cube, so I really lack the need for "cubic metaphors"), but for a distro targeting Jean Dupont or Mam'zelle Jeanette, it should be more informative, eh?

Nor I know how to take a screenshot with all those Compiz effects that bewildered me: "elastic" windows having that "pillow effect"; dynamic shades and transparencies; and the whole stuff.

You must know better than me. It was interesting to see them working, but I was finding them terribly disturbing. When I tell a window to maximize or restore, or when I want to drag it, I expect it to do what I say, not to play with all that "rubber" effects. (Yes, I hated "The Mask", how did you guess it?)

Now, given the current "market trends", it's good that Mandriva 2007 has such 3D effects working even with crappy video cards. But it's a waste of time for the whole humankind.

Performance-side, here's the funny part:

• Xgl was faster than AIGLX!
• Xgl was the only case where libGL was not complaining that "3D driver claims to not support visual 0x4b"!
• AIGLX made the system almost unresponsive, with CPU 67...98%!

Here's what glxgears gave me:

No 3D desktop:Xgl:AIGLX:I'm outta 3D now.
— § —
What I definitely like in Mandriva 2007 is the new RPMdrake 2007, which works!


I have not tried yet to add extra repositories, but easyurpmi and PLF are still there for later use :)

— § —
What I liked a lot less was the layout of the menus in both GNOME and KDE. To be honest, I never liked the way Mandriva puts the applications into categories. Several other distros make choices closer to the way I see things, so that I manage to find applications easier. A recent surprise was to see that UHU-Linux 2.0 puts them even better than expected.

Another feeling is "the Fedora feeling", but instead of asking "why I can't have more software on 5 CDs?", it's rather "why I can't have more software on 3 (4) CDs?" with Mandriva. (Say I would like to have gxine...)

A last note on software packages: they're still mostly KDE, and there are not enough GNOME apps in Mandriva! This is frustrating even with the provided small games!

— § —
A more interesting topic: networking and firewalling an ADSL (PPPoE) connection.

Here's what I was asked to select:


In full honesty, I don't have anything like ppp+, all my interfaces are the other three: eth0, eth1, ppp0!Visually, my internal network is always like this:


Moreover, if you examine the output from ifconfig, you will notice that the interfaces (eth0, eth1) were only assigned IPv6 addresses!

Ditto, having NETWORKING_IPV6=no in your /etc/sysconfig/network is a known way to disable IPv6, and this is mentioned in both 2007 Errata and 2006 Errata. But why has Mandriva chosen to enable IPv6 for default in a distro meant for John Doe?!

99% of the people will not need IPv6. A large part of them would benefit from disabling it. A rather important part of them will even need to disable it.

Now let me tell you why I need IPv4 addresses for my Ethernet adapters. It's tremendously simple: because SpeedTouch bridging modems have the administrative page at 10.0.0.138, and I can't access that page if my card does not have a 10.0.0.x address!

It's as simple as that. And I used to have assigned IPv4 addresses by default with older distros (say, SuSE 9.2, 9.3 and 10.0), whereas with Debian I had to fix this by hand — quite ugly, I'd say; see also Slow DNS lookup? Disable IPv6!.

When you have a distro like Debian, or Slackware, or Gentoo, or when you have something like Mandriva Corporate Server, I can understand you can have IPv6 enabled by default. But why enabling it by default in a distro "for the masses", like Mandriva Linux?! Is it so hard to understand that it's more normal to have 1% of the users forced to enable it by hand, instead of having 70% of them forced to disable it by hand?!

Mandriva is a good distro, it's only they make bad choices.

— § —
My quick assessment:

for the distro "in itself" (features, etc.)
as seen by "John Doe" (ease of configuration, etc.)

____
P.S.: Speaking about "some bad choices": the default page for Apache/2.2.3 (Mandriva Linux/PREFORK-1mdv2007.0) only prints this, with heading H1: It works!

I'd say this is quite... err... less than inspired, if you compare it to a more professional default page.
____

Next in the series... Second Mandriva 2007 Day!

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