Oct 07 2006
00:25 GMT
My Second Mandriva 2007 Day mandriva 

Avec un grain de sel...

After my first hour with Mandriva 2007 Free (last night), it was now day two. Will I reboot into Debian any time soon? I'm afraid I will.

Let's start with an Errata: the lack of some packages (remember what I said about the GNOME games?) was only apparent. The problem was that (like in some other distros too), you can't select really EVERYTHING in the installer, when you check all the boxes you see.

Playing later with Rpmdrake 2007 revealed some interesting packages left on the CDs:
  • fonts-ttf-bitstream-vera (CD1)
  • gnome-games (CD2)
  • wine 0.9.20 (CD3)
  • Beagle 0.2.9 (CD2)
  • MySQL 5.0.24a, php-mysql-5.1.6. Interesting enough, security updates were already available for MySQL and libphp5-common5-5.1.6!
  • BMPx (from PLF) and Audacious (CD2), but audacious-extra-plugins also from PLF. (Unfortunately, Audacious dies with "Received SIGSEGV", duh.)
Oh, I forgot to say I added PLF to RPMdrake:
  • ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/plf/mandriva/free/2007.0/i586/
  • ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/plf/mandriva/non-free/2007.0/i586/

There are still some applications I should probably compile myself, as I couldn't find them anywhere.

— § —

Anyway, now that Kat is dead, they say KDE users should have Kerry instead. But what Kerry?!

The provided «Mandriva Linux Starter Guide in English», dated «September 2006» on the first page, tells about Kerry-Beagle. It's just not there. Not anywhere!?


In compensation, Beagle can be configured through beagle-settings, and (to avoid an unnecessary logout) launched with beagle-search --autostarted --icon. It's only... some results are from the future!


(Have you ever read on this site that I trust Beagle? No, you have not.)

— § —

For sharing the Internet connection (routing with NAT, a DHCP server, and a properly configured firewall), one can use drakgw:


Make sure to uncheck the DNS box, because bind is missing from Mandriva 2007 Free!

Anyway, the most surprising part is that after I configured a shared Internet connection, everybody started to have IPv4 addresses too (no, I have not disabled IPv6, but it's Shorewall who started using DISABLE_IPV6!), as some changes were necessary in the routing table:

Without routing the internal LAN, the gateway for eth0 was the GW from the ISP: 89.120.37.25.
# ifconfig
eth0   Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:0E:2E:6C:XX:XX
       inet6 addr: fe80::20e:2eff:fe6c:a3b5/64 Scope:Link
...
eth1   Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 4C:00:10:71:XX:XX
       inet6 addr: fe80::4e00:10ff:fe71:ecf6/64 Scope:Link
...
ppp0   Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
       inet addr:86.x.x.x  P-t-P:89.120.37.254  Mask:255.255.255.255
...
# route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination   Gateway       Genmask         Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
89.120.37.254 0.0.0.0       255.255.255.255 UH    25     0     0 ppp0
169.254.0.0   0.0.0.0       255.255.0.0     U     0      0     0 lo
127.0.0.0     0.0.0.0       255.0.0.0       U     0      0     0 lo
0.0.0.0       89.120.37.254 0.0.0.0         UG    25     0     0 ppp0

With routing (and sharing the Internet), the internal eth1 needs a way out through eth0, which is now having a DHCP-assigned IPv4 address (10.0.0.1 or 10.0.0.2) by the ADSL bridging modem, and the gateway for eth1 is now 10.0.0.138, the ever famous administrative IP for SpeedTouch and GW in the same time!
# ifconfig
eth0   Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:0E:2E:6C:XX:XX
       inet addr:10.0.0.1  Bcast:10.0.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
       inet6 addr: fe80::20e:2eff:fe6c:a3b5/64 Scope:Link
...
eth1   Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 4C:00:10:71:XX:XX
       inet addr:192.168.1.1  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
       inet6 addr: fe80::4e00:10ff:fe71:ecf6/64 Scope:Link
...
ppp0   Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
       inet addr:86.34.6.70  P-t-P:89.120.37.254  Mask:255.255.255.255
...
# route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination   Gateway       Genmask         Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
89.120.37.254 0.0.0.0       255.255.255.255 UH    25     0     0 ppp0
10.0.0.0      0.0.0.0       255.255.255.0   U     10     0     0 eth0
192.168.1.0   0.0.0.0       255.255.255.0   U     10     0     0 eth1
169.254.0.0   0.0.0.0       255.255.0.0     U     10     0     0 eth0
169.254.0.0   0.0.0.0       255.255.0.0     U     10     0     0 eth1
0.0.0.0       10.0.0.138    0.0.0.0         UG    10     0     0 eth0
0.0.0.0       89.120.37.254 0.0.0.0         UG    25     0     0 ppp0
That was a nice one!

Note that one of the MCC applets (draklets?), drakinvictus, is useless(*), as the Invictus Firewall it's a Mandriva-specific high-availability redundant firewall cluster system, and this feature is only available in Powerpack+ 2007:

— § —

During this second day with Mandriva 2007 Free, only two incidents occured: gnome-panel (freezed once), and net_applet (crashed once). Not a big deal.

Mandriva 2007 Free is great as a desktop (much more powerful than Ubuntu), yet as a power user, I'm not that much into it.

I'm going into Debian now...

_______
(*)Actually, Invictus is not on the CDs/DVD, but it is in the "main" online repository. See also Cui Prodest Invictus?

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