A VirtualBox that is. This is a quick look at Mandriva 2008.1 (Spring) One RC1 which was released March 1, 2008.

The latest releases from Mandriva have received many positive reviews, so I was curious at their latest offering. While it’s not final yet, this is an RC, so it should be in a reviewable state. I’ll try not to compare it to other distributions, because I don’t want the review to be influenced by other experiences. I like reviews which look at what the user expects.

Update 2008-04-09: Took a look at the final Gnome One version as well!

Mandriva offers two different kinds of downloads of this release, the first is called ‘Free’ which consists of three CD’s or a DVD. The other version is called ‘One’. The ‘Free’ edition comes with a traditional installer, the ‘One’ edition is a live CD with installer. I’ve downloaded the One RC1 KDE edition.

After setting up a VirtualBox virtual machine, and mounting the downloaded ISO, we’re greeted with a friendly, nice looking boot screen:

On boot Mandriva asks a few simple questions about your locality, type of keyboard etc. Funny thing is, I live in the Netherlands, but that’s not in the country list. All kinds of crazy and small countries are listed, but no Netherlands, no Holland or whatsoever.

After booting, Mandriva greeted me with a message saying the sound server is crashing:

The window appeared a few times again, without me doing anything, and then…the window just froze! No response to a ctrl-alt-backspace or ctrl-alt-delete signal, so I did a power down and restarted the virtual machine. I figured it must have been a hick up. On the second boot I got the same result.

Then I took a look at the sound settings in VirtualBox. Turns out VirtualBox does not enable sound in the VMs by default. So I enabled sound, and tried again. Lo and behold, the system worked:

Apparently trying Mandriva without sound is not such a good idea.

It appears Mandriva includes the VirtualBox guest additions by default. Installing them would not be a big deal, but it’s always a big plus if things just work.

The laptop on which I tried the VirtualBox-Mandriva combo (an Acer 5920), has a resolution of 1280×800 pixels. Mandriva detected a resolution of 1024×768, and it didn’t adjust the resolution to the VirtualBox window size. This is something *shrug* Windows *shrug* seems to do well inside a VirtualBox VM. Note that I haven’t seen any other Linux distribution doing this, but it would be nice to have.

Off to web browsing. The default browser is Firefox 2.0.0.12. Flash support is included by default, so Youtube and the likes work fine out of the box. There’s also video support provided by Totem and its Firefox plugins, which works fine for most video content on the web. There’s no Microsoft MMS support, which unfortunately is used by a few sites. While I don’t mind Mandriva not supporting this by default, the error message is not of much help. It offers no clues about how to get the needed support. This is something which Ubuntu does for example, and their system works fine. This would be a nice addition to Mandriva as well.

One thing I always dislike about KDE is that there are so many menu options, which appear very unorganized. Mandriva seems to have done little to improve this:

The system itself runs smoothly, and responds fast. I did open up a konsole and checked the top output. Somehow the system load is high, which seems to be caused by artsd and/or pulseaudio:

Also, netstat shows Mandriva starts Xorg with TCP listening on by default. This means port 6000 is open and always listening for connections. I’d like it if the system didn’t listen on any ports by default, for security reasons.

Anyway, since the system is running smoothly, and sound worked perfectly, I decided to not worry about it, and try the install system. Now this part was a nice surprise! The install asked very few questions, and was done in six minutes! Nice touch!

When the installer is done, it asks you to reboot:

The first boot took 55 seconds, but the first 20 seconds of that the progress bar makes no progress. Something is causing a delay there. After the first boot, Mandriva sets up the root account, asks for a new root password, adds a default user account, and sets up networking. This is all pretty simple, and works well.

Shutdown took 26 seconds, which seems a bit long to me.

Second boot took 62 seconds, but that’s including the 20 second delay at the beginning, and automatically logging in the default user.

Off to a look at the software management. It shows a nice simple screen which should be understandable for most users:

Unfortunately, the default selection is based on ‘Packages with GUI’. You have to select ‘All’ in the drop-down menu on the top-left to search through all packages. This is why there’s only one result for the search term ‘fonts’ in this screenshot. With ‘All’ selected there are a whole lot more. Mandriva offers almost every package you can possibly dream of, but hiding it with this drop-down box does not seem like a good idea to me. I just found it confusing.

For network configuration Mandriva offers its own program. It works well, nice and simple:

When using the operating system, it seems to work well. I did not experience any crashes or other weird behavior. Mandriva comes with its own Control Center, which allows you to configure just about every aspect of your system:

That concludes this review. Even though I experienced some problems I quite liked how the system behaved. It responds and feels fast, almost lightweight. Unfortunately, with VirtualBox you can’t yet test every aspect of the system. No 3D desktop effects for example. Also, I suspect the high cpu usage from artsd/pulseaudio could be caused by running Mandriva inside a VirtualBox.

I’m look forward to testing the final release on a real machine. Mandriva seems to be on the right track the last couple of years. I get a nice and fluffy ‘Mandrake’ feeling with running Mandriva, and that’s something positive in my opinion.

For convenience, here’s a list of the pluses:

• System feels fast and stable
• Mandriva Control Center, and the other configuration tools make it easy to configure every part of your system
• Fast installation
• MultiMedia/Flash support by default

And the minuses/issues I spotted:

• Without sound, the system hangs after boot
• No ‘Netherlands’ in country list
• pulseaudio/artsd cause high system load
• Xorg listens for network connections by default
• The graphical system does not detect and adjust the screen resolution on the fly
• KDE menus feel unorganised
• No ‘Codec buddy’ like program