A while ago I took a look at Mandriva 2008 Spring RC1 inside VirtualBox. Today, the 2008 Spring final release was announced. I decided to install it on my main laptop (Acer 5920). Here’s a few quick notes. Perhaps a full review will follow later. This time I downloaded the One GNOME i586 version.

The announcement seems to have been made a bit too soon unfortunately. Not all mirrors listed by Mandriva had the all iso’s up already. I needed to use BitTorrent to download the GNOME One version of the ISO. I was unable to find an x86_64 version. Pretty strange. 64 Bit hardware has been in common use for about three years now here, but software support still seems abysmal

About the install: After starting the Live Install, it complained about not being able to mount an USB stick. I clicked the notice away, an install continued without problems. I noticed the Netherlands is now listed in the “Other countries” list. Thanks Adam and Mandriva team! (see comments on previous review).

The install is pretty fast. In about ten minutes it was all done, and ready to go. After first boot, Mandriva asked to register. Then, something strange happened: it did not boot into a graphical environment :-S

After another reboot, it did though. At boot of the LiveCD i selected to use Compiz Fusion for the 3D Desktop effects, and these settings are kept after install. Nice! Mandriva unfortunately detected a wrong screen resolution though: 1024×768 instead of 1280×800. After editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf, it worked correctly. This can probably also be done from the excellent Mandriva Control Center, but this was faster for me, since I’m not really experienced with the MCC. Here’s the obligatory default desktop screenshot:

Mandriva Control Center looks like this:

Mandriva comes with its own network configuration app, which offers far more configuration options than NetworkManager which is delivered by most other distributions. Mandriva’s app works fine for me.

Another sign of Mandriva announcing the release too soon:

After selecting Austria:

The Acer Crystaleye webcam does not work in Ekiga, but I’ve never got it to work on any other distribution either.

The desktop effects provided by the Compiz Fusion implementation seems to work very well, except for some screen flicker when alt-tabbing. I’ll have to investigate this some time, it seems related to using the NVIDIA drivers.

For now, that’s it. Besides the buggyness, and unableness to install additional software, or updates, Mandriva 2008 Spring One somehow looks and feels exciting to me. More so than Ubuntu 8.04. Almost everything seems to work fine, and feels fast. Mandriva 2008 Spring One comes with a lot of what “normal” people need for working with the system. The proprietary NVIDIA drivers, Adobe Flash plugin, DVD/video support is all installed by default, and is working great.

The looks of the system are fresh, and “spring” like, although they do not differ much from the previous 2008 release.

There are some bugs in the system, but I don’t know of any distribution delivering software this fresh without a few of them. I also trust Mandriva will fix them as soon as they can. They have to if they want to win back some terrain lost to Ubuntu. Also, next time Mandriva, please wait with announcing the new distribution until all mirrors are ready for it.