You can never tell what happens with yourself next.
Did developers who started Mandrake project back in 1998 knew that their baby would become world famous operating system? But fate of this baby is not the easiest. It was renamed to Mandriva, remarketed, and finally split into at least two. I am talking about recent fork between Mandriva and Mageia. Of course, there were other forks before, but recent one was the most serious in the whole history.
I have already written about Mandriva Linux several times. They were reviews of Mandriva 2010.1 and 2010.2, based on KDE. Up to that point Mandriva released different spins of their operating system: one CD iso image for GNOME and another for KDE version.
Latest Hydrogen release is different here. It only has KDE version. Other DEs were deprecated, although still available from community. And new ISO image weights more than 1.6 Gb. This is significantly more than previous versions which could fit standard CD. By the way, for limited time only you can still get CD with previous version of Mandriva from Buy Linux CDs web shop!
I was not much impressed with previous releases of Mandriva. But Mageia quickly became my distribution #1. That's why I was very curious how much Mageia 1 was different from Mandriva 2011.
It was time for me to create Live USB for Mandriva. Previous versions of this OS had special tool called "Mandriva Seed" to create Live USB. This time round I decided to use something more generic. And I was lucky! My Live USB was created from iso image with simple dd command. Same method is mentioned in release notes, if you bother to read them.
Boot menu of Mandriva 2011 only had 2 options listed: Launch OS and Install. Of course, my choice was for Live run.
As usual for Mandriva (and Mageia too), boot process takes user's attention with quite a lot of questions. System language, keyboard layout, time zone and clock setup are to name some of them. Of course, Mandriva 2011 has big choice of languages available out of the box. That was true for previous versions, this is true for Hydrogen. British English is called just "English" in the menu, and Russian is also in the list.
Even during the boot you can notice some changes not only from previous Mandriva versions, but from other KDE-based systems. Most remarkable change at this time is boot splash screen. It was significantly reworked. Now it has different icons compared to what you could be used to. Yes, icons still appear one-by-one from left to right. But icons themselves are different. They remind you about cloud facilities (Mandriva sync) and other modern ideas in computer-related industry. And last icon is... Window! Yes, square window with vertical and horizontal bars! Is it just a joke towards Microsoft?
I need to mention here that Mandriva 2011 Hydrogen uses KDE 4.6.5. This is not the latest release of this Desktop Environment, maybe update will come soon.
Once booted, you get to KDE desktop without any icons on it. There is a panel at the bottom, but this is not standard panel. Instead, Mandriva 2011 uses RocketBar which was specifically adopted for Mandriva by Russian team of developers ROSA Lab.
Default wallpaper in Mandriva 2011 is blue-themed abstract picture. If you don't like it, you can still select from several others, which are more or less standard for KDE-based distributions. Surprisingly, there are no Mandriva-styled wallpapers in the distribution.
There are 4 virtual desktops by default, but there are no switch panel anywhere on the screen. That's quite strange, isn't it?
Freshly booted Mandriva 2011 uses about 400 Mb of memory which is too much from my perspective. For example, Mageia 1 on my laptop only takes 170 Mb when booted from hard disk. The difference is more than 2 times. Are these different ROSA Lab additions who took so many resources? I also noticed that processor load was quite heavy during all the Live run.
ROSA Lab provided Mandriva 2011 with quite significant facelift. I have already mentioned panel. That's just a beginning. KDE standard Kickoff menu was also replaced, of course with ROSA-style menu. Thus menu reminded me GNOME3 with almost full screen covered with black background. Menu itself has 3 sections: recent document, applications and timeframe. Last one is intended to list recent documents, but switched off by default because requires Nepomuk index to be run. There is a reminder on that tab which allows switching on Nepomuk.
From my perspective, ROSA menu is still worse than KDE-standard one. I would say it continues tendency to move closer to tablet PCs with large icons and finger-oriented interface. Not sure this is right for desktops.
What I found most annoying is that Applications part of menu has sections placed one after another. You need to scroll whole list to get to the very bottom of menu. Application groups are only used to separate items, but not for navigation. It is still better than, for example, standard HTC Sense launcher for Android. But Android is not intended for desktop use at all.
Does Mandriva 2011 Hydrogen speak foreign languages? I think I have already given you an answer when noted that Russian is among possible system languages. And of course Russian keyboard layout can easily be configured via standard KDE method in configuration panel - Input methods.
Unpleasant surprise waited for me in the network configuration. All the previous versions of Mandriva I've seen so far had no issues with my WiFi card Broadcom 4311. It worked right out of the box. But... here Mandriva 2011 Hydrogen made step backwards. I saw no network available. WiFi card Broadcom 4311 was recognised and listed fine, but firmware was not included. It should be downloaded from Internet. That is absolutely frustrating since free open source firmware for this WiFi card is available in the Internet. More and more distributions include firmware into the package, including RedHat and CentOS. But Mandriva team decided otherwise.
I could not manage pick up the network connection. That means I was not able to test support of external network partitions and their mounting.
What is included into Mandriva 2011?
As I noted before, ROSA Lab team made quite a lot of changes to Mandriva design and functionality. Another part where these changes are obvious is Dolphin file manager. This new design is fresh and slick. Honestly, I like it!
An NTFS partition was mounted OK from Dolphin. Russian characters in filenames and paths were recognised absolutely fine. Is it consequence of KDE approach, or ROSA team input? Nobody can worry about support of multilingual users better than those users themselves. That's why so many distributions developed by English-speaking communities and enthusiasts (American, British, Australian etc) unfortunately forget about other languages at all.
Firefox 5 is included as default browser in Mandriva 2011. What is interesting: Firefox starts with default page file:///usr/share/doc/HTML/index.html, and this page says: Mandriva 2011 Alpha 1. Does it mean that Mandriva team released Alpha version? I would prefer to believe otherwise.
Other than Firefox, Mandriva 2011 includes KDE-native Konqueror browser. There are lots of other KDE-specific Internet tools: Kopete, Chokoq, KGet, KTorrent, KNetAttach to name just a few.
Mandriva 2011 includes LibreOffice 3.4.2 in full version with Math and Draw applications. You can also find Okular document viewer in Office section of menu.
Graphics section of Mandriva 2011 menu does not include GIMP, but there is Kolor Paint drawing tool. This section includes Gwenview, KSnapshot, Shotwell and still the same Okular.
Clementine is default player in Mandriva 2011 and it is listed in Multimedia section. SMPlayer is there for people who only use multimedia player to play music, but don't want their library (re-)organised. I am such a person. There are also K3B disk burning tool and PiTiVi video editor in Multimedia part of menu.
Tools section of Mandriva 2011 menu is huge. I won't list all the applications there, it will take too much time. You can have a look yourself. I should only mention that there are some standard tools which you find in any distribution, and some quite unique.
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| Mandriva 2011 running Dolphin, Firefox and video in SMPlayer |
As I mentioned several multimedia players, I had to check support of audio and video files. Surprisingly enough, MP3 files played out of the box in Mandriva 2011. Russian characters in MP3 file tags were recognised fine in Clementine. Unfortunately, SMPlayer did not show me any tags at all.
Video files from local hard drive (avi) played out of the box too. I did not check which codec was used in that file. But at least one codec exists in Mandriva 2011 by default.
I could not check video playback from online sources like YouTube, because of network connection troubles.
What is my general feeling about Mandriva 2011? They are mixed.
New release of this famous OS has lots of great features. There is definitely progress since previous version.
Some of new features are very nice and from my perspective should be taken into other distributions
- Dolphin redesign is just brilliant
- MP3 / video support is very nice. There are some discussions about open source license nature and compatibility of these codecs. But from point of view of regular user, these codecs are the must.
But some of new additions in Mandriva 2011 are not that nice.
- Distribution size. Why is this version so much bigger than previous?
- Boot time should definitely be improved.
- Memory usage is way too high.
- System response time was generally very slow. For example LibreOffice Calc took about a minute to start, Firefox just little bit less.
Are these issues consequences of distribution ISO image obesity? Or they are results of something else? This is something Mandriva developers should look at. From my current position, I'd say that Mandriva 2011 Hydrogen offers user good choice of features, but price for them is too high.
Where will this OS go now? To its Dusk or to its Dawn? What do you think?
If you are interested, here are some links:
Review by Prashanth: http://dasublogbyprashanth.blogspot.com/2011/08/review-mandriva-2011-hydrogen.html
Review of Mandriva 2011 RC2 from Cristalinux: http://cristalinux.blogspot.com/2011/08/mandriva-2011-review.html
Review by ComputerworldUK: http://www.computerworlduk.com/in-depth/operating-systems/3300129/five-reasons-to-try-out-mandriva-linux-on-the-desktop/
Where will this OS go now? To its Dusk or to its Dawn? What do you think?
If you are interested, here are some links:
Review by Prashanth: http://dasublogbyprashanth.blogspot.com/2011/08/review-mandriva-2011-hydrogen.html
Review of Mandriva 2011 RC2 from Cristalinux: http://cristalinux.blogspot.com/2011/08/mandriva-2011-review.html
Review by ComputerworldUK: http://www.computerworlduk.com/in-depth/operating-systems/3300129/five-reasons-to-try-out-mandriva-linux-on-the-desktop/
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