MandrivaOne 2007 quick tour

I've just installed MandrivaOne 2007 after playing a bit with the LiveCD. OK, long story short: DON'T TRY IT. At least not for upgrading from 2006. If there's an upgrade option, it's hidden somewhere; if I hit F1 for more options, all I'd get would be a grub prompt. That's all. In older versions you'd have a whole list of options. Oh well.

The 3d effects were at least funny to watch (the wobbly windows especially), but not that essential. However, it was quite slow to load, but it might've been the fault of the medium - a slow CD-RW. Hm. Where's the parallel init?

Then, at first I tried the LiveInstall option, assuming that it was maybe smart enough to figure out it needed to upgrade. Oh well, maybe I'm a bit tired - now that I think again, it doesn't make sense. I made sure I copied somewhere safe all the stuff you could call 'important', and then proceeded.

The result was a total fuckup, the old packages database was completely wiped, but the old programs were still there (I had my /home and / on the same partition, since I'm lazy, and since last time I tried sharing /home between distros didn't work anyway). So when trying to run basic stuff like 'ls' I'd get complaints about missing symbols in libc. Oh well...

Then I gave it a second try, this time with a fresh install. It was better, but still, I wouldn't say I'm impressed. The install is quite minimal (2.1 GB, but about 1100 packages), and seems targeted towards the non-technical user. Which is fine and dandy, but what if I'm a technical user? For fsck's sake, man is missing (even though some manual pages get installed - oops). Also info. Fonts are goddamn ugly - try viewing entries from the Debian bug database in Firefox to see my point. And that was at 1024x768 - I don't dare imagine how it would've been at 1280x1024, the normal resolution of my LCD. Ugly, ugly, butt ugly. Same as the old 2006.0.

But there are other bad news. It seems Mandriva has lost quite a bit of the vitality of old - guess it's expected when you decide to release once a year. I barely found the first version of Szaka's ntfs-3g, the one from July, while on Ubuntu they already have the last. Sigh. Yeah, I'm soo lazy. The PLF website is down, so is easy urpmi... Well, at least there are mirrors: on mandrivausers.org (but without PLF, so it's basically useless), on seerofsouls.com (this one has both PLF-free and PLF-nonfree - yipee).

But anyway - I'm kinda disappointed at this release, one year in the making. Of course, they've had their share of troubles, firing the founder and one of their top developers... But still. Too bad, really, too bad.

Afterthought: Or is it that only MandrivaOne sucks? Maybe I'll try the Free version some time, but not that soon.