Mandriva 2006 (was Re:Idea on which Distros to support)

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On October 17, 2005 12:28, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Madison Kelly wrote:
> > Un, but I don't seem to be able to download Mandriva (it seems to
> > be for sale only now). I found Mandrake 10.1 (not sure how much
> > has changed) on linuxiso.com and I will test out my program on
> > it.
>
> Much too old.
>
> Mandriva 2006 is out and it's extremely nice. It installed without
> a slip on both my laptop and Athlon64 server. 64-bit Ubuntu crashed
> trying to install on the server. Mandriva is the first-ever distro
> that doesn't have my Thinkpad crash when inserted or removed from
> its docking station. And it comes with OpenOffice 2.0.
>
> The free download is right now limited to "Mandriva Club" members,
> and even that limited availability appears to be saturating both
> their FTP sites and their Torrent network.
>
> The website "mandriva.com" is all about the commercial products.
> The site "mandrivalinux.com", while still encouraging people to
> support them by buying products or Club memberships, still offers
> free downloads via FTP or torrent:
>
> http://www1.mandrivalinux.com/en/ftp.php3
>
> Right now the only thing available for free download to non-club
> members is 10.1, but don't bother with that.

2005 Limited Edition (a.k.a. 10.2) has been available for free 
download since sometime in the spring so it is still available, 
though I agree with you that 2006 is the one to go with.

> The jump to 2006 is 
> well worth the wait; it will be available to non-club members in a
> few weeks according to the website.

You do not have to wait if you are not a Mandriva Club member. There 
are options. First, you could do an ftp install. Second, you could 
download the contents of the 2006 CD, which is freely available on 
all the mirrors, and burn your own CD/DVD and install from that. 
Finally, you can do a minimal installation of 2005 LE and then do a 
urpmi upgrade by pointing the installation at the 2006 urpmi 
repositories. To do a minimal 2055 LE installation, you only need the 
first ISO.

1. Boot from the 2005 LE CD1 that you burned from the ISO.

2. Select custom installation.

2. Deselect every application category in the package selection step 
and select the checkbox to indicate that you want to select 
individual packages.

3. You should be presented with a form that asks if you want to do a 
minimal installation with urpmi (recommended) or without. Select 
"with urpmi".

4. Let the installer do its thing and reboot.

5. Get a root shell and type:

urpmi.removemedia -a

6. Go to <http://urpmi-addmedia.org>, find a mirror that suits you, 
and select the various repositories you want to add. I would add 
main, contrib, and update for the time being.

7. Copy and paste the string that the form generates into the root 
shell. That will take a few minutes as it downloads the urpmi 
metadata from the three repositories.

8. You are now ready to upgrade to 2006.0. Type:

urpmi --auto-select --auto

and let it do its thing. When it is finished, you should have a 
working 2006.0 minimal installation. You can then install whatever 
you like by using urpmi, e.g. urpmi kde, would install KDE and all 
its dependencies.

This is the first version of Mandriva that we see some of the 
influence of Connectiva on the distro. One example of that influence 
is SmartPM <http://smartpm.org>. I like the idea of a package manager 
that is agnostic to the package format.

Something else that could prove to be very useful when having to test 
something on multiple distros is Xen. You can use whatever you like 
for the dom0 (the host in VMWare parlance) and run any distro as a 
domU (a guest in VMWare parlance). I am running Xen on Mandriva and 
have hosted Mandriva, Debian, Fedora, and Gentoo as guests.

None of the above suggests that you should not be a Club member if you 
want to support a very polished distro. The only thing that comes 
close to the polish of Mandriva is SuSE but I prefer Mandriva, 
amongst other things, for the friendly support that one can find on 
#mandriva. Disclosure: I do not own Mandriva stock nor am I 
affiliated with Mandriva in any way other than as a very happy user 
and contributor. I also have "voice" on #mandriva, for what it is 
worth and not only use Mandriva on desktops but on servers for 
hosting domains and applications.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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