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

[Evan Leibovitch]

Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:

>>> 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.
>
>
>    That's considerably overstating the case. Many people are still
>    using that, and even older versions. I have 8.2 happily running on
>    one box.


Sure, but would you choose 8.2 for a new install?

Most distributions are stable enough that older versions are "happily 
running" for a lot of people. My suggestion is simply that for someone 
like Madison who is looking to do a first install of Mandriva, 10.1 is 
now two releases old. Your first view of a distro should be the best one 
you can get.

>    I generally notice very little difference moving from one version
>    to the next.


As has been said, 2006 is the first release that brings together 
Mandriva, Conectiva and Lycoris. Mandriva claims this release to be the 
first Linux distro to be "certified" for Centrino, ending previous grief 
over support for the Intel wireless system (though it's still not 100% 
open source).

Yes, I know that Centrino worked on previous releases, but never 
seamlessly. Same with things like hibernation or the ATI/NVidia drivers.

There are a lot of things that in previous releases could be "made to 
work", that in this release just work. Many of the changes are subtle 
but still worthwhile.

But most importantly, the ghastly "evil clown penguin" bootup theme of 
Mandriva 10.2 is now gone :-).

- Evan

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