Mandriva One 2010 Spring KDE

Submitted by Boudhayan Gupta on Thu, 2010-07-29 13:37

When I optimistically downloaded the 690MB ISO file from Mandriva’s website, I had high hopes that this version would improve the steadily degrading once immensely popular GNU/Linux distribution.

When I went Linux for good, my first distro was Mandriva 2008.1 Spring Free. It was a brilliant distro, and given the choice I would run it even today. I have many happy memories with it, discovering, mixing and matching applications and designing my desktop the way I wanted to, never for once missing the the comfortable home provided by Windows.

2009.0 was good, but nothing to write home about, as was 2009.1. Cut to 2010.0 and Mandriva began to take the shape of my worst nightmares.

2010.1 does nothing to improve on it.

First of all, let me bring to your attention that Mandriva SA is going through a huge crisis. We can excuse them to some extent due to this, and thus I’m not going to be too harsh on them. However, take note of the following:

    * Mandriva One, the version with all the proprietary hardware drivers and multimedia support included out of the box, has no 64-bit version.
    * None of Mandriva’s Kernels have PAE support, except the Server kernel.
    * The Server kernel is not pre-emptible, and thus performance is rather degraded. Additional, it includes built-in Xen support, thus effectively removing all support for the NVIDIA binary drivers (The two don’t play nice with each other).
    * The Multimedia kernels have himem support up-to 4GB, but suffers from the 32-bit Memory Hole problem between the 3GB and 4GB address space.

This is a huge problem for me, because I have 4GB of RAM, and I’m not happy with only 3.2GB of it being usable. Mandriva Free does have a 64-bit version, but it’s a DVD and it’s a lot of work to set, up, too. Their excuse for lack of a 64-bit version for One? Too much work! Have a look here: http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=98720. Can you believe this?

So I was forced to download a 32bit version of the KDE release and give it a spin - in Oracle xVM VirtualBox. Here’s what I found.