Vlogcanic

Mandriva is a french desktop linux distro known for many significant innovations, controversial corporate decisions, and technical proficiency.

It got started when Gaël Duval released the first Mandrake Linux in 1998. It was based in Red Hat and, among many novelties, it included KDE 1.0 as a default desktop environment (something not done before by other distros), a friendly installer (a very big deal back in those days), rpm package administration and many other perks. It was the first distro to keep non-expert and non-command-line users in mind and to set itself the goal to come up with something usable and reliable enough to replace Windows.

Mandrake sailed under the easy to install flag, but faced quite a bit of corporate, legal and popularity problems. They got sued by Hearst Corporation over the name (Hearst owns the comic character Mandrake, an illusionist with super hero streaks), they went bankrupt and then started charging for some products and services which didn’t go to well in terms of pleasing the Linux crowd. Mandrake Linux and Mandrakesoft (the corporation behind the distro) lost the legal battle to Hearst so they rechristened themselves as Mandrakelinux, whithout spaces.

However, they kept innovating too: Mandriva Move was released in 2003, the first distro ever to be ready to work from a USB pendrive.

In 2005 Mandrakesoft bought (or merged with) two other Linux distros: Lycoris and the brazilian Conectiva thus calling themselves Mandriva from then on. The following year Mandriva signed an OEM deal wth HP to provide them with a Linux distro to go with their equipment in Latin America. That same year saw the first Mandriva Flash release, a commercial distro based on Mandriva ready to boot and run from a USB flash drive. Later in 2006, Mandriva fired G. Duval, the distro’s founder who has moved on to another project.

More recently, Mandriva has bought Linbox, a solution provider based on Linux and open source software and signed a deal with Turbolinux. This last agreement has stirred a bit of controversy: while it’s supposed merely to provide a common  ground for both distros through a development lab (Manbo-Lab), it’s kind of smelly for many folks as Turbolinux is among the Linux developers that have signed a patent agreement with Microsoft.

As the usability pioneer distro, Mandriva has inspired many other efforts to make Linux less of an esoteric geek toy and more of an every day desktop utility. MCN Live and PC Linux OS, among others, are user friendly systems based on Mandriva.

Mandriva’s available editions.

• Mandriva Linux Free is Mandriva’s free-software-only distribution. It’s free to download and install but it doesn’t run as a LiveCD and is usually available for both 32 bit and 64 bit arquitectures. It leans towards desktop use.
• Mandriva Linux One it’s also free to download and contains binary (non free) software. It’s an installer and LiveCD with two editions (one for KDE, one for GNOME).
• Mandriva Linux Powerpack is Mandriva’s commercial desktop product. It’s available as an installation DVD only, you have to pay for it, and it contains many non free packages and features in order to make it more interesting and easy to use (propietary graphics card drivers, Flash, Java, and things like Cedega or Real Player). It’s available for 32 bit and 64 bit archs, and includes both KDE and GNOME as well as other desktops to install on demand.

Mandriva’s distros are often noted for their wide hardware support, and high kernel and architecture customization. The 64 bit distros are among the best available in that arch, and you’ll get kernel updates suited for your particular needs (like kernels optimized for use in laptop computers, for instance). The 32 bit ones, on the other hand, are optimized for i586 and higher processors which makes them a bit faster than the more common i386 stuff but also means they take some more resources to run smoothly.

The distro has had a turbulent history, an oscillating popularity, but has contributed many key concepts now widely in use by all kinds of players. Things, however, seem to be getting better for Mandriva as their 2008.0 release, specially the Powerpack edition, gets good reviews consistently and some of their most impopular moves (such as charging for Mandriva Club membership) get corrected. Let’s see how the Turbolinux thing works for them.

While the Enlightenment windown manager makes for a really cool desktop environment, it doesn’t really do the whole trick. It lacks a bit of features and funcionality to be a fully fledged and self contained desktop environment such as KDE or GNOME. That’s the gap that OpenGEU aims to close.

Conceived and started in Italy by Luca de Marini (who, oddly enough, is an artist and designer and not a code writer) OpenGEU, formerly known as Geubuntu, is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu with Enlightenment as the default desktop and window manager and quite a bit of extra work by the distro’s developers that fills the holes in E17 by using some tools and programs from the GNOME desktop –the whole point is to have the best of both worlds available in one single distro.

So far, OpenGEU has released two versions: Prima Luna (based on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04) and Luna Nueva (based on Gutsy Gibbon 7.10). Both are available as installable LiveCDs but, alternatively, you can turn a standard Ubuntu system into an Enlightened one (with OpenGEU’s extras) by installing and configuring a set of .deb packages.

OpenGEU is in active development aiming to improve and perfect the way in which GNOME and Enlightenment 0.17 get along in Ubuntu. It’s community based.

Enlightenment is free and Open Source window manager for X Window systems that can also be deployed as a full desktop environment (such as KDE or GNOME). It’s built upon the Enlightement Foundation Libraries or EFL.

It’s the brain child of Rasterman (real name, Carsen Haitzler) who remains as the lead developer ever since Enlightnetment’s first release in 1996.

Enlightenment is noted for many unique features and for graphical beauty coupled with very high efficiency so while its full of nice 2D effects all over the desktop it doesn’t need that many resources to keep working swiftly and responsively.

In the eleven years that span the project’s history there’s been no final official release (every Enlightement you can find in any distro is considered to be a betta version). The latest one is 0.16.8.12, released on Feb. 16 2008. Currently, version 0.17 or E17 is under development.

Because Enlightenment has had a jumpy history and has been something of a one man’s project, it’s not been as popular as GNOME or KDE for use as the default desktop environment in most distros. There are, however, a few to choose from:

• Elive an installable Debian LiveCD with E16 and E17.
• gOS a distro based in Ubuntu, also available as an installable LiveCD, built to work in low end computers, heavy on Google applications and with a Mac OS X visual twist.
• OpenGeu formerly known as Geubuntu, is basically Ubuntu with E17 and a lot of work to make GNOME and XFCE fill in the gaps in Enlightenment.

The Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) is one of the most remarkable contributions made by the The Debian Project to the wider Linux community. It’s a package manager first introduced with Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 in 1999.

APT is frequently hailed as one of Debian’s (and derivatives)stronger features. The tool is so well respected that it’s spawned several projects aimed to port it into other operating systems such as OpenSolaris and Mac OS X not to mention other Linux flavors and packaging systems (apt-rpm, for instance, is an APT for Red Hat and systems using the rpm packagin system such as SuSE).

APT’s flagship user application is the line command apt-get which is included by default with any Debian or Debian-based distribution.

Using apt-get is simple enough. All you need is to know what package you want to install –but by name, every package has a short name, that’s the one you need to know.

Using apt-get to install or remove packages and other useful options.

For instance, let’s say you want NDISWrapper installed in your Linux (say it’s Ubuntu). The thing to know is that the package’s name in the repository is not NDISWrapper but ndiswrapper-common, so you open up a terminal and type this

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common

you give the system your password and if you haven’t installed other packages needed for this one to work in advance, apt-get is going to search them up and install them for you by itself.

apt-get has plenty of other functionalities besides package installation. The most obvious one is the removal of packages. If you got fed up of NDISwrapper and want to uninstall it you simply go to the terminal and write

sudo apt-get remove ndiswrapper-common

Other very useful options are:

apt-get update to resynchronize the packages database in your system with those in the repositories.

apt-get upgrade to have all your installed packages upgraded to the newest available version (you need to run the apt-get update beforehand).

apt-get source [package-name] to download the package’s source code.

apt-get dist-upgrade will upgrade your whole distro (so if you’re running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 you’ll go to Gutsy Gibbon 7.10).

Installing multiple packages.

You don’t need to write a line for every package you want. You can instead type all the package’s names in one single command

sudo apt-get install [name1] [name2] [name3]

apt-get with a GUI

If you are less of a typer and more of a point and clicker, there are plenty of options for you to use apt-get. GNOME’s Synaptic Package Manager, for instance, is a GTK+ graphical front end for apt-get (with some extra advantages such as a searchable package index). KDE has the Adept Package Manager.

Sidux is a desktop Linux distro based upon Sid, which Debian’s name for their current development distro.

The Sidux project was born last year on Nov 24th as a group of Kanotix developers quited in order to work on a Debian Sid based distro that would install to the hard drive from a LiveCD. It’s developed officialy from Berlin, Germany.

It includes only free software as defined by the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which are usually considered to be among the most conservative ones regarding the adherence to the GPL licences.

Since its creation, Sidux has released four Sid snapshots, all during 2007, code named in greek.

So what’s the point of a Sid based distro?

Debian is among the most influential distros in Linuxland and is arguably regarded as the most stable one (theoretically, a Debian system is completely stable if configured correctly) but stability comes at a cost: the Debian project have a very thorough and lengthy test process designed to guarantee stability on the final versions so it can takes many months before any new or cutting-edge piece of software shows up in a stable Debian.

Something of the kind happens in other Debian based distros. Take Ubuntu: an app could take a bit less of time to be availalbe in Ubuntu than it does in a final Debian but it will still take some time and there’s allways the possibility that it simply won’t make it as Ubuntu’s repositories are not as extensive as Debian’s.

In other words: it makes sense to have Sid at hand in a LiveCD that’s easy to install if what you want is almost immediate access to all the latest stuff in Debian, and if stability is not your top priority.