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ModNote: Edit title, re-merge Klopus's thread. --mkrishnan
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_What%27s_New
We at Mandriva noticed Asus's excellent Eee PC low-cost, miniature notebook taking the world by storm. Thanks to our work on the Intel Classmate PC, we already had extensive experience of working with this type of system, and it was simple to make Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring 100% Eee-friendly. The Eee comes with a capable Linux distribution, but should you reach its limitations or prefer to install your favourite distribution instead, Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is ready. It supports all the Eee's hardware out of the box, with no configuration required, and the Mandriva configuration tools and applications have been tweaked to be friendly to the Eee's lower resolution screen. It's easy to install Mandriva even without a CD or DVD drive: you can read about several possible methods right here on the Wiki.
Ooo baby yeah! Drive your man crazy with Mandriva. Let's hope more distros become EEE Friendly.
Ossian
EDIT: At least spell the name of your own distribution in the subject of your post correctly! 
--mkrishnan
Last edited by Ossian (2008-03-04 10:11:37 am)
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This is wonderful news to me. Mandriva is my favorite OS. As soon as 2008.1 is released I'll be sure to try it out on my EeePC.
At the moment, eeeXubuntu is working okay, but I miss my drak-tools.
Thanks for the update.
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Please correct link you provided to What's New. It should be http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_What%27s_New
Last edited by sha1dy (2008-03-04 9:39:35 am)
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I last used this when it was Mandrake. I was put off by the poor English used in the distro, for error messages and such. Has it improved since then?
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It sounds like it will be a nice release all around. PulseAudio by default is a great step -- Linux audio is still too complicated and unpredictable. Several of the newly supported pieces of software sound nice, particularly Elisa.
And of course, they need to be applauded vigorously for what looks like it will be the first major distribution with 100% Eee hardware support in mainstream. It's very gratifying to see a top level announcement in which the description of what's new in the latest version deals specifically with our Eee's! 
I know Mandriva is beginning support for LUKS, which Ubuntu uses also, but when I did some googling, I could not find information on this: does Mandriva support any kind of installation whereby most or all of the disk is encrypted? A situation like Ubuntu 7.10, where /boot is not encrypted but the rest of the disk is would be fine...
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Anyone got the time to do a step-by-step on how to get Mandriva working on an Eee? Can't understand the 'instructions' on their wiki page! I'd like to see it as Mandrake was the first Linux I ever installed and used.
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Isn't the point of an Eee friendly mainstream that you do not need Eee-specific instructions anymore?
You probably want the "One" live ISO, in either Gnome:
ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/dis … m-i586.iso
or KDE:
ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/dis … m-i586.iso
Use that with a CD player or else make a bootable ISO out of it in the normal way, just like any other linux distribution, and you should be good to go.
I might actually give it a quick spin myself.
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Yes, I would think that booting up one of the "One" live versions would be the easiest ways to try Mandriva on the Eee. Wouldn't even have to worry about mucking up your existing Eee OS if you ran it off of a CD.
I'd also wait until the final release before actually doing an install. Might as well wait for all of the "known" bugs to be squashed so you don't have to deal with them.
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Actually, I have to apologize for my earlier comments. Since we deal with this issue pretty constantly ... is there a way to make a bootable USB of Mandriva from the ISO without booting the ISO itself first? I tried what seemed like the sensible thing: copying the files to a bootable USB partition, using lilo to put an MBR on it, syslinuxing it, and moving the syslinux.cfg file to the appropriate location. The kernel loads. The initrd seems to load. And then it drops out of warp, goes through some things that seem to be regarding probing the mass storage and IO, and then dumps into busybox.
EDIT: Odd... it does exactly the same thing in Qemu. I'll take a screengrab. I googled and did not find anything about this issue....
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Does the current 2008.1 RC1 ISO already has Eee support?
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klopus wrote:
Does the current 2008.1 RC1 ISO already has Eee support?
I'm typing on a RC1 Eee right now and it seems to be pretty solid so far.... Hell of a lot better then windows, but then again I'm just a bias Mac/Linux user....... I installed from the Gnome One CD and the install rolled right on through. I did originally set up the fluxbox desktop from a FTP install and that did not work, hopefully the next release may fix this....
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I take it you didn't have any of the boot problems I had with the 2008.1RC1 Gnome One CD? Any thoughts on what's going on for me? 
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mkrishnan wrote:
I take it you didn't have any of the boot problems I had with the 2008.1RC1 Gnome One CD? Any thoughts on what's going on for me?
To be honest with ya I just hooked up a external USB CD-ROM on one of the right hand usb plugs and booted straight from the CD and it loaded fine, what happens when you try to boot up? I'll see if I can give you any suggestions....
I would definately post the issues you are having in the Mandirva forums to see if those guy can give you some help too, I haven't really used this distro since it was called Mandrake.
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Thanks! I admittedly don't have a CD / DVD player to use with my Eee... I tried a couple of things, which I outlined in post 11 above, but basically, I get the error listed in the screenshot and get dumped to busybox. What concerns me is that it happens even in Qemu...
I might play around with it some more and see if I can make some progress.
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If you have access to an ethernet network connection an easy way to install Mandriva is as a network install.
Get the image 'all.img' from a mirror such as
ftp://ftp.proxad.net/pub/Distributions_ … all/images
Put that onto a USB flash stick with
dd if=all.img of=/dev/sdX
where X is the drive letter of your USB stick
(caution do not use the wrong drive letter or you could wipe the contents of your hard drive)
You now have a bootable USB stick. When you boot from it you will be invited to perform a network install over NFS or FTP. Select 'cooker'.
It will find an ftp mirror for you automatically. Installation then proceeds just like a full CD install, only slower since everything will be coming over the network.
In a few weeks the development branch 'cooker' will be frozen. After that get the image from the official 2008.1 mirrors.
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Thanks!
I did actually try network install, and it too was a bust for some reason! It started okay, but it was incredibly slow -- much worse than Ubuntu network installation. I watched a three hour movie and it was only about 40% through. I left the Eee on overnight, and it hung up on a package it could not find (apparently a spell checker; it allowed me to skip, but then it repeatedly could not find this package in other languages). I eventually gave up. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the Cooker server, or something I'm doing wrong? (It was just a straight default Mandriva 2008.1 Gnome install).
So, I re-downloaded the ISO (it looks like I may have had a bad one earlier), and this time I'm playing with it in VirtualBox, which seems completely able to load it, at least in Live mode, with the exception that Mandriva mis-detects the resolution. So I'm going to install it to a VirtualBox disk image (since that should be a lot faster than using it live), and play with it that way for now....
That means I can't see native Eee hardware support, but at least I can get a feel for where Mandriva has gone.
Here you can see it installing in VirtualBox, albeit temporarily running at 640x480 (it's the lower-right window).
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Your issue with hanging on a package was because you were using Cooker.
Updated packages get added daily and if a package is updated between the time you start installing and when it actually looks for the package you will get a hang.
That will not happen when installing from the official release.
Yes a network install is slow, but at least it works without a CD drive.
It is also possible to do an install from a DVD image mounted on another computer over the local network, but that is a bit more complicated to set up.
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Ahhh, well. In the meantime, the virtualbox installation is almost done, so then I can start tweaking it.
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EEE Support continues, pterjan is part of mandriva kernel team:
http://fasmz.org/~pterjan/blog/?date=20080306
About the install, it's possible to empty the iso on another computer inside a http or ftp server and access them though your usb stick.
Also, if you have a remote usb disk, you can just drop the iso there, it will also be accessible through the installer you put in your flash key.
The best wey to test it is the RC isos:
ftp://ftp.free.fr/mirrors/ftp.mandriva. … so/2008.1/
The RC1 is the one I use right now and it's very stable.
I installed it on a remote usb disk, it's quite easy to do with the installer and I don't have performance issues compared to xandros (except the incredibly fast boot).
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All right, I've had enough.
It does seem relatively stable. These are my brief thoughts, using Ubuntu 7.10 as a comparison.
Installer: I played with both the text and graphical installers, and found them both to be a bit of a bear. The partitioning tools are particularly painful. The one big plus is that there is a manual, package-by-package selection feature, which AFAIK is no longer in any Ubuntu installer, including even the net installer.
Ease of Use, Configuration: I like the control center that Mandriva is implementing a lot, but it needs much more work. The control center has the potential to be much less confusing and cluttered than the myriad of control panels in Gnome in general and in Ubuntu specifically, but in Mandriva's case, many important things are in the individual control panels outside the control center, and so you have to look in two places. Great idea, needs to be carried out farther.
Out-of-the-Box Experience: Things pretty much just work, which is nice. However, Compiz wasn't on by default, which surprised me (is it always that way, or was this an installation quirk for me?). Package selection is a bit on the heavy side, leading to default installations that are somewhat bigger than Ubuntu ones.
Look and Feel: It has a nice, but plain theme. The splashes are very pretty. In some ways, the boot process is visually cleaner than Ubuntu, although it does jarringly drop back to text at times. Canonical has made this kind of visual seamlessness a big goal for 8.04, so it'll be curious to see what their riposte is. The color scheme is much more to my liking than the Ubuntu human theme (although I use the blue Ubuntu theme), but I find it less elegant, more bulky, and less suited to the display size.
Security: In general, they seem to take security quite seriously, and perhaps moreso than Ubuntu. Mandriva seems to have more and better security-related configuration out of the box, but some choices are odd. When I created my account, it defaulted me to automatic no-password login, and I had to change it back. I think that is just crazy. Also the disk encryption is poorly documented, and I've yet to find a guide to installing Mandriva with an encrypted disk. It seems that it will let you encrypt most mount points except root. However, as far as I can tell, this would mean that, if you wanted all potentially sensitive data encrypted, you would at a minimum need to create four *separate* partitions for /home, /tmp, /var (all encrypted), and / (not encrypted). This is much more complicated and takes a lot more space planning than Ubuntu's option of encrypting root and then having only /boot in a separate unencrypted partition. May not affect that many people; for me it pretty much ends my interest in Mandriva at this time just by itself.
To me, it's nice, and I'm really glad they've been so supportive of the Eee. For someone who doesn't feel technically up to modifying Ubuntu, this seems like a good choice. For the rest of us, who're going to do some playing anyway, it seems really hard to justify picking this over Ubuntu. The community size plays a role here too -- like my example of looking for encryption guides and docs, in general I found that existing knowledge basing on the internet for Mandriva is substantially less than for Ubuntu.
No offense, and thank you to everyone who helped me with playing around (albeit briefly) with Mandriva....
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I just ran Mandriva 2008.1 KDE LiveCD on my Eee and I'm very very impressed. Amazingly it recognized Eee and configured everything right as far as I can tell. Look, Ma, no scriptpacks to hunt down, no danger that next distro update breaks scriptpacks!
Almost everything Eee specific just works out of the box:
* Both wired and WiFi (choice of madwifi by default or ndiswrapper) worked immediately and without much drama,
* Audio works
* Screen resolution was correct via 915 dirver with 3D,
* Compiz works (configuration offered to enable Compiz or Matisse)
* Fn+F1 (suspend) works, Fn+F2 (wifi on/off) works, Fn brightness also works, Fn loudness doesn't work
I didn't try external display or hibernate to disk (hibernate to memory seems to work).
I'm more familiar with Debian derivatives like Ubuntu but I'm really impressed by Mandriva especially since it's the first mainstream distro to have working Eee hardware support OTOB. In terms of polish and completeness Mandriva KDE doesn't seem any worse than Kubuntu, in some aspects I really like it more. Like Ubuntu it's bloated but rpm package uninstaller is quite friendly.
Now I'll try Xfce variant and will seriously consider permanently installing it.
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How about the webcam? microphone? Skype? (Bottom line: Is it feasible to use Skype videophone with a liveCD (or too slow)?
Sheng-Chieh
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shengchieh wrote:
How about the webcam? microphone? Skype? (Bottom line: Is it feasible to use Skype videophone with a liveCD (or too slow)?Sheng-Chieh
Sorry, Sheng, these don't interest me so I didn't test them but in the interest of community I will But I tested external monitor using my 19" ViewSonic (square, not wide screen) and it works including Fn switching. I was able to set 1280x1024 and Eee was driving it fine.
Being through more than few DIY Eee-nized distros I'm still quite shocked that Mandriva worked as is and this in Live CD form so you really easily can try before you "buy"
Last edited by klopus (2008-03-10 12:13:30 am)
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