[CS-FSLUG] I came this close...

[Dommy E. Hamid]

Nathan,

Good job for staying in the "light side." I agree that Mandriva 
(sheesh.. still cannot get used to the new name for Mandrake) is one of 
the best all-in-one distro for beginners. While it looks a lot more 
kiddie than Suse or Fedora Core, it is very user-friendly.

As David told you, you should go to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ to get 
additional repositories to improve your experience. Add at least 
contrib, plf-free, and plf-nonfree. This will add at least the codecs, 
libdvdcss (for region-lock), newer version of xine and mplayer, and 
other software you may like such as emulators and bible software such as 
gnomesword (although for the bible modules, you need to download it 
manually from the sword-project site).

Unfortunately, since open-source moves on at a quite rapid pace, the 
software included in Mandriva is not as current as Suse or FC4. If you 
want newer version of software built for your Mandriva 2005 LE, you may 
want to add additional repository such as MandrakeClub.nl ( 
http://mandrivaclub.nl/sources/official/2005/ ) or thac's (for newest 
KDE, it's found in http://rpm.nyvalls.se/ ). Personally, I haven't 
installed Thac's KDE yet, but I have installed tons of software from 
mcnl (includes the newest version of java run time) and so far it's all 
running smooth.

As far as 2006 is concerned, the first beta has just been released a 
couple of days back. The schedule can be found here

http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/MandrivaLinux2006

Keep hanging in there :)

Dommy

Nathan T. wrote:
> Hello everyone, I'm still here.
> 
> For a time I was about this close (with my thumb an index half an inch
> from touching) to going back to Windows if Debian didn't work, but as
> soon as it was about 90% done downloading MSIE (which I used for
> download because for some reason FF gets the wrong file size and goes
> nuts) dropped the download and said my HD was full despite the 10 Gb
> or so that were still free (Windows is nuts). I decided since I was
> going to try at least one more distribution to download Mandrake then
> because it's the one I started on, and now that I have a job I think I
> could save up for a boxed MDK set.
> 
> Anyway so far things have gone great, its eye candy isn't as good as
> SUSE's, but it's quicker and more responsive than that which bears the
> green lizard. The boot time is longer than Windows XP by a little bit,
> but the UI and everything else after that is much faster. Mandrake
> still puts together a very nice KDE desktop, I'm going to evaluate it
> a little more before I decide to stick with it but so far things are
> looking very positive.
> 
> All I need now is to get support for Windows codecs and DVD playback,
> I think I remember that having something to do with
> http://plf.zarb.org but it's been so long that I can't remember if
> that's even the right site to get the RPMs from, or which ones to get.
> SUSE started acting up on me when I replaced Xine with a different
> version from http://packman.links2linux.org and installed the codec
> RPMs. If Mandrake survives the installation of the codecs and doesn't
> show any nasty bugs then I'll be very happy with it.
> 
> Does anyone know when MDK 2006 is due to come out?
> 
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