Mandriva 2010

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Facts:

  •  There are four versions of Mandriva available: Free-which contains only open-source software, One-which is the regular free (as in beer) version, Powerpack-the full, pay to use version and Flash-which is Mandriva (on a stick), also a pay to use version.
  • Comes with three different full default themes.
  • Is available in 4 desktop environments: Gnome, KDE, LXDE and Mobiln (for netbooks)
What I liked:

  • The best thing about this distro has got to be the interactive firewall.  I have already seen mulitple requests for a .deb version of this.  It's by far the best firewall application GUI for Linux I have come across.
  • The Mandriva theme was polished and pretty, as usual, a good looking distro.
  • The infamous Mandriva Control Center makes configuration simple.
  • Wireless was not configured out of the box but it was easily set up and had no problems.
What I didn't like:

  • Empathy is an IM client that replaces Pidgin in this distro.  I couldn't get it to work at all, which was very frustrating.
  • The interesting looking TV Time app didn't work either.  I got the following error:  no such file /dir--Cannot open capture device.  I took this to mean that since I was doing the Live Install, there wasn't a /dir for it to read.  Not sure what the heck that error meant and no other Linux newb will either.
  • took quite a while for the distro to load.
Summary:

As usual, Mandriva makes a good, solid distro.  As I understand it, Mandriva is the most popular distribution in Western Europe.  It is stable, rpm based, polished and pretty.  A couple of applications didn't work for whatever reason, which was frustrating but the experience of the interactive firewall made up for it and doesn't detract from the overall use and stability.
I give this latest version of Mandriva (2010) an A for appearance and an A- for functionality (much of that comes from the interactive firewall).