Here is a selection of points and changes which I have made in the last twenty-four hours . . .

Foreign computer users in South Korea are in a strange situation. Neither pre-installed systems nor Windoze installation CDs (which are actually made in Singapore) can be purchased in English (or so I am told), whereas systems can be imported from just across the sea in Japan with both Windoze pre-installed AND the installation disc available - but this attracts 10% import duty.

Contrariwise, there are many versions of Linux available, of which Mandriva is just one, and there is little by way of language issues now as it becomes available with more and more languages available for users. So a mature Linux distribution, which is more useful than Windoze and is essentially available for free, is a gift for many people around the world, and Mandriva 2006 is rightly winning praise from many sources now.

This time around, I had installed 2005LE a few weeks previously, and this distro was so good that I signed up to become a Silver Club member. Then 2006 finally came out and I downloaded it, and I am typing this text now from within it. It arrived at a fortuitous time, as recent scheduled engineering tasks undertaken by my ISP here have apparently doubled the download speeds. What follows is a set of initial observations which relate to my normal use of Mandriva on my desktop.

Firstly, compared to the previous distro, this one seemed somehow slow and the reason for this seems to have been the inclusion of RealPlayer 10.0 Gold instead of the previous version, which was the RPMed RealPlayer 8. RP8 is much better integrated into the system and is responsive, whereas RP10 has always been clunky and troublesome (and probably best left to Windoze users). Although the application itself works fine, its KDE implementation - its integration into and operation within the framework of KDE 3.3/3.4 - is slow and it is this which appears to have been causing the trouble. I have now removed it and replaced it with RP8, and the whole system is now more responsive. I like to listen to the BBC's Radio 3 while I am surfing etc., so this is a welcome change for the better.

After the initial install, of course I wanted to discover the update list, which I always obtain from KDDI in Japan. This has been troublesome in previous distros because although the server list was included, in practice it has been necessary to go to the Easy URPMI web site and enter the URLs manually. This time the process was automatic and again, this is a welcome change. I have also installed KOffice today and it seems to be working fine.

A major improvement has been the apparent end of the "latency" problem, in which overloading of the firewall by packet floods would cause it to go down temporarily. I am pleased to report that this no longer appears to be a problem.

Negative points so far include the nice-looking but essentially pointless information panels which come up when the mouse is over their corresponding app buttons. Likewise, when starting an app, the mouse pointer is accompanied by a little trailing graphic which I find irritating. I will be trying to find out how to turn these off!

Above all else, however, the most irritating thing is the way in which it is not possible to upgrade over an existing installation without creating problems - for example, old kernels are retained and upon booting, LILO continues to show these; the eventual result is a fatal crash, usually implicating the ATI drivers, which is what happened yesterday. Indeed, these drivers always seem to be problematic and although they are not a regular feature of difficulty when installing the latest distro, I have often encountered unrecoverable situations where X will not function, either because a link to the drivers has become misplaced or (as was the case yesterday) they were for some reason not installed and had to be put in place using XFDrake. If a user decides to install the latest version, this means that by default they have decided that the old one is no longer needed and part of the installation process should be the removal of the old kernel before the new one is installed.

Another gripe is that much of the installation process itself - which was in fact almost brutally fast, taking only some twenty minutes this time around - seems to include an awful lot of files and programs which I personally never use. It may well be the case that there are some .so and .lib files which are required across a range of programs but this is one of those things which tends to be buried, or at any rate the originators assume that users magically "know" about things without being told in the first place. One of my chief complaints against Windoze is precisely the same thing - all sorts of things (in that particular case) like Media Player and DRM which are neither wanted nor needed, but are still installed regardless. The installation discs for Mandriva supply a range of media players but rather than having the things installing automatically at the beginning and then possibly having to be removed later, why install them in the first place? Let M$ be accused of stupidity, not Linux! ^_^

So my suggestion is as follows: It's all very well having a huge range of software to choose from but I know both from my own experience (and from reading other peoples' blogs and various user group fora) that usually, people only tend to use a handful of apps and programs and the rest are simply ignored. What I think Mandriva should do is to first install the files which are essential for the function of Linux, and then have an interactive session in which the user selects the apps which he or she desires, beyond which no others should be installed. Much of what has been installed in the last few distros has been things like Gnome which I personally have never used and frankly do not want; likewise it is nice to have a choice betwen KDE and the others but if I don't want them, why not just leave them on the disc???

Each time a new version of anything comes out, everyone wants it and the result is slow downloads and clogged bandwidth. It is nice to have the choice, but this stupendous PowerPack, comprising seven CDs because (clearly) it could not all be fitted into six like last time - is perhaps too much. Also, I have had trouble trying to download using BitTorrent and had to resort to FTP instead. The whole idea of BT is to reduce the stress on the servers, but it is too slow and I suspect that what is happening is interference from the likes of the RIAA and its various global clones. Mandriva (and other vendors who wish to use BT for legitimate purposes) should be complaining at the highest level about this because it benefits really only one competitor - Microsoft - who wish to connive with the entertainment industry to remove peoples' chice of what they listen to and watch, where and when. I am a paying customer and when an unwanted third party engages in activities which interfere with a legitimate online transaction, that is itself an illegal intrusion and should be prosecuted without mercy. No law has been broken and the third parties are unnecessary and unwelcome.

One thing I was glad of was the rapid demise of the 2005 LE penguin which made Tux look like Donald Duck. What I do not like now is the login screen, which seems impossible to change. Also, there seem to have been some changes in the security settings in MCC so that only the settings of the firewall can now be changed from the "Security" window.

Oh, well . . . at least these things can eventually be hunted down and rooted out, a task which is much more difficult using another certain OS. But it is precisely the guilty activities of which the latter is accused - installation bloating - which Mandriva should not seek to emulate. Beyond the essentials of the system, nothing else should be installed without consulting the customer first. So in future I would like to see a much more "interactive" installation. Why is it that you can select things like the default user language, screen resolution and download mirror, but not whether you want AmaroK instead of XMMS, or Totem instead of Kaffeine? This, I think, is an issue which the distro editors at Mandriva should make a priority for future versions of the OS.