Mandriva Club - gb2g - 2006EdtionQuickReview

Quick Review of Discovery/LX 2006

As an "Early Seeders" member, I've been downloading Discovery/LX 2006 and PowerPack during the all week-end and install them to quickly see the differences and new good things that Mandriva and the community cooked for us. I am very surprise that after 5 days of availability there is still no online review or comment...am I the only one to download? As I mentioned I enrolled as an early seeders, meaning that my bittorent is still running for all of you guys when you decide to download it. See attached files for screenshots (more will come within 2 days).

Discovery/LX

What I like

installation was completed in 20 minutes, so easy! Things have been simplified which is very good for this pack,

boot time is FAST! It is now as fast as MS Windows on my laptop. To get a KDE desktop fully loaded it takes only 1 mn (it was about 2mns with the 2005 LE)

KDE widgets style is the default kde one: Plastik and not anymore the Mandrake Galaxy which, for my personal taste, is a good decision (and make sense since Gnome is not present here)

the set of software is overall well choosen and the menu is quite easy to navigate (although icons for the first level are all the same)

All usefull software such as Flash, RealPlayer… are by default here.

wifi has been improved (except configuration sometime very difficult to do) with the net_applet change to show the level of signal...very useful.

the desktop search engine Kat is installed by default. I have not tested it.

rpmdrake has been really improved and can add automatically contrib and jpackage sources.

Problems

am I stupid or there is a bug in KDE Control Center (see snapshot1_2006Discovery_800.png)? I cannot see the list of icons to select actions on the left pane (this does not happen on the powerpack, I will try to re-install it later).

another issue: rpmdrake does not popup a message to ask for the cd x to insert to get the requested rpm from cds, I had to insert 3 of them to gess and no message at the end to tell me if it was installed or not. I found a similar problem in the PowerPack version...this seems to be a serious issue. After a second installation it was working fine, strange for a fresh install.

wifi is really difficult to setup. I used to setup it through ndiswrapper and it was quite easy but now that I have a laptop with an integrated wifi (intel) that is automatically detected I should use the Mandriva Control Center...and there, things are not at all for beginners (at least on the wifi side). So far I have not yet connected my laptop...I still have things to learn in my life, good!...but I realized that after a reboot it was finally working. After a second installation it was fine and working right away, but I would prefer to have to select the wifi network in a list of available networks around me.

Wishlist

Since Mandriva is made to be easy, and specially this pack, I wish to have multimedia tools that really answer end-users needs (ala iLife from Apple). I am not talking about a whishlist for KDE and friends but really things that I believe achievable by Mandriva.

Video editing/dvd/TV tools. There are some pretty good tools now that are easy to use such as KDE DVD Authoring Wizard, KMediaFactory, kdetv or even kino. Fortunately there is no more kdenlive that is not usable at all, although it is very promising it is not for end-users yet.

how about put some (free) music by default (like in the Amarok live cd) so end-user can start right away with something? Same things with pictures (with Digikam preconfigurated with those images). It will not increase the distribution size too much and really put the user start to use those multimedia software right away.

I know that Drag&Go (or whatever is the name) is on the way but how about integrating klik? It's becoming very popular and it means that a lot of package will be available through this technology, probably some will never be available through Drag&Go. It will make sense, I believe. It was probably too late for the 2006 Edition to include it.

it would be much friendly that when we start for the first time an application it opens full size or at least reasonable size (see ), a lot apps currently open in a useless size meaning that we always need to resize, this is not a good feeling from the very beginning.

I believe that Mandriva should package more KDE service menu by default, they are useful shortcut for common tools, one of my favorite is KIM but we can also thing about many others and even the KServiceEditor as well as some useful Amarok Script such as wma convertor and so on...to be considered!

Conclusion

Overall is an excellent version and real improvements are visible right from the very beginning of the installation, it is worth the upgrade. There is no way I will go back to 2005LE even if you torture me! Install it, use it and enjoy it!