Open Mandriva Lx 3.03

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crosscourt
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Open Mandriva Lx 3.03

Post by crosscourt »

i was always a huge fan of Mandriva back in the day and even though I use Mageia 6 presently, decided to try Open Mandriva.

Had issues downloading it from their website so went to Sourceforge and its a 2.1gb download. Noticed the date of the iso was Nov 27, 2017 which made me cautious. Download went fine and I tried a live session first. Everything worked bu the time it took to get into the live session was far longer than Im use to but speed once there was excellent. Decided to install it and that went fine all hardware seen and working. Good set of apps installed as well.
Then I see the Discover icon showing 1135 updates......thats crazy. Didnt use Discover as Open Mandriva has its own package manager that works fine. It took forever and the package manager had to do the updates in groupings because it couldnt display all 1135 of them on screen at one time.
When finished I got two messages one telling me I was finished and it installed correctly and the other wanting to start again, guess which I picked.

Rebooted and everything was fine. Open Mandriva is partially based on ROSA so you see some of the similarities but many aspects like the panel and some areas of the menu were pure Mandriva. Desktop wallpaper was reminiscent of Mandriva as well. KDE version 5.10.5, Frameworks 5.43, QT 5.8 and uses the 4.15.18 kernel. No glitches with the menus nor with the system so far, Firefox Quantum 60 is installed by default and I also have Chromium 66 and Thunderbird installed as well.
Im honestly surprised this distro is down as low as it is in Distrowatch as it offers more than Mageia in many ways but havent explored the feature sets and multimedia yet so stay tuned. It has many of the same software choices available with PCLinuxOS.

Enjoying it so far but Ill be back to report more.
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Re: Open Mandriva Lx 3.03

Post by tlmiller »

Yeah, since they've released OpenMandriva, they're not that quick at updating the release iso's. I noticed that as well a while ago.
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Re: Open Mandriva Lx 3.03

Post by crosscourt »

Its ok as Im use to it from PCLinuxOS which is a rolling update. I do a reinstall and have 840 updates.


Just tested multimedia and a few simple games and everything is fine. I like it so far and it gives you a feel closer to Mageia with software choices closer to PCLOS which is a plus. It has good speed, feels quick. Will check the OM site to see if they have a newer iso.

Includes a nice welcome screen with info on various aspects of the distro as well as applications choices. The software sources were already configured versus Mageia which forces you to configure them and understant ehs difference between stable and tainted sources. OM's method is far friendlier to newbies.
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Re: Open Mandriva Lx 3.03

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Only oddity was the printer wasnt auto detected like most of my other distros. HPLIP driver was installed so one click and the printer is configured and they also have a link for this in the welcome center.
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Re: Open Mandriva Lx 3.03

Post by crosscourt »

Forums appear to be offline, no recent isos at all, so if you install, be ready for close to 1200 updates after install amd dont use Discover. Go into control center and click on update your system.

Here are the release notes, https://wiki.openmandriva.org/en/3.03/Release_Notes

Ill be testing ROSA as well and comparing its commercial roots to the community driven OpenMandriva.

Flash will need to be installed from the package manager and codecs, just click on the welcome icon and go to applications/multimedia and install them.
They have quite a few one click popular apps you can install, like Dropbox, Skype and Thunderbird to name a few.
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Re: Open Mandriva Lx 3.03

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I may try it out on the test work laptop next week. It's been a long time since I've used this OS on real hardware. I've installed it pretty consistently in VM's, and haven't ever really had issues. In fact, with KVM set up correctly, I actually used this fullscreen on one of my laptop and it really did work well enough that you could believe it was installed bare metal. But even that was 9 or 10 months ago now...

Had no problems downloading it myself. Whenever possible, I ALWAYS choose to download torrents, and while there weren't a LOT of seeders, there were at least enough to be able to get it downloaded.
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Re: Open Mandriva Lx 3.03

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Decided to try it on my Chuwi live. Not surprisingly, it failed. Sat loading playmouth switch something for eternity. I actually went and did dishes, still trying to load it when I got back. But given that OpenMandriva's never had good hardware support for anything beyond the most basic hardware, this doesn't surprise me. Despite not being insanely new, it's still far too new for OpenMandriva to get it right yet.
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Re: Open Mandriva Lx 3.03

Post by crosscourt »

Their site was down which is why i went to Sourceforge. Surprised youre having problems as a friend of mine has this running on some very recent hardware( recent Dell XPS tower that we use for game testing) with no issues and UEFI. Iso has 4.13 kernel but they install the 4.15 kernel on update. Its hardware support is pretty much on par with Mageia 6 as far as I can see.

The lack of updates and a recent iso is going to hurt some hardware users but this experience was pretty good. RPM distros in general Ive had excellent
experiences with hardware support. Looking through the reviews on Distrowatch theres a variety of hardware being used with success.

Its interesting as you had no issues with Kubuntu and I had issues though minor with my older hardware. Kubuntu for me has always been problematic versus the RPM distros that have always worked very well, that you have issues with.
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Re: Open Mandriva Lx 3.03

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What concerns me is the lack of activity in their forums, no faq and overall a lack of interest. They are maintaining but just barely which will drive people away. They makeit look like Mageia is the true successor to Mandriva with their lack of PR, announcements and developments. Could be a manpower/money issue. I like this distro and with work would consider using it, being an avid former Mandriva fan.
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Re: Open Mandriva Lx 3.03

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My Kubuntu is on older hardware. It's on a Haswell laptop, so 4 generations old now. While not ANCIENT by any means, it's past the 3 year standard "business class" warranty period...

Not sure how much you've followed OPenMandriva, but it's never had a very active community. It's a small team of core developers, and that's kinda it.
The forums get an uptick in usage after a release, but generally speaking, they're pretty much dead. This has been the way since shortly after they started the project.

I'd say the other issues most likely are money. To my knowledge, there is NO corporate sponsorship, so everything for OpenMandriva (domain, hosting, certificates, etc) is paid out of pocket by the team. And unlike some that are in the same boat, they don't throw the "donate!!" in your face, and don't offer things to try to convince people to donate.
Last edited by tlmiller on Sun Jun 03, 2018 6:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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