Wonderful world of new dists..

[Brian Chabot]

Thomas Charron wrote:
>   Ok, once again, I'm annopyed by a dist.  Highly annoyed.

As you and others here may recall, I've been a Mandriva user for a while
now.  I caught a lot of flak for using a distro with so much overhead
(it was the first distro to require a whopping 64mb of RAM and a 586
processor or better).  I also caught a lot of flak for using something
supposedly so tailored to the clueless end user.

I liked it because of urpmi (an rpm wrapper much like apt-get) and the
fact that I can flip back and forth between a gui configuration editor
like Mandriva's Control Panel and the usual text configs which are
almost unchanged from the standard RedHat configs.

Overall, I really like Mandriva.  But here are a few Mandriva annoyances...

1. kdesu - "Remember Password" function broken.
2. (2007) Mandriva Control Panel - Software installer keeps asking if
it's OK to connect to the 'net.  YES, DAMNIT!  STOP ASKING!
2. (2007) Mandriva Control Panel - Software Installer - No way to toggle
between categorized and flat list.
3. (2007) Mandriva Control Panel - Update Installer - No way to select all.
4. (2007) Mandriva Control Panel - Configuring display resolution does
not put "Modes" lines into xorg.conf
5. nVidia-installer - neglects to add "Option "UseEDID" "False"" to
xorg.conf
6. nVidia-installer - neglects to add Modes lines to xorg.conf
7. HardDrake - could use much better descriptions of hardware. (Overly
descriptive terms like "hw:0,1" do NOT help.)
8. No XMMS in main repository (need to use "contrib")
9. No Seamonkey in main repository (need to use "contrib")
10. RPMs with non-existant or back-rev'd requirements.
11. STILL no automagic update system.
12. (2007) Mandriva Control Panel - Update Installer -"No Updare"
warning"  No shit.  I just installed them all.  STFU.
13. RPMs with crappy or no descriptions - "Pilot is a plugin for VDR
that brings the ability to quickly browse the EPG information."  WTF are
VDR and EPG?!?
14. DVD autostart not functioning after installing gmplayer and de-CSS
(has to be manually configured with no instruction as to how.)
15. No useful info on which video cards work with the new 3d enhanced
desktop... or how to configure those that do.  (The crappy Radeon in my
laptop works, but the new GeForce 6800 in the desktop doesn't... WTF?)

So yeah... even Mandriva isn't perfect.  But I still like better than
the rest I've tried.

Brian