Mandriva 2007 WOW!

[Lestat]

all i can say is WOW!
what a insane leap forward for an OS.

i'll start by saying its running with the hardware in my sig.
but i am using a single 100gig SATA drive hooked to the mobo, not the Sil Sata Controller. although there are drivers for the Sil in the OS you have to initialize the Raid during loading and doing so totally screws your raid array. which i found out the hard way.

1)
in order to install it properly on this baord, an all other Linux os's as of late you have to enable AHCI in the bios, otherwise it cant find the cdrom to load the os.
2)
not enableing AHCI gives you an error after you format the hard drive, it says it can't mount it, which is screwed since it had to mount it in order to format it,, :\
Once AHCI is enabled you can load the OS off the cdrom and have no issues with hard drive mounting or OS loading
3)
I havent played with linux too much but this is the first time i have ever seen this.
If you have the OS image on another hard drive even a USB hard drive you can tell it where the image is and it will mount the image and install the entire OS from that dvd image or cd image. which is the most freakin awesome thing i have ever seen an OS do! no more DVD burning!!
4)
install was freakin painless, LILO doesnt work for some reason but grub is kickin into high gear as usual and working just fine.
5)
NVIDIA HARDWARE ACCELERATION OUT OF THE BOX!!! yes thats right my 7800 GTX has hardware acceleration right after loading!
It warns you that there is a proprietary driver for this kernel, and do you want to use it,, i told it yes, so maybe thats why it work,, i dont care its working.
6)
Eye candy holy crap. the 3d effects that you can install, holy crap. they make Vistas 3d flipping look like its 100 yrs old and total childs play.

you can make the windows bounce and boing like rubber when you move them or expand or maximise or minimise them.
you can have Desktop Rain, there are about 4 different ways to flip thru the different desktops. all in a 3d mode. again this makes vistas 3d flipping look like crap. lol.

i have jjust started testing but this is the first linux that right out of the box hard hardware support for all my hardware and i am shocked. the Mandriva crew went all out this time and wow what a beast it is.

its hard to take screenshots of the rubber effects and such, i took one of the desktop rain but its 1.08megs lol.

i have more to report on but anyone who has it and hasnt installed it do it.
or go grab the free version and play around. its a great OS and i truly applaud the mandriva crew for all the hard work, ESPECIALLY the hardware video acceleration out of the box.
i have never had a video card that actually had video acceleration work, no matter what i did it would never work, or would only work about 1/10th of the way.
glxgears is giving me nearly 30000 fps!

i want some linux games now!!

more to come!

[Lestat]

oh yeah,,, and if you have a bunch of windows open... and you want to see them all in a flat 2d view simply run your mouse up the the upper right corner of the screen and your desktop is now showing each window or program you have open and you simply click on one and its the active window.
a little annoying for wanting to close a window but im am pretty sure you can tell it to use another corner of the screen.

[[XC] Teroedni]

So Mandriva offers Nvidia binary drivers and Compiz by default
Clever:)
I guess we gonna see madriva climb back to the top at distrowatch now:p:

Lestat
You should include some picture :)

[LazyBum]

Hmm wonder if ATI support has gotten any better. I went through a linux experimental phase this past spring but hardware compatibility issues among other things eventually got me to quit. Many of the distros didn't have an option for 1600x1200 desktop resolution, which is totally unacceptable, trying to view a 1600x1200 LCD at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 is a friggen blurry mess. Mandrivia seemed about average at the time, compared to Fedora Core and Suse, which has been my favorite. However the begging/spamming for money really was a putoff to me, enough to make me abandon the distro prematurely.

[[XC] Teroedni]

Hmm wonder if ATI support has gotten any better. I went through a linux experimental phase this past spring but hardware compatibility issues among other things eventually got me to quit. Many of the distros didn't have an option for 1600x1200 desktop resolution, which is totally unacceptable, trying to view a 1600x1200 LCD at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 is a friggen blurry mess.


could you not simply edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and put 1600x1200 in the section screen part?

And if your loking for a good alternative to Mandriva i suggest the latest Ubuntu. It does not install nvidia driver and compiz by deafult but its no problem to add it after install:)

[Super Nade]

1)
in order to install it properly on this baord, an all other Linux os's as of late you have to enable AHCI in the bios, otherwise it cant find the cdrom to load the os.
2)
not enableing AHCI gives you an error after you format the hard drive, it says it can't mount it, which is screwed since it had to mount it in order to format it,, :\
Once AHCI is enabled you can load the OS off the cdrom and have no issues with hard drive mounting or OS loading

There is no AHIC Option in the BIOS for the P5W-DH. I have tried enaling and disabling ACPI, APIC with no success. Is there a way to circumvent the no CDR issue in my case? Mo flavour of Linux will install. However, I have successfully installed several flavours of Linux via a Windows based VM i.e Parallels.

[Der_KHAN]

its hard to take screenshots of the rubber effects and such, i took one of the desktop rain but its 1.08megs lol.
i think this'll give people an idea of xgl:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJDRbHJAEL4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEgUTkWi-zU

[Vapor]

Oooooo, nice effects, might break my anti-Linux spat give it awhirl when I get G80......but, even with the cool effects, the skin is fugly. Bluecurve and all derivatives are so blahse.

[Lestat]

well that video is also of gnome which is ugly
KDE is more XP-ish

im tellin you there is a list of effect and stuff that are just wicked and they are not that intensive also.

Mandriva 2007 is the friggin stuff. man and i hate linux.. i mean i seriously can find absolutely no reason to use linux for anything other than an office email and websurfing system.
there isnt anything on linux that makes it worth using 24/7 notto mention the absolute lack of any decent games.

but playing around with mandriva.. which i played with 2006 and liked it,,i also like suse 10
but linux is still so.. unfriendly,,,and required a years worth of nightschool to truly understand and use it like we do with windows.

but enough of that.

try it out fellas if you get the time the trial is free give it a whirl.
but you have to mnually install the visual effects during setup. otherwise its not installed

anyways all i need is a usenet program that can handle binaries and im set..

(maybe if OSX was really usable and had real driver support for the marvel netowrk adapters id try that too.)

[AzraelDarkangel]

I've used Linux a bit. Mostly (Debian based) Mepis and also E-Live with the Enlightenment desktop. For day-to-day stuff I like Linux much better than Windows. Only problem is there are still alot of games only playable on Windows.
Aside from that I was reading some reviews on Distrowatch and I might try out this one at some point:
http://www.sabayonlinux.org/
Essentially a simplified but very refined and cutting edge Gentoo for people that don't want to put it together from scratch. Also has the newest and most cutting edge version of effects you mentioned.

[JAWS]

Lestat, are you using the free version of Mandriva 2007? I just switched from Suse 10.1.

[[XC]thewildblue]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nzbget

Try that I managed to find a usenet reader that loaded nzbs for me. Just cant remember what it was exactly.



well that video is also of gnome which is ugly
KDE is more XP-ish

im tellin you there is a list of effect and stuff that are just wicked and they are not that intensive also.

Mandriva 2007 is the friggin stuff. man and i hate linux.. i mean i seriously can find absolutely no reason to use linux for anything other than an office email and websurfing system.
there isnt anything on linux that makes it worth using 24/7 notto mention the absolute lack of any decent games.

but playing around with mandriva.. which i played with 2006 and liked it,,i also like suse 10
but linux is still so.. unfriendly,,,and required a years worth of nightschool to truly understand and use it like we do with windows.

but enough of that.

try it out fellas if you get the time the trial is free give it a whirl.
but you have to mnually install the visual effects during setup. otherwise its not installed

anyways all i need is a usenet program that can handle binaries and im set..

(maybe if OSX was really usable and had real driver support for the marvel netowrk adapters id try that too.)

[Ashraf]

It doesn't matter what Linux distro you are using. You gotta have XGL to have the effects. ;)