On Monday 29 January 2007 08:17, Charles R. Buchanan wrote: > time/situation comes up, although I very much doubt I will be fooling > around with Mandriva anytime soon. Maybe it's their way of making people > buy the non-free version?
I missed how Mandriva came into this conversation, but it caught my attention because I just installed Mandriva 2007 powerpack. It's very nice, definitely worth a look. Probably the most interesting feature I noticed was the inclusion of LinDVD, the licensed DVD player! It's by Intervideo, the same company that produces WinDVD. Imagine my stunned disappointment when it failed to run, seemingly because of a programming error. The error message referred to an error on a certain line number. How in the world could Mandriva include a totally broken application in the distro? And it's an application that probably receives the most attention from users! So it was off to the PLF repositories for the usual codecs, etc. and good old mplayer, which worked fine. I plan to use Mandriva for a while to get a better idea what it is like in actual usage. Sadly, my test of Suse 10.2 only lasted a few days. Overall I thought it was nice, but I just could not tolerate the slowness of the package management system. Times of 30 minutes were not unusual just to add 1 new program (in my case). Every time it goes through this endless process of scanning each repository before I can even do anything. I have to go away and do something else while waiting for it to be ready to search for a new program! In Kubuntu the average time (in my case) is 5 minutes. Package management is so fundamental, I think it does not matter how nice the rest of the distro is if its package system is not well-designed. Bryan *************************************** Powered by Kubuntu Linux 6.06 KDE 3.5.2 KMail 1.9.1 This is a Microsoft-free computer Bryan S. Tyson [EMAIL PROTECTED] *************************************** -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
