remisandotbe

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I use it since the day of the release. I'm very pleased with it. the only small thing is that I have some problems with the usage of external HDD's / usbsticks. ntfs support needs to be installed (not standard), and 'special' commands need to be executed to be able to write on them.

GREAT OS.

rtzed

I have used Mandrake/Mandriva for many years and 2008 is the best yet. I am using the 64 bit version. It is no problem using 32 bit if a 64 bit program is not available. In the last year most programs have become available in a 64 bit version anyway. I have gkrellm on my desktop and a year ago it usually showed one core at a time working but now both cores are usually in use.
2008 has made real advancements in hardware detection. For some time my TV card was not detected properly but in 2008 it works fine.
One irritation though is when installing RPM's in the control center there is very limited information listed for the programs in the repositories.

Olle Gladso

Finally got around to installing the 64-bit edition. All is well, except
a couple little problems. Kpowersave will crash on login. Putting a command directly in autostart will also crash. However, setting a symlink to kpowersave in the startup folder is a suitable workaround. No restricted driver for my graphics card, so graphics performance when playing some games is subpar. (32-bit had an excellent restricted driver) Wish there was a top notch OSS driver, oh well.
My conclusion still stands,even with those minor annoyances. A great OS!

aRTee

I really enjoy Mandriva 2008, I'm using the powerpack on my desktop (32 bit) and laptop (64 bit edition).

If you want worldwide legal dvd playback, Mandriva 2008 Powerpack is the only big distribution that will offer it, and out of the box at that.

Read my review here (don't forget to bring lunch, it got a bit long) :
www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/review2008.0.html

Enjoy Linux,
aRTee

s16ri

Installed mandriva for two days already. Awesome except for my wireless configuration. Had tried ndiswrapper but no luck. Will try again later. Btw, i've installed mandriva one 2008 on my acer L320 (vista home premium).

camorri

I installed this on a new rig. The system board is a Gigabyte GA-M61SME-S2 board with a AMD 64 bit processor. 1 Gig of ram, and a 160 gig sata HD.

The Nvidia video worked out of the box, as did the audio and ethernet. I have not found any not working hardware; yet.

I havn't tried to burn anything on the LG DVD burner. I reads without any issues.

Only sofware problem to report is KSCD refuses to play an audio CD. Kaffine plays them without any difficulty. KSCD reports I don't have access permissions to /dev/cdrom and here is what is reported for /dev/cdrom.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2008-01-02 09:34 /dev/cdrom -> hda

Got KsCd to play audio CD's. I had to change the permissions on /dev/hda to 777, and also had to change KsCd output to Arts. It now works.

Price, installed from the free download.

fabmejia

I am using the 64bit version, haven't tried wireless but so far very happy with this distro, the only complaint is with the screen savers when the 3d desktop is activated ( i have an NVIDIA geforce 7300) it locks the screen but runs in a window.
Apart from this little quirk, this version of mandriva is awesome.
My hardware is: msi k9n ultra with an amd athlon64 x2 3800+ with 1 GB of ram and a 160GB SATA HDD.

dccombs

Being a Linix newbie, I am very impressed with Mandriva One 2008. I downloaded the free copy, and it installed in less than a half hour. All hardware came up working, even my Linksys WUSB54G wireless adapter.

My system: MSI K8M800 MOBO, AMD Sempron 2800+ (1.6g), 1gig Dell pc3200 RAM, WD 160gig IDE HDD, onboard SIS video and VIA sound, Samsung DVDRW, and the above wireless adapter.

I have been using a dual boot Mandriva/Win XP Pro system for over a month now and it has performed almost flawlessly.

I have added Opera 9.25, and Picasa via downloaded RPM packages, and they installed w/o problem. I also added Avast! antivirus, which was the only one I was able to sucessfully install, after trying AVG, and ClamAV. The update process was straight forward, although I only installed the security updates for now, along with the latest versions of FireFox and Open Office.

I love thos OS! It's complete with CD/DVD burning software, a complete office suite, and plenty of options for digital photos, and music. I am just learning of all the available free software via my recently added repositories.

davidkangell

This distro is very easy to configure with the control center, 3d desktop (compiz-fusion or metisse) is set up automatically if you select it, pretty much everything works flawlessly-- I prefer it to PCLinux and to all the other distros I've tried. It is very easy to locate packages for it, even some quite obscure ones, and packages almost always install (although they don't always show up in the menu) Overall a very solid distro, and compiz-fusion works beautifully-- no crashes for me yet.

Hubert the Oboe Nerd

Where can I start...

Mandriva 2008 is just great. Excellent support for machines running Linux and Windows side-by-side is blended with a great ease of use to put out a great distro.

Mandriva is the best distro I've tried. Support for all common media files, and the simplicity of migrating from Windows are its strong points.

I've had a great time working on Mandriva Linux 2008. Recommended to everybody.

dudeman41465

I've been bouncing around for years experimenting with different Linux distributions. I started my linux journey with Mandrake 6 or something, and went from there to Fedora, Ubuntu, and a couple of others. Well I got this new laptop, a Compaq with intel dual core processor, and Windows Vista Home Premium. Several distributions would boot, but didn't pick up half my hardware. Well after a month or so of waiting on Windows Vista to finish whatever takes it so long to do every little task, I decided to go check out Mandriva. I first left when they started charging for their OS, but now there's a free version without the customer support and less included software. The Mandriva Linux 2008 One livecd picked up everything right out of the box on this almost new computer, so I did the install and have used it with no problems. Extremely stable, redhat based with access to .rpm packages, and a very sleek and stable KDE desktop environment. I recommend this OS to new and experienced Linux users alike.A few inconveniences include the fact that my little button that turns off the wireless card stays red and doesn't really turn it off, but that's not even a factor, it's just there. ; win32 codecs of course do not come in the free version so you have to get them yourself, and although it pre-set my compiz settings to the highest, I had to turn them down before my videos would display a picture. ; The install was very easy, easier than the one for Windows, which is the case with most Linux distros now. ; Ummm, I'm having trouble thinking of negative things about this OS, so just download the LiveCD and check it out for yourself, I really recommend it.

frank james

It is agood distro, BUT I cannot install cups, so cannot get my network printers to run.

On the same system, i.e computer and hardware, \i could not install PClinux, either gnome nor KDE. The video played up and installion never finished.

The software tag did not apper on the control configuration toole so I could not add anything or check for updates.

Apart from hat Mandriva is perfect!!

Jim_H

I've used Mandriva on and off for a number of years. Whilst looking for a new distro for my laptop (HP nx6110), I decided to try the latest version.
Rather than write a long and pointless review, I'll stick to the main points...
The distro is pretty a standard KDE install, which looks ok and nothing obviously special.
On the laptop, my wireless (Broadcom) refused to work. As an experienced Linux user, I spent an age trying to get it to consistently connect to the router (which was 12 inches away, on my desk during installation!). Eventually, I managed it, but not without many problems. On reboots, the wireless connection would refuse to come back up, resulting in a reinstall and reconfiguration of the whole thing. Not to mention that even trying manually, unless my router is broadcasting the SSID, I cannot get Mandriva to see or connect.
Every so often, usually during or just after some kind of configuration jobs, the keyboard would freeze, and/or the gui would die. Unable to get into the console, I ended up hard resetting the laptop a number of times. Eventually, even after installing all current updates, I simply gave up.
I have never had these kind of crashes with any distro before or since and know the laptop hardware is fine as it dual boots XP, which behaves itself. This laptop is regularly (usually every three months or so) used to distro hop and these issues are completely new. I can only conclude that they are due to bugs in the distro itself.
The instability is a worry and for me, a show-stopper. I will try again with new versions of Mandriva as I do like the distro, but hope they sort out the issues.