I have been using Mandrake/Mandriva for some time mostly as a server. I have come to a point where I would like to rid myself of Winblows.

Under Mandriva 2008 the latest packages for Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office are not available except from a manual install. My question is, is there a distro that has the latest versions of the above software for a seamless install? Or would it be best to simply run manual installs?


Thanks :-)

Sometimes distributions won't release on the exact day the individual projects release their updates. Most distro's need to test before they make their own release. Either hang tight or go grab the source and either build your own packages or install manually.

A new version of mandriva is released every six months so it is most unlikely that they will invest time in backporting the latest packages to a system that is at least two releases behind the current one. That would apply to almost any distro. I am sure that if you simply grabbed the latest release of mandriva, ubuntu, fedora or suse, you could save yourself a lot of time. Compiling open office and firefox will take quite a few hours unless you happen to have a powerful brand new computer.

Thank you Jay. I do happen to have a dual Xeon box but would rather install an OS update for sure. Mandriva seems to be a bit strange, they are not offering a free version that installs to hard disk. Am I wrong here or am I looking in the wrong place?

Both
There are free isos but I have to admit that the folks at Mandriva seem to delight in hiding them as well as they can; the 32 bit livecd is quite easy to find but the rest, nah. I am sure one of these days they are going to release one codenamed "Mandriva Easter Eggs" LOL.

Here is a link to the 32 bit livecd, which is not all that difficult to find.
http://www.mandriva.com/en/download
As for the 64 bit version, I usually select a mirror that hosts the 32 bit dvd and climb up the tree until I find myself in the directory that has 64 bit. Could take some patience, though.

I have already tried the liveCD but it doe not provide a hard drive install so, what is the use?

There should be an installer on the desktop.

Hi
I work with opensuse and all updates are as easy as with Windows. You have only to add Mozilla repository to YaST and then you update it by selecting allays the latest version. Once you added repository (and there are several!) you always get latest version. And all dependencies will be solved by YaST (not like with manual installation or RPM installation in command line).
OpenSuse is very easy even for beginners. My last try with Mandriva was in 1999 or 2000, but I immediately realized that it is not for me and changed at this time to RedHat (over the years I moved to Novell solutions).
regards
Rafal

Thanks Rafal.

I have tried SUSE in the past but always found it difficult to find repositories. Is there an easy way to find them?

Thanks,

Rick