Review: Mandriva Linux 2009 Beta 1 (KDE4.1) - 31/07/2008 by Andrew
Distro Review
Gaming on the Cutting Edge – Part 2
This is the second review in the series, following on from Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 2. The point of these reviews were lost on a few readers in part 1. Why review a Linux distribution that is in Alpha, Beta or Release Candidate? The answer is simple; Newer distros mean newer kernels, which give better support for new hardware and newer distros have newer packages - importantly, game packages. The last point is quite important. Downloading Ubuntu 8.04.1 right now will give you a very stable OS, though a number of the games in the 8.04 repo's have been superseded. In fact, if you're wanting to play online, you might find that this is impossible as the server version might be newer than the version you're running. The answer is either add extra repos from dodgy sources, compile from source or upgrade to a 'not safe for production' distro that's still going through the testing phase of it's release cycle. By taking the last option you'll be helping them out by inadvertently testing, so you're doing the world a favour...while you headshot people in OpenArena.
But which distro, and is it safe yet to jump on board something that hasn't been stamped as being production ready? What new games are available and what versions? How easy is it to setup a gaming machine with distro X? Hopefully these reviews will shed some light.
Mandriva Linux 2009 Beta 1
Hot off the press, I downloaded the KD4 combo live/install CD for x86-32. I would have much preferred to check out the 64bit version, but alas, this wasn't available in a Live CD format.
This is the first of two planned betas before the two release candidates (how you can have two release candidates is beyond me – having three betas and one release candidate makes more sense) with the final public release date being the 9th of October 2008. This is some time away so rather than wait to see if this will be any good as a gaming distro, I'm jumping in now to try it out.
My test machine is made up of the following collection of jumbled spare parts:
AMD Athlon 3200+ (2.0Ghz)
Gigabyte 939 Motherboard (GA-K8NSC-939)
2x512MB Geil DDR400 Dual Channel
Gigabyte 6600GT 256MB AGP 8x
LG DVD Burner (GSA-4163B)
Seagate 40GB 2MB cache ATA100
Onboard AC97
Logitech G15 keyboard + G5 mouse
Live CD and Installation
Booting up I was presented with the single option of booting Mandriva Linux 2009. After carefully choosing, the system started to do the usual loading until I had to choose a language, location, accept something or other, keyboard and time. After a bit more loading I was presented with a very blank looking KDE 4.1. Quite plain and lacking some polish like mouse over text on the left hand buttons, as well as looking...well like KDE4 – not quite finished.
I was expecting to see a big 'Install' icon on the desktop but the icon is instead under the 'tools' section in the menu. Clicking this brought up the very simple installation, which is a matter of clicking guided partitioning and then waiting while 'stuff and things' happen in the background. During this process you are presented with something that looks very much like 'Advertising' explaining the wonderful 2008 Mandriva range. Slightly scary, but at least there was no 'buy now' button trying to get your attention.
After this, it was setting up the bootloader (grub) and then restarting.
Desktop, Graphics and Games
Now that we've got Mandriva 2009 installed it was time to put it through it's paces. Two options present themselves now, with 'Safe Mode' being added to the mix. Mid boot it requests 'Please wait, adding media...'. Unsure what this is though me thinks it's some non GPL goodness to make our lives easier. Whatever it's doing, it takes a bit of time with no screen movement. I wonder how many people will force a reboot during this time...
After setting up a user and avoiding doing the questionnaire, you're right to login and start using the system. As the system is quite bare, it's time to add some packages to see what's available. Firstly, I'd like to say that there's an impressive list of games available, though this is let down by the poor arrangement. For example, OpenArena is filed under 'Arcade', though Nexuiz is under 'Other'. Even so, you can easily search for packages.
Game wise, Planeshift 4.0.0, OpenArena 0.7.7, Nexuiz 2.4.2, FreedriodRPG 0.10.3, Glest 3.1.2 and Wesnoth 1.4.3 make an appearance, along with a huge number of other titles including Second Life.
SuperTuxKart was let down, with 0.4 being on offer and not 0.5. Warsow and AlienArena are absent, which seems quite strange as they're both (especially Warsow) well known games and have been around for quite some time.
One strange (but good) thing was the automatic installation of the Nvidia drivers, with version 177.13 being installed without so much as a pop up. Top marks for Mandriva on this.
Bottom Line
Hopefully Mandriva has a 44 gallon drum of polish ready to pour on the KDE version of Mandriva 2009 before it's released for public consumption and since there are still a few releases yet before the final version, they've got a good chance of doing just that. As for a cutting edge distro ready for gaming, it does have a huge selection of games on tap, most of which are the latest versions though it just lacks the overall polish of Ubuntu. When the dust settles, I'd still pick Ubuntu 8.10 over Mandriva 2009 – it's a close call though.