Installation:
On the Free DVD, there’s not really a whole lot you must mess with,
you can if you want but there’s not much return on investment as most
of the defaults with the preselected desktop environments are fairly
good and you probably won’t need to remove more than a package or two
when it’s done anyway.
I chose the GNOME edition, and there’s a few things I want to point out with the installer itself:
1. Mandriva is one of the few distributions that lets you have the
XFS file system on /boot with GRUB as your bootloader, so all you
really need is SWAP and one / partition with XFS if that’s all you
want. Ubuntu will stop you, complain that you should use LILO as your
boot loader instead, clicking continue will go ahead and install then
fail to install GRUB, even though you should expect that it would use
LILO instead, since it did let you continue and there are no user
options to let you pick your own bootloader. The work around ends up
being a small /boot partition on Ext3 if you want to use XFS with
Ubuntu.
This has supposedly been fixed for Jaunty starting with Alpha 5, but
due to bugs in the Ubuntu installer, I ended up having to work around
it anyway, whether Jaunty Final will be any better with that is
anyone’s guess, in any event I appreciate Mandriva giving me choices
instead of simply assuming I’m too stupid to set up my partitions.
The One CD perhaps has better bootloader options, but you can fix
anything you don’t like in Free by going to the Bootloader preferences
in the Mandriva Control Center, I have it clear /tmp on every boot and
changed it from 10 seconds to 3 for the countdown before booting the
default kernel.
2. In the case of the Free DVD, I ended up getting the Server kernel
somehow, but in looking around, I noticed that Mandriva has many other
kernels you can use (Ubuntu has generic and generic), so I ended up
using kernel-linus-smp, which is the kernel straight from kernel.org
with no modifications, et up for multi-processor/multi-core systems, I
set up Nvidia as a DKMS driver so that it build modules for
kernel-linus automatically, so I am impressed.
Ubuntu on the other hand uses heavily patched kernels based on
Debian’s already heavily patched kernels, these can produce a better
kernel, but they also introduce bugs that don’t exist in the vanilla
kernel or even in other distributions.
3. You do have to edit your Timezone and monitor/video card settings
or else it may reboot with the wrong resolution and using the
unaccelerated VESA driver (And set for New York’s timezone), I selected
1680 x 1050 Generic Monitor with Nvidia 6100 or later, this brings the
system up with the 2d accelerated NV driver until you can get around to
installing the Nvidia binary module.
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