Installing

OK, right now you might have decided to give Mandriva 2007 ONE a try. As you have been reading all this up till now, you must be interested, so then there is a good chance that you would like to install Mandriva 2007 on your hard disk. If you really don't know much about computers, you'd better ask someone who does to help you. If you feel comfortable enough, give it a try.

Taking the dive

I suppose that you have a version of Windows on your PC and that you would like to be able to use it at least untill you are convinced that Linux will give you what you need. First you need to check how many room you have left and whether that is sufficient. You should have about 5GB minimally to comfortably use Mandriva. Check first that you have at least that and some spare room for your Windows installation.

First, there are two tasks to perform under Windows. And here comes the first DO: BACKUP all your data. I've installed Mandriva at least 10 times in a dual boot configuration even including beta versions and release candidates. I never lost any data. However why taking risks? Always backup all your data, it's just good practise. You should do that anyway once in a while.

The second thing you really have to do is to defragment your hard disk(s). What we are going to do is to shrink the Windows file system to make room for your Mandriva install. If your windows file system is too fragmented, files could be at the end of the drive and be overwritten. Defragmenting will put all the files in front on the disk.

OK, so that were two tasks you had to perform under Windows. Now hook up and turn on all your peripherals (printer, scanner, etc.), so that they can be recognized and configured by Mandriva. When done, you can put in the Mandriva 2007 ONE disk and restart your PC. Mandriva ONE will start up. During that startup, it will already ask you some questions about the keyboard you use and the language you would like to use, etc. These will be used later during the installation, so make sure they are correct.

The installation itself

Upon the desktop, you find the icon to start the installation (see Figure 30: Live install icon).

Figure 30: Live install icon

This will start the installation wizard. The wizard will first of all help you to create room for Mandriva Linux on the hard drive. It will do so by creating “partitions”. While partitioning, the hard drive will be divided in seperate logical zones (partitions) that are seen by the operation system as different hard drives, although they are just different zones on the same hard drive. This is the most tricky part of the installation. It's most likely that you will have just one big partition completely dedicated to your Windows installation. In that case you can just ask the wizard to use the free space on the Windows partition. I don't have an example of that since on my PC there were already several partitions. Basically though it will reduce the Windows partition to a safe size and leave empty space you can use for Mandriva. On that empty space you will have to make at least two partitions, but I advise you to make three. You need to make at least a root partition (the mount point for that is / ) and a SWAP partition (the only partition that does not need a mount point). The root partition will contain all the directories of your system that are not put on a separate partition). It should be at least 3 GB, preferentially 5. The SWAP partition will only hold temporary data. It will be an extension for your physical memory. The right size for that would be the same or a little more than the size of your physical memory (especially on if you would like to suspend to disk). The third partition I would advise you to make is a seperate partition for your home (the mount point for that is /home ). The reason for making such a partition is that /home is the space that holds all your data. If you ever want to install a new version, you do not need to restore your data later on. You can just keep your home partition intact (including all your settings and configurations). If you do not make a seperate partition for your home directory, it will be on the root partition, and your root partition will be reformatted during a new install. For the rest of the partitioning, it should be OK to just accept the defaults proposed to you.

TIP: you can also attribute a mount point (e.g. /win_c) to your windows partitions so you can easily read data from them.

After the partitioning, the installation itself will start, all required files will be copied from the CD on the hard drive this can take some time (depends on the PC speed but probably around half an hour).

Next steps will be questions about the bootloader. This is a small program that gets started before Windows or Mandriva Linux is started and that allows you to choose which one to start. Just accepting the defaults should be OK. That was it for the first phaze. If you still have applications open, close them and restart your computer via the KDE menu.

The postinstallation configuration

Once restarted, the PC will continu the installation wizard (but this time not in live CD mode, but in installer mode). The first step will be to setup your internet connection, which depends on your situation. Just following the defaults proposed should be fine in most cases. Next is the root password. As explained the root user owns the system. Only root is able to make the big changes. Make sure to set a root password, but make sure not to forget about it, or you will get stuck into a system that you cannot change (even not update) anymore. However, it is unsafe to do normal PC work with those root privileges. So it is enforced by Mandriva that you need to create at least one other user that will be your normal working account (with its own separate password). You can add more, and when you created all users that you need, just click Done. After that the First boot wizard will be started. This is a small questionnaire from Mandriva. You are free to respond to it or not, but it might help Mandriva, and as they gave you this wonderfull set of applications, it's the least you can do in return. Don't worry about the question about the Register Key. You don't need any. If you bought a boxed version, you have one and it entitles you to support. If you did not buy a boxed version, you can still fully use Mandriva, but you just have no right to support. After the First boot wizard, it might take a while before something else happens (it seemed to me the computer hung, but after waiting quite a while, it went on). If you would really not get any response, hold the ctrl, alt and backspace key all three together. You will then come at the point you should: able to log in with your own account. Congratulations and welcome to the Mandriva Linux community!

From now on when you reboot your PC you will have a small menu to pick which system you would like to start. By default you get 10 seconds to make your choice (which you do by using the up and down arrow keys).

NOTE: On some PC's there might be two entries for Windows (windows and windows1). that is then because your PC has an autorecovery partition (probably the first of the two). If you get into that, leave it again without launching the autorecovery (otherwise it will undo your linux installation).

NOTE: The first time you will run windows again, it will run a filesystem check. This might take a while but does not at all mean something went wrong. It's just that Windows does not understand what has happened that the partition is smaller all of a sudden.

Personalization

Once you have your Mandriva up and running, you will still have to personalize it to your needs. The following list of personalization stuff that I do, might help you as well:

1. Since we have installed from Mandriva ONE, which is only one CD, some software that you might want or need is not included. In order to be able to do so, you'll need to set your installation media first (see earlier).
2. First of all install the applications that you have missing. Think about:

1. Thunderbird (just my preferred e-mail client because it allows me to share the adressbook with my windows laptop from work)

2. Kerry (just great to find your files)

3. Flashplayer, Realplayer and their mozilla plugins

4. Mplayer mozilla plugin

5. Real codecs

6. Only if you think this would be legal in your country:

   • lame

   • libdvdcss2

   • win32-codecs

   • xine-win32

   • avifile-win32

7. Nvu (for web editing)

8. Kino (for editing home made DV movies)

3. It is easy to have the most used stuff on the panel, so I add the icons for Thunderbird, the MCC and the Recent Files to it. And I activate the Universal Sidebar. Then I start the KMix (the Sound Mixer) to have the icon for it in the panel).
4. And the last step is to configure the applications themselves (e.g. setting up your e-mail account).

What could be improved

One has to go look oneself for certain installation sources and install them by hand. We do understand the Mandriva policy to push the choice whether to install software that might be illegal in certain countries towards the user, and even that it is illegal to point to information on how to do this. But there must be a way to make it easier (some way that the user can install something from PLF that will add PLF sources as easy as the Add button in the MCC.

There are several minor issues that show a little lack in polish:

• When opening an ods file in Konqueror, Mandriva does not know what to open it with. Selecting OpenOffice.org Writer from the propose menu is very simple and indicating to always use the same application as well, but it would simply show more polish if this would have been set up in advance.

• When attaching a digital photo camera, the actions proposed do not contain the possibility to load the images on the PC with Digikam. In fact the actions proposed don't allow you to do anything (Open in New Window fails and Do Nothing doesn't help you). Similarly when you insert a DVD, it does not allow you to start Kmplayer or another DVD player.

• As mentioned above, for the moment there is no functional update warning utility. This should not only be present, it should be activated by default for everyone (not as a paid service as it used to be). This is a matter of security of the system. When a huge security breach would turn up for unpatched Mandriva systems, without such warning service, just too many users would be affected. You just cannot count on most users to go hunting for patches (even if manually starting rpmdrake on the MCC allows to install patches easy enough). You have to throw it in the face of the user like Ksmarttray does. Moreover the current implementation of rpmdrake forces the user to select each single application to update one by one, which is so tedious.

• Although the set of default applications is quite good, for the beginner, there is one very important application missing from the menu: the file manager. I know Konqueror is available under the Internet menu. But it is presented there as Web Browser and it is also run in its webbrowser profile. Most beginning users will not know that this is also the file manager. A second menu item for Konqueror should be put as File Manager in the root of the menu with the corresponding profile.

• At the time of writing, almost one month after the official release, still a lot of packages (e.g. kdar, kipi-plugins) still don't install due to dependency problems. Other packages have signature problems. Probably this is being worked upon. But it is just plain annoying to see this in officially released packages.

The default security level of Mandriva 2007, does not give users write access to Windows partitions, only read rights. This will be a problem for a lot of dual boot users, wanting to share data between windows and Linux. TIP: You can easily change this in the MCC in the partition management module. You go into expert mode (watch it!) and select umask=0. When the partition is mounted again (for instance at next boot), all users will have write access to the partition.

Conclusion

Although some improvements are still possible, Mandriva 2007 is an excellent OS. Where the use of Linux used require quite some extra effort which had to be overcome mostly for reasons of principle (security, Open Source, more control, etc.), Mandriva 2007 is really giving the user a very functional system. The Orange theme is a bit too much in the beginning but after a while it grew on me. With the introduction of 3D desktop, not only functionally Linux has become very hard to beat, also the coolness factor is now huge.

If you are able to install Mandriva 2007 yourself or if you know someone who can do it for you, it certainly is worth the try, even if you don't care the least about the reasons of principles.

More information

TUX magazine (see http://www.tuxmagazine.com/) is a free digital Linux magazine directed to the average user and beginners. Every edition is full of very informative articles. Unfortunately they will go to a paid subscription model. However, probably (hopefully) the old issues will remain consultable for free.

The English Mandriva club forum http://forum.mandrivaclub.com/index.php?op=En is in active use. Since Mandriva is out of the French equivalent of chapter 11, the company works to get a better contact with the users. This can be noticed through the presence on the forum of people on the Mandriva payroll, which has become a big asset to this forum.

An alternative to this forum is the http://mandrivausers.org/ which is also a very active forum, but that does not have any ties with the Mandriva company.

If you would like to try Games on Linux, or would like to find out whether gaming on Linux would be good enough for your needs, you can find more information on the Linux Game Tome: http://www.happypenguin.org/.

If you are in doubt about the Linux distribution that would be best suited for your needs, you can find more information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions or http://distrowatch.com/.

I'm not the only user who has tried and opinionated Mandriva 2007. Here are some reviews by others:

• http://www.linuxforums.org/reviews/mandriva_2007_review.html

• http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/53/

• http://lunapark6.com/?p=2264

Of course if you want to go further with Mandriva it would not hurt to have a look at the Mandriva Wiki that also contains information on a.o. the installation:
http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view/KB/.

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License

This work is governed by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. In order to obtain a copy of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

The author to be credited is Wim Coulier (website: coulier.org).

English translation polished by John Barron (http://www.europa.demon.co.uk/)