Forking around with Mageia 6 RC amd64

[Bobbie Sellers]

Hi Readers and Typers.
Just concluded some work on the test bed: Dell E6420 with 8 Gigabytes
of ram.
I was favorably impressed from the startup of the installer.
It was so much like Mandriva. It has the choice of DE screen too
which offers KDE's Plasma 5, Gnome (probably 3.x) and Custom. When
I booted up I was offered as well as the KDE product, Ice
A mistake easy to make is that when the DE comes up i thought it was
ready to go but no and after a couple of times of trying to do stuff
too early I figured it out,
The install went pretty fast.
Updating left me with a system that still worked.

I rearranged Plasma 5.x.x pretty close to my ideal formation and
tried out some tools. Gwenview works fine and so does VLC on my .mkv
anime files.
I have the same problems with KDE's Plasma 5 as on every other distro
using this DE. Cannot copy the clock/date. Some extensions to
the editor missing still and I am comparing it to the predecessor KDE's
mostly excellent Plasma 4.14.18
It is way ahead of Open Mandriva which failed to revive after
the first set of updates.

Grub2 comes up nicely and has all the OSes on this system:
PCLinux OS64 2016.03, PCLinux OS64 2017.05, and lists some that I
thought I had scrubbed including Open Mandriva and Debian 8.8.0.
Only hassle was that they did not list in order installed but moved
the Mageia to the top of the list. Very pretty menu though.

So if you are not wedded tightly to another OS as I am
presently, you should try out Mageia but you might want to wait
until it is not telling you that Cauldron is the install.

bliss "running fast and light" on PCLinuxOS64-2016.03
GNU/Linux 4.11.3-pclos1 #1 SMP Thu May 25

--
bliss dash SF 4 ever at dslextreme dot com

[Bit Twister]

On Mon, 29 May 2017 19:27:59 -0700, Bobbie Sellers wrote:

>
> Grub2 comes up nicely and has all the OSes on this system:
> PCLinux OS64 2016.03, PCLinux OS64 2017.05, and lists some that I
> thought I had scrubbed including Open Mandriva and Debian 8.8.0.
> Only hassle was that they did not list in order installed but moved
> the Mageia to the top of the list. Very pretty menu though.

Sounds like an a hefty requirement to have a boot loader figure out
the order of installed distributions.

If you leave Mageia grub2 install as default for awhile, you might
notice it will remember the last booted install and make that
selection the default selection for the next boot.

I did not appreciate that feature so I configured /etc/default/grub to
quit doing so, and rolled my own script in /etc/grub.d to make the
menu much more user friendly as to what to select from.

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 05/29/2017 07:27 PM, Bobbie Sellers wrote:
> Hi Readers and Typers.
> Just concluded some work on the test bed: Dell E6420 with 8
> Gigabytes of ram.
> I was favorably impressed from the startup of the installer.
> It was so much like Mandriva. It has the choice of DE screen too
> which offers KDE's Plasma 5, Gnome (probably 3.x) and Custom. When
> I booted up I was offered as well as the KDE product, Ice
> A mistake easy to make is that when the DE comes up i thought it
> was ready to go but no and after a couple of times of trying to do stuff
> too early I figured it out,
> The install went pretty fast.
> Updating left me with a system that still worked.
>
> I rearranged Plasma 5.x.x pretty close to my ideal formation and
> tried out some tools. Gwenview works fine and so does VLC on my .mkv
> anime files.
> I have the same problems with KDE's Plasma 5 as on every other
> distro using this DE. Cannot copy the clock/date. Some extensions to
> the editor missing still and I am comparing it to the predecessor KDE's
> mostly excellent Plasma 4.14.18
> It is way ahead of Open Mandriva which failed to revive after
> the first set of updates.

It still works after several rounds of updates.

>
> Grub2 comes up nicely and has all the OSes on this system:
> PCLinux OS64 2016.03, PCLinux OS64 2017.05, and lists some that I
> thought I had scrubbed including Open Mandriva and Debian 8.8.0.
> Only hassle was that they did not list in order installed but moved
> the Mageia to the top of the list. Very pretty menu though.
>
> So if you are not wedded tightly to another OS as I am
> presently, you should try out Mageia but you might want to wait
> until it is not telling you that Cauldron is the install.

bliss "running (fast as well as) and light" on PCLinuxOS64-2016.03
GNU/Linux 4.11.5-pclos1 #1 SMP Wed Jun 14

[Doug Laidlaw]

On 19/06/17 13:06, Bobbie Sellers wrote:
> I was favorably impressed from the startup of the installer.
> It was so much like Mandriva.

Mageia still has the feel that Mandriva had before it disappeared for a
while. Mandriva was designed to be user-friendly, and Mageia has
carried on the tradition. Choice is part of what Linux is about.
OpenMandriva wants to create a usable desktop with only KDE. That seems
to be next to impossible. KDE is no longer just a DE, but tries to
configure the underlying system as well. Its applications are good, and
I run them in Xfce. GNOME's tools are second-rate by comparison. Its
official TV player is one man's personal creation, and lacks any usable
menus.

I have tried several alternative distros, and keep coming back to
Mageia. I currently have OpenSuse running as a second system. It
filled up my /boot partition with kernels, and even the community had
no real idea how to remove the oldest ones. I install a package, and
find that all the dependencies are bundled with it. Mageia lets you
know what is happening. PCLinuxOS has a mixture of RPM and apt, and
like all compromises, it doesn't work as well as either one alone.
synaptic seems to be the best graphical installer I have come across,
but it doesn't have Mageia's urpmi. LinuxMint is a preconfigured
system, good for those who want to accept what it gives. Packages are
preconfigured to work "out of the box," with reasonable default
settings. Proper configuration tools are omitted from the basic DVD,
leaving the user who wants to be a little bit different, out in the cold.

I acknowledge that preferences are a personal thing, and being a
long-time user of Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia, I tend to see that as a
reference distro. Being in my 70's, I have become somewhat inflexible.
But Mageia still seems to be the most usable distro of them all.

(The patchy roll-out of the Australian NBN in my city forced me to delay
posting this message. Entire streets have been overlooked, and my
connection is intermittent. The Council made representations to the
Authority, and was told it is "all too difficult.")

Doug.

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 07/01/2017 04:21 PM, Doug Laidlaw wrote:
> On 19/06/17 13:06, Bobbie Sellers wrote:
>> I was favorably impressed from the startup of the installer.
>> It was so much like Mandriva.
>
> Mageia still has the feel that Mandriva had before it disappeared for a
> while. Mandriva was designed to be user-friendly, and Mageia has
> carried on the tradition. Choice is part of what Linux is about.
> OpenMandriva wants to create a usable desktop with only KDE. That seems
> to be next to impossible. KDE is no longer just a DE, but tries to
> configure the underlying system as well. Its applications are good, and
> I run them in Xfce. GNOME's tools are second-rate by comparison. Its
> official TV player is one man's personal creation, and lacks any usable
> menus.

Every thing you say of Mageia could be applied equally well
to PCLinuxOS64 KDE 2016.03. The 2014 versions were good as wall
but it could not yet handle the (U)EFI system nor was there clear
understand of those points by myself and a large number of users
nor of the Globally Unique ID Partition Table.
If my old Compaq Presario had not broken down and if I had
not been able to secure a HP Pavilion more easily than a competent
used machine I might have continued to use PCLinuxOS 2014. But
I needed a software machine that could live with Windows 8.1
and Mageia 4.1 worked for me then Mageia 5 until PCLinux 2016.03 got
out to the mirrors(and I picked up a single line in the Distrowatch
Weekly) when I learned about it...

So far I don't like KDE's Plasma 5 as it is far from finished
with the tools I have used for about 11 years now since I started with
Mandriva 2006. Some reviews say it is beautiful or even pretty but
for me beauty is in functionality and Plasma 5 extends itself in
the wrong directions as you mention.
I tried Gnome tools for 3 weeks or thereabouts on Mandriva.
I found it inconvenient and the tools unreliable and I like that
version of Gnome 2.4 a lot more the present versions. Mate
is my choice of runner-up to KDE.

>
> I have tried several alternative distros, and keep coming back to
> Mageia. I currently have OpenSuse running as a second system. It
> filled up my /boot partition with kernels, and even the community had
> no real idea how to remove the oldest ones. I install a package, and
> find that all the dependencies are bundled with it. Mageia lets you
> know what is happening. PCLinuxOS has a mixture of RPM and apt, and
> like all compromises, it doesn't work as well as either one alone.
> synaptic seems to be the best graphical installer I have come across,
> but it doesn't have Mageia's urpmi. LinuxMint is a preconfigured
> system, good for those who want to accept what it gives. Packages are
> preconfigured to work "out of the box," with reasonable default
> settings. Proper configuration tools are omitted from the basic DVD,
> leaving the user who wants to be a little bit different, out in the cold.

Synaptic using RPM packages works just fine for me.
I will say that the repositories have been cut considerably
but there are still as much as most folks could hope for. Linux
Mint is ok for Windows leavers but I would never use it for anyone
with developed preferences.

I don't know much about OpenSuse but I would just make
sure I had the current kernel installed and then use Midnight
Commander to go to the boot partition and clean out most of the
older kernels. Here Synaptic with the Search/Name/kernel lets
me see what is at hand and remove the old stuff with a few
clicks as soon as the new kernel is selected for installation.
I actually like it better than the old system on the Mandriva.

>
> I acknowledge that preferences are a personal thing, and being a
> long-time user of Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia, I tend to see that as a
> reference distro. Being in my 70's, I have become somewhat inflexible.
> But Mageia still seems to be the most usable distro of them all.

Well I will only be in my 70s for another 39 days and while
I am less than youthfully flexible I try out other systems on my test
bed at least weekly. Some are good and others like the early sta of
Mageia and the Open Mandriva 3.xx version will not survive their first
batch of updates.

>
> (The patchy roll-out of the Australian NBN in my city forced me to delay
> posting this message. Entire streets have been overlooked, and my
> connection is intermittent. The Council made representations to the
> Authority, and was told it is "all too difficult.")
>
> Doug.

Sounds like the Authority is a bunch of second-raters if indeed
they are Aussies. Enhancing services is a hard thing to do but it gets
done including rebuilding physical systems even by the modern
Californians. Hope your connectivity improves, Doug.

bliss "running light (as well as fast)" on PCLinuxOS64-2016.03
GNU/Linux 4.11.8-pclos1 #1 SMP Thu Jun 29