Mandriva

[viking60]

Lots of updates on Mandriva cooker: among them plymouth. But the broken splash images are not fixed by it?
I did a urpme --auto-orphans today and that works as good as ever. But I did update and re-install some stuff before I booted.
As always with this command; the ones that can read, have a huge advantage
Most things work just fine - if you are not into sound

[viking60]

Time to show off Mandriva 2012 - Bernie Lomax then:

With Rosa menu

With Standard KDE menu

[rolf]

Very nice.

I installed Tech Preview and added, e.g: ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pu ... 12/x86_64/
as sources, probably a symlink to cooker? This has led to a situation where boot is fubar (as of last week, or so). Maybe I just need to update the packages to get such a pretty Bernie.

I have never done auto-orphans. The list that an update provides for packages that aren't needed always seems to include really important looking software.

[viking60]

I just added whatever the MCC (drakrpm?) suggested in the GUI and removed the CD repos.
The auto orphans looked scary but I felt brave - and nothing bad happened

[viking60]

Very nice.

I installed Tech Preview and added, e.g: ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pu ... 12/x86_64/
as sources, probably a symlink to cooker? This has led to a situation where boot is fubar (as of last week, or so). Maybe I just need to update the packages to get such a pretty Bernie.

I have never done auto-orphans. The list that an update provides for packages that aren't needed always seems to include really important looking software.

Yes I got that too now - Not able to boot anymore.

Oh well this might be the final nail in that coffin. ROSA is working well and has the capacity to develop.
I have thought a bit about this process and I realized a couple of upside down things:

Mandriva the company did push the limits on technology and came up with a distro that used RPM5 and did change quite a bit to the look and feel.
What they did not realize is that Linux users are very conservative and do not like changes so the majority of the community follwed a fork Mageia that had the old look and feel.
And the absolute most important thing where Mandriva stepped wrong was that it was not possible to update the current installation.
That update is entirely possible on the fork.

So we have the ironic situation that the Company is pushing the limits and the communities are taking the conservative approach. That is not how it works for RedHat Suse and other distros.
Fedora is pushing the limits and doing the falling on the nose, and when they are finished doing that, it might find its way into RedHat. OpenSuse has the same function.
Mandriva SA on the other hand is happy to fall on it's nose so that the communities can have a stable distro - that is ..exotic

Much can be blamed on the lack of communication between the communities and Mandriva SA that has resulted in a badly camouflaged hostility from Mageia towards Mandriva.
And maybe the main factor that the driving forces behind Mageia defacto lost their jobs in Mandriva mainly due to lack of funding and as they say, bad management.

This has created the camp situation where you either are in one camp or in another (If you are not with us then you are against us ....etc).
Not good for RPM distros this.
As I understand it Per Øyvind is not willing to break his back either if the music is not playing - and it is becoming very quiet now.
At the moment the continuity of the distro is represented by ROSA and our Italian MiB friends.

[rolf]

I think that is a very good analysis of the Mandriva limbo, past and present.

Apropos, perhaps, a symptom of this uncertain, unstable state is the outcome of my recent attempt to use the openshot video editor, from contrib, to manipulate some EVO 4G/Sony Handycam files. For years, I've added PLF sources and installed the more-capable but clouded-license multimedia programs from PLF. Now, it seems they have been migrated to ROSA repos but updates are not forthcoming, at least not so swiftly as with PLF.

As a result, a Mandriva official update overwrote my PLF installation of ffmpeg and various supporting programs, which I discovered when openshot told me some illegal libraries were not present.

Code: Select all

[rolf@localhost ~]$ urpmq --sources ffmpeg
ftp://allotter.yandex.net/mandriva/official/restricted/2011.0/x86_64/ffmpeg-0.7.1-5plf-plf2011.0.x86_64.rpm
ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/MandrivaLinux/official/2011/x86_64/media/main/release/ffmpeg-0.7.1-2-mdv2011.0.x86_64.rpm
ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/MandrivaLinux/official/2011/x86_64/media/main/updates/ffmpeg-0.7.12-0.1-mdv2011.0.x86_64.rpm

After some efforts with rpm -Uvh --oldpackage [*], I was able to discover all the dependencies, downgrade to the older PLF versions, put those programs in /etc/urpmi/skip.lst, and get on with my little domestic terrorism project of combining cellphone clips of our trip to Bend, OR into one DVD, to be shipped to GF's family in Vietnam.

I see that the community is decimated, the in-principle opportunity of a rebirth being developed by Charles Schultz, a few developers, perhaps, that are not so familiar to me, not that I move in developers' circles, a gaggle of motivated but not-so-devel-capable supporters, and Per Oyvind Karlsen, working hard behind the scenes, it seems. I have some misgivings that there is not sufficient community on the coding-capable side but there is significant diligence apparent from new development blood @*.ru, so I'll hang on and hope for the best.


[*] When you think about it, it's quite an accomplishment for rpm to give you messages in terminal that allow you to sort out what is needed to get particular elements of the vast complex of software sorted out. This is popularly known as 'RPM hell' but I think some credit is due. I hope that, in the future development of Linux, when developers decide how to write the code, not too much attention is given to what is 'popular'.

[viking60]

Yes Unity is also moving over to Rosa. That is a very interesting system I will want to try once it has found its place - kind of an Arch approach to rpm.
This meeting in Paris where provind and wobo attended seemed to base on a far greaterc community.
I have also noticed that the one distro based on Unity - TinyMe - is looking for another base due to the lack of stable base system. In fact they are looking at Arch....
http://tinymelinux.com/forum/thread-995-page-2.html

[viking60]

I tried to re-install Mandriva 2012 today with the old i585 DVD in VB.
Then I hooked on the cooker repos and started the update (there were 900 of them) after a good while it fails with no X11-driver so the update does not go through.
(aria2 error 19)
Also there is no way I can install the X11- drivers manually AFAICT. Looks like there is soemthing wrong with task-x11 that is not good.
Maybe it was just my network that stopped working during the update - I cannot find my mirrors now...
I will have to give up again Bernie is still dead.

[jkerr82508]

For anyone who is interested:

http://forum.mandriva.com/en/viewtopic. ... 5&t=137936

Jim

[viking60]

Thanks Jim! Downloading the 64 bit version from Per Øyvind now.....
Installing it...
Having some trouble with setting up the graphics....Getting error when trying to test it....Changing parameters...
Nope that does not work in VB with the minimal 64 bit link checking the other download.
Yup that bigger image froze on the first attempt with 6 min left, but on the second attempt it went through.
Plymouth splash seems to be still broken and no background out of the box either. There is no sound and I get a message that there is an error with dbus and that it is turned off. There is a really long and annoying delay when choosing to reboot or turn of the computer.
The rest seems to mostly work.

[jkerr82508]

POK has posted a link to the official Alpha iso's:

http://folk.uio.no/peroka/mdk-2012-alpha/

There are i586 and x86_64 DVD's as well as a dual CD.

Jim

[viking60]

Thanks again to our crystal ball berserk who magically always knows this stuff.
Tried the CD- dual 64bit iso and it installs just fine and also lets me set up the graphical environment and then during reboot it fails to start X.
Systemd can't find autofs4 it sais, and during boot up.startx does give it an honorable try and fails with warnings like
FOUR_LEVEL_X has 4 levels but kpdv has 5 symbols
and as a last message the connection to the X-server is lost.
Trying some other medium....
And the DVD x86-64 iso did behave pretty much as described above.
Installation went smoothly.
Then: No sound plymouth splitted (looking ok on shutdown though), flashplayer had to be replaced with another one in the repos. The rest seems to work. Hard for me to see if there has been any progress...