Thread: Mandriva

Mandriva is a popular distro developed by a company of the same name that has a number of versions for corporate and server use. Mandriva is one of the better looking distros around, and uses the GNOME desktop environment very effectively. Mandriva was earlier known as Mandrake Linux, and originally based on Red Hat. Mandrake Linux was supposed to make Linux easy to use and configure. The second aspect of Mandrake was focused on, which had a detailed control panel which was familiar to what Windows users were used to. The popularity of Mandrake shot up in the early 2000s, and brought with it a legal battle for the company. This was over the name "Mandrake", which was copyrighted by the Hearst Corporation, who owned the comic book series "Mandrake the Magician". The name was changed to Mandriva after that. The free edition of Mandriva is to Red Hat what Ubuntu is to Debian and is still one of the more popular distros around. There are bi-annual releases of Mandriva since 2007, with each release having the year appended to the name instead of the version number. Apart from the yearly releases, there are half-yearly releases, known as the spring editions. The spring editions have a .1 appended
to the year name. The latest release of the Operating System is Mandriva 2009.1. Mandriva is pretty general purpose, and can be used as effectively for multimedia or gaming purposes as well.


Installing Mandriva


Mandriva has a nice Graphic User Interface, which, like OpenSUSE, uses a wizard like approach with two sections, the Installation section, and the configuration section. Place the disk in the tray, and restart the system. This is the screen you will see, if you are using the DVD version and not the Live CD:

Choose Install Mandriva Linux 2009. You can change the language of the installer by hitting the [F2] key. Next, you will have to choose a language for the operating system, which is not the keyboard map. Asian languages are available, and more importantly, you can choose to install more than one language at once. Click on "Next" when you are done. The next screen is the license agreement and the release notes. Go through the agreement, select Accept, and click on "Next". This is the keyboard map screen, and there are only 4 options in the default screen (click on more if you use a different map), but these are rather confusing.

The first option is DVORAK, the rest are variations of the connection with automatic configuration, or is connected to a router, you can select "Yes" for Mandriva to download updates while installation. done, click on "Reboot". You should now see the bootloader with Mandriva, and Mandriva (Safe Mode). If you dual booted the system, the other Operating System should also show up here.