Grr Mandriva 2

The first Linux distro I used properly was Red Hat. I can’t for the life of me remember what version but it was a long time ago.

I gave up on Red Hat some time after because I’d updated my copy and everything went wrong. Nothing worked properly - it was a mess. I went onto Mandrake. And it was great.

Now Mandrake is Mandriva and now it’s not great.

Six days ago I mentioned the stresses I was having with Mandriva 2005 Limited Edition.

Well since, things have got even worse. Having given up on KDM’s graphical login abilities because the X server just wouldn’t boot up, I opted for a text based login, followed by a quick type of ‘startx’ and away into KDE.

Yesterday that broke. startx no longer starts up the X server first time. Instead I have to type startx, wait for the errors to appear, then type startx a second time for it all to work.

Why? Well who knows. Just like I don’t have a clue how to stop KDE from loading up Kscd every time I insert an audio CD. Well it’s obvious isn’t it? You just configure Kscd not to start up when you insert an audio CD. Easy.

Nope. I did. I saved the settings. I quit the app. I inserted a CD. Kscd appeared. So I reconfigured it. I saved the settings. I quit. I inserted a CD. Kscd appeared. So I tried again. And again. And again.

In desperation I uninstalled Kscd. I inserted a CD. gnome-cd appeared instead.

Oh and everytime I play an MP3 file at the same time as using Firefox, the audio playback stutters. It does this with no other application. I even tried re-installing Firefox. Still stuttered. I’m now using Konqueror.

Perhaps an update is in order? I fire up Mandrake’s update app. No updates found. Not one. Which is funny cos here’s a directory full of the things that I can tell you for a fact, haven’t been installed.

All in all, I am not impressed. I was already erring towards canning Mandriva and recent events mean it is now inevitable. Just as soon as I get the time, it will go. I’m going to start by doing a test install of Ubuntu on the laptop - it has a Linux partition that isn’t used. If Ubuntu works out all right, then as soon as I get time, Mandriva will be gone from my main machine. If it doesn’t, I’ll try SuSe instead.

But whatever happens, it can’t come a moment too soon

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