Hi, i was wondering if anyone could sheed some light on linux and its new 3D desktop capabilitys! I recently downloaded the live cd version of mandriva! and i thought it was great. I ages ago bought suse 7.2 and had it installed via dual boot with xp on my hard drive. but i couldnt make the swap. However cing how good linux has become and after being forced to use unix in uni i have gain more knowledge. Anyway i was wanted to get mandriva, but i noticed that if i download it, the website says i will have to download the drivers for my ATI graphics card! is this true? this is quite unfair if so? SO if this is true can you recomend another linux distro that has the 3D desktop. Also what is the difference between AIGLX and Xgl? will my graphics card ati radeon 9700pro? work with it? THanks for your help in advance P.S. just ordered a new 250gb for linux!
i've been using Mandrake/Mandriva since 8.1 i guess about 5 years ago. i haven't tried the new 3D desktop myself and have found the 2007 release a tad flaky so far.
i installed the 2007 release (32bit version) on one of my work machines, 2007 has been (so far) been very stable on there. However i installed the 64bit version on my laptop (which is my main machine and runs the 2006 release 100% solidly) and 2007 has been an disappointing failure. A few reinstalls did not improve things and whilst newer updates might have eventually fixed things i was annoyed enough to revert to 2006 on the laptop, which is as before, 100% rock solid. I've also tried the 2007 release (32bit version) on my Athlon dvd burning PC and a couple installs have either failed at the install stage with segmentation faults or seg. faults after a successful install. Not good and have yet to put 2006 on there instead. Maybe i'll try again much later when there's shedloads of updates for 2007 but so far for me it's been a waste of time, especially as 2006 has been so well-used by me on a few machines, 2006 for me has been by far the best version (as i say i've been a Mandrake user since 8.1, the versions have got better over the years, pretty much, though i didn't get on very well with 9.0 i think it was)
ok, well, i am currently downloading the free dvd version, so will try and install it and see what happens! Tho it mentions it doesnt include drives for ati and nvidia on the free versions, will this affect me? Also apart from 2006 mandrivia, what other linux versions could you recomend me trying, bearing in mind that over the years that i had linux the most annoying and troublesome thing i found was installing programmes either from rpms or anyother type. Thanks for your help am very grateful
just acquire the missing drivers/stuff via update sources such as this - http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ i've used a few other distributions but i prefer Mandriva by far so concentrate on that the most
ah, nice website, thanks for that. thanks for your help, shud have linux installed by the end of the week, so will let u know how it goes
well, i got the 2007 powerpack of mandrivia installed ok. Had a few problems still do. Managed to sort out the update thing which is broken with this version, swapped it with a programe called smart. Which seems to be working fine. One problem i still have is that my printer (epson stylus 680) wont print anything expect pages upon pages of writing. Also everytime i boot up, i want it to log straight into my user account, which it does, but everytime it asks for root password and then brings up the 3d desktop config? Any ideas on how to fix this? Thanks
I too have been ingrigued with Mandriva 2007. I have used Xandros, and checked out Ubuntu and Kubuntu, which were solid also. The load of Mandriva went without a hitch, but upon th reboot the pc comes up to a prompt, it asks for a user name, which I supply, then a user code, which i supply, then goes to a prompt. Any Idea why I do not get the KDE destop, It was checked by default in the install. I have not had any prior linux installs go to a prompt?
Never Mind. I beileve I fond the issue. the install did not find a graphic card in the notebook, nor did it find a sound card. In the DOCs, which I just downloaded, I found a screen I did not get during install which is for paramaters for the graphic card.
