Conectiva Kicks Ass.
 

I ordered conectiva online from a unoffical site, the other day. Ive Just installed it, It has the nvidia drivers all ready to go, etc. Problem is, can one of you conectiva guys, pull up a terminal and type glxgears, becuase it doesnt seem to excisit, another question, how do you install additional software packages, it only installed about a gig. (Ive got all 3 discs.) Plus I don't know if my sound is working, (every distro since lynxOS can dectect my sound card it's a controller device). But I am, very impressed, Ive still got gentoo to try out, If I didnt have to run windows for gaming (at the moment), and for hardware, I would have more space.(40GB Nasty). Im trying to get the ultimate linux gaming system, once I had everything working on fedora core, but it didnt like the gcc nvidia kernel driver the installer made, so i was getting like 15fps on counter strike. But this distro outrivals, it's fellow company (Mandrakesoft), They've also done a great job with the Installer, and ive noticed it's alot like suse and red hat, I presume it's based on the two.

The Conectiva Linux will no longer be updatable. Madrake bought it some weeks ago.

If you want a distribution to run games, I recommend you Debian or KuruminGames (a brazilian distribution focused in running games and detecting video cards from NVidia and ATi automatically with what we call "magic icons"), everything quite simple. KuruminGames is based in Knoppix and runs like a live-cd. Cool for tests and if you don't like, you shouldn't install.

The problem with KuruminGames is that it cames with KDE (for me that's a problem, because I don't like it) and I guess is entirely in portuguese, but you may be able to change locales.

Debian is what we call a "parrudo" in Brazil. It's very strong about it and I had absolutely no problem installing the NVidia module.

Thats not entirely true, Conectiva is still a distro in its own right and is still recieving updates and will probably do so for a while. If you read the public statements made by Mandrakesoft, they are leaving the Conectiva and Mandrake Linux distros as they are for now, while they figure out how they can use each others technologies either for a new distro probably at the end of the year or to share development resources.

Debian was a bitch, I had a few problems with the drivers there, I can't beleive how good conectiva is. Mandrake is shit becuase the free version, has no support, doesnt come with any gfx drivers and it's has zero apps. What do you expect I suppose, it's coprate. Same with suse, except they have a kick ass ftp install and the excellent YOU (Yast Online Update), problem is I had issues with the drivers again, I won't go into much detail. About, conectiva. Don't let some french assholes at mandrakesoft put you off your own native distro, christ im using it and im from the UK. Use apt or synaptic to update, thats what i'll do anyway.

Thanks redazz, your right, conectiva is still it's own distro. Keep using it if you like it.

Maybe you didn't give Mandrake a chance, its got a lot more software than most distros, except Debian. Most free versions of any distro don't offer free support, but have forums (official or unofficial) where you can get help. Urpmi is a tool similar to apt-get thats used to manage packages on Mandrake and in my own point of view works more or less the same as apt-get if not better. Take a look at zebulon.org.uk and easyurpmi and you will see that Mandrake has quite a lot of apps and they are fairly easy to install.

Problem is i tried the umrmp stuff and it didnt excisit??

So thats where your problem is. Anyway it does work fine once the sources are configured. You don't have to use it in text mode either, you can just use Rpmdrake the GUI.

Oh the update, yeah. I though there were just pure patches. Is it possible to get apt and synaptic running on mandrake?

It is but there aren't many repositories since urpmi seems to do the job fine for most people. Someone suggested that the Mandrake urpmi repositories could be used with apt/synaptic, but I am not sure how accurate that is.

Well I tried apt-get, didnt excist. It seems the free version isnt fantastic. Is that your version?

It's not installed by default, you have to get it from the contribs section of Mandrake rpm repositories or better still, using urpmi. Yes I am currently using the free version but sometimes, I buy the boxed versions.

Quite happy with conectiva at the moment, go the sound sorted out, (Had to change it to OSS). Just installed cedega and im updating all of my steam games now (half-life, cs, etc) Just did a test run and got like 60fps which isnt bad on linux. You even tried xandros been thinking about getting it.

Gee Mandrake[OS],

Maybe you should consider changing your nick.

I am glad that you like Conectiva 10. Like you I tried Mandrake 10 Official and I was not impressed. So I tried Conectiva because I can understand Brazillian Portuguese, which helps a lot whenever I have problem setting up or adjusting Conectiva.

While I love using Conectiva as a desktop client I am interested in seeing how it performs as a LAMP server. Which means I am going to have either purchase a New larger HD or Wipe out Win2k. I think I will try to save up for a new HD or HDs. Since I have another computer that has a small drive that needs to be upgraded.

Let me know how your gaming experience goes because I am in the process of migrating my windows machines to Linux and I am interested in how well windows software runs in Linux.

Peace,

Thorn

It runs cedega badly, due to phtreads being enabled. The games are also laggy (15-20fps on counter strike) like fc3 was, so it seems to be a universal problem, trying out different distros at the moment, but I am impressed with conectiva, and that will be my main os.