Hi there, havent posted here for quite some time.

I used mandrake 9.2 a long time ago, it was ok but it didnt suit me very well, maybe i was still really big linux noob.
Eventually I went over to Ubuntu and i like the distro, so far the best and i tried mepis, and suse amongst many other. Suse 9.2 proff. is great but REALLY Slooowwwww... same as i had with mandrake 9.2 ( I have a decent PC ) So now i'm wondering if i should give another KDE and RPM based distro another shot.

Ubuntu serves my need at work because i have a fast internet connection but at home I'm strugling a bit. + a lot of the times I need to play to configure things more than i would like when i'm at home. You know sometimes one justs want to watch a movie and listen to music. Ubuntu doesnt come with a lot of codecs / plugins pre installed ( license issues )

Does Mandriva LE 2005 ( download version ) come with certain codecs installed?

How fast is it ? Compared to other Distro's you might have used? is it KDE perhaps? is there a way for me to upgrade to KDE 3.4 EASILY?

Is there 3rd party repos. that i can useinstead?

is this the biggest Mandriva forum unless you pay for support?
See I dont want to pay for support / silver status etc. I live in South Africa and at the current exchange rate its just not worth it.


i know these are a lot of questions but well... this is linuxquestions.org after all

Codecs are easily installed using any plf mirrors.

Comparable to any other linux distro and there is KDE 3.4 rpm's available.


There is plenty.

If you don't want to pay...you don't have to.

One of the things that first attracted me to Mandrake was ease-of-use. One of the things that *keeps* me on Mandrake/Mandriva is the Community.

In answer to your specific questions:

The download version comes with only the free codecs. Others are available through the PLF.

Mandriva 2005 is comparable to any other distro for speed. Sure, it's not *quite* as fast as a "compiled-for-your-machine" distro like Gentoo, but, IMO, the difference in speed is negligable, if not unnoticeable.

I don't personally trust the 3rd-party KDE3.4 rpms that are available right now. So, (again, IMHO) I don't think there is an *easy* way to ugrade at this time. But KDE3.3 is not exactly a piece of crap, either.

The best repositories are the official ones. Use Easy URPMI (link in my sig) to set up your repositories. "Main" and "updates" are obvious. "Contrib" sources have the 3rd-party apps. "Plf" has the stuff that might be a problem in some countries from a legal standpoint.

This is one of the best places to get Mandrake/Mandriva support. Another excellent place is http://mandrakeusers.org, which is *not* an official Mandrake site. It is run by dedicated Mandrake users, for Mandrake users.

I mainly use other distros now, but when I was a full time Mandrake user, I liked the ease of use and community spirit.

You should specify what kind of codecs you wish to talk about. There are millions of codecs. Specificaly Mandriva 2005 comes with mp3 support. Video support throught mplayer. Java 2 runtime and flash 7 can be easely downloaded from the internet.

It's reasonably fast. You wont get significant advantages from other distros. What trully make the machine fast is recompiling the kernel.

Upon installation you choose the Windowing program you wish to install. The default one is KDE 3.3

I doubt. rpm system makes this kind of KDE upgrade very difficult

repos??? What the hell is that? If you need more rpm search google for "easy urpmi" and use urpmi, or rpm

The difference is not negligable. Try recompiling your kernel.

If you are running Mandrake you can go to the ogle dvd player site and download the rpms to install the dvd decoder. I couldn't get the dvd to play till I found that site. RPMs are very easy to install.

Once the codecs are installed there are several players that will play the dvd.Kaffeine /mplayer /Ogle etc.

I think Mandriva 2005 has improved on one thing drastically. That is the wireless support. WIreless support in Linux up to this point has been terrible. Mostly the fault of the card manufactures not wanting to develop drivers for LInux yet.

Mandriva has ndiswrapper in the distro. You have to install it first. But once you do it works great. If you card chipset uses ndiswrapper you are in luck. I have four machines that use wireless. Mandriva easily installed three out of the four !!! That has been unheard of in Linux.... The only one it didn't install was a d-link 520e that has to have primary and secondary loaded each boot up. A real pain.

Mandriva is supposed to be slower than many distros. But not slow enough that would make a person switch. I use Mandriva because I'm learning LInux and I like being able to install the programs with little fuss. I believe when I have a better understanding of Linux I might change distros, but for now Mandriva is the best package for me.

I tried the new version of Mephis. It is great handling wireless cards. Much better than Mandriva. But it was so hard to get other programs installed that I went back to Mandriva. If you are having trouble with wireless than I would suggest trying out Mephis pro.

How could I pass up a ZOMBIE STAR EYE'D TUX?
I did not vote in the poll because I do not use Mandrake instead of other distributions.
I plan to multi boot 8 or 10 distributions on my upgraded PC.
I was a Mandrake user with 7.x and 8.x versions. Being curious I am giving LE 2005 a spin.
After a few initial difficulties it is working well so far.

I like Mandrake/Mandriva, I just hate the name, sounds like a hooker. I understand that it was done to incorporate Connectiva. Its a good distro but not worth the huge downloads. I just intall via mini-install cds.