As usual, I take a day or two when a new Mandriva version is in RC status to install and play around with it. If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that the machine I throw to the dogs is my Toshiba Libretto. Asus may have a cute thing with the Eee PC, but I’ll stick with my Libretto. You’ll also recall that with every release since I’ve had the Libretto, there is always something that needs to be tweaked or that just doesn’t work out quite right.
Well, 2008.1 works completely out-of-the-box. X resolution is properly set, madwifi is properly setup, the SD card reader works.. everything just works. The only thing I don’t know about is the fingerprint scanner, but I’m not sure what we have for biometric packages, if anything (but I also haven’t really looked beyond MCC because anything else would be a “hack”). Now, I haven’t played with it extensively yet… today was a cooker upgrade from when I was bored one night a few weeks ago and had installed beta2 on it, but then never had the opportunity to play with it more. So after a urpmi —auto-select, reboot, and some playing, I’m impressed. Metisse was a little slow (but looked pretty sharp)… definitely wouldn’t use it everyday but it makes for nice “check this out” factor.
KDE4 looks pretty nifty… Tried to urpmi task-kde4 and got some conflicting files amongst various packages so didn’t get everything installed, but it still runs well enough (I think I’m just missing some office-related stuff). KDE3 looks… well.. the same. So does GNOME, but in the case of GNOME that’s ok because GNOME always looks sharp. =)
All in all, as of right now, I’m impressed. I’ve had to do exactly zero dickering to make everything (except the fingerprint reader) work. Very nice.
The real test will be the HP tablet, but that’s going to run 2008 until 2008.1 is done as that’s a production machine and the Libretto is my “road warrior” machine and since I’m plunked in this super-comfy chair all day and really only leave the house when I’m going stir crazy or need to buy coffee or water, it’s ok if something breaks on that machine.
At any rate, congrats to the development team! So far so good. Sound works (I don’t care about PulseAudio vs the other audio systems as much as some do.. I just care if it works), so that’s a good thing too. Will throw some mp3’s and video files on there tomorrow to see how well the other apps work. So, short of task-kde4 (which is in contribs, although that shouldn’t be an excuse), everything is working great.