Mandriva Linux 2009 Is Perfect For VirtualBox On XP
Introduction
I’ve been toying around with Sun’s VirtualBox on my Windows XP computer for the past month or so, installing and testing various flavors of Linux, like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse, Open Solaris, PC Linux OS, and Pardus.
For the less computer savvy readers of my blog, virtualization means that running multiple computers on only one computer. It is nice because I like to have a virtual computer running Linux so that I can use a command line to surf the web or quickly edit a text file.
For the most part, I have been underwhelmed by my “Linux on XP” experience. It has been a nice, but clunky and impractical affair.
But then I installed the latest version of Mandriva ‘One’ Linux 2009. I was blown away with how well it worked with VirtualBox.
Installation
*Update* Installation isn’t seamless. After booting into a Live CD environment, the live installer crashed on me once, requiring a reboot. After a successful installation, on reboot, the system likes to hang, so I had to reboot again. After that, everything seemed fine.
Improvements
The first improvement I noticed was that KDE 4.1 looked and felt great. It was pleasurable to use, much more so than the 3.x versions.
The next big shock was the automatic mouse integration. This means that you don’t have to hit the right control key every time you want to go back into to Windows XP. This is a huge selling point, since no other distro has this working out of the box for me.
I was also pleasantly surprised that cut and paste between XP and Mandriva actually works.
Mandriva’s most important improvement is that sound actually works using VirtualBox. No other distro on VirtualBox has been able to communicate properly with my Creative X-Fi sound card.
I’d also like to give props to Mandriva for the urpmi command line installation utility. It works really well, giving the user suggestions for packages if you spell the program’s name wrong, and is very simple to use. It is much easier to type ‘urpmi frozen-bubble’ than ‘sudo apt-get install frozen-bubble’.
Minor Difficulties
Now for some complaints:
-There were no text based web browsers installed for use at the command line. This is an inexcusable oversite. I mean, come on, you have to include links, lynx, or w3m just in case KDE or GNOME doesn’t boot properly.
-Whats up with the default settings of w3m? At first, I was very pleasantly surprised to see that it actually downloads and displays all of the pictures on the webpage, but quickly realized that this isn’t the sort of behavior that I want a text browser to exhibit by default. I’ll be using lynx for speedy browsing instead.
-Localization problems. If I select US as my region, why am I presented with a 24 hour clock and a French spellchecker in Firefox? Very sloppy (or thoughtless) implementation going on in France, obviously. *Update* I didn’t have this problem when I didn’t click on Advanced Settings in the installer.
-Why oh why did I have to manually install the printer setup program (system-config-printer)? This is something that should be included by default, not just included in the special pay version of Mandriva. Once installed, it eventually found my printer, and I was able to print successfully.
-*Update* The system sometimes prompts you with confusing and dangerous messages. After doing a security update through the graphical utility, urpmi prompted that there were orphan utilities that could be removed by typing “urpme —auto-orphans”. Well, thats bizarre, shouldn’t the package management tool do that auto-magically? So, I did it manually, and by doing so, installed most of KDE 4.1 - woops.
-*Update 2* After reinstalling Mandriva after accidentally uninstalling most of the OS, I used urpmi to install a neat little utility called urpmi-recover. Just type ‘urpmi.recover —checkpoint’ when you have a stable system, and in case you (or Mandriva) bork something pretty bad, you can type ‘urpmi.recover —rollback’ to roll back the system to a stable state.
Conclusion
Mandriva Linux 2009 is a great virtualized OS solution for your Windows computer. It provides a fully functional and integrated Linux environment to work and play with while you use XP.
However, for general use in a non-virtualized environment, I still recommend Ubuntu for its polish, ease of use, easy setup and terrific support forums. Mandriva is not for beginners, but it is great for intermediate and advanced users.
