Friday, November 27, 2009

Moving up to Mandriva 2010

Just upgraded my Dell Mini to Mandriva 2010. Been running it for a few weeks and working through the issues. I must say, although I welcome the improvements that KDE 4.3 brings, this release was nowhere near as solid as 2009.1. It's riddled with many serious bugs and annoyances.
One bug that seems to still be unresolved is the haldaemon bug where the system will sometimes fail to mount external drives, requiring a restart of haldaemon.

A quick rundown of some of the things needed to make this release fully functional on a Dell Vostro A90 (Inspiron Mini 9):
- Audio still didn't work. I still had to add the following line into /etc/modprobe.conf
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=dell
- I used the same method as before to install aircraft-manager. This worked just fine.
- Disable speedboot by editing /etc/sysconfig/speedboot. Setting "speedboot=no". This stops some weird ACPI bugs.

Some observations:
- The intel driver has stabilized and no longer freezes
- Idle CPU is generally lower & better behaved than KDE 4.2

All the bugs are reported & being worked on, so lets hope that in the following weeks updates will work out all the issues. Overall, I'd say if you are already running 2009.1 and are thinking of upgrading. Wait a month or so, you'll have better experience by then.

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