ok finally got mandriva 2008.1 installed on my laptop. i chose to do an upgrade over 2008.0. the install kept cutting out because of some dust specks on the dvd..do i ever learn this lesson? linux installs are very very particular about having spotless discs. i’ve had windows discs scratched all to hell and still install without complaining about file corruption…maybe that’s not a good thing.

anyways i hit 2 bugs that luckily were listed in the 2008.1 errata. one seemed fairly serious because the upgrade-install got caught in an infinite loop..which caused me mild panic. seems surprising that this bug made it to final release. mandrake/mandriva releases are always bashed for being buggy, but i don’t care. i love this distro to death. why? great “control panel”-esque management utilities. vast package selection. my 2nd distro of choice is suse. i know ubuntu is what’s hot nowadays, i dabbled with it some. i just don’t think that distro is geared towards me though. how’s that for elite?

anyways, here’s the 2 bugs:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Errata#Upgrade_from_previous_release_…
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Errata#Volume_on-screen_display_stuck…

i like the new interface for audacious. i also like the updated media source utility in mandriva control center. it now does a lot of the work that easyurpmi did for you. i’m still not having any luck getting stable wireless connectivity with the new bcm43xx driver. i still have to fall back on using ndiswrapper. however, i think i might reload 2008.1 from scratch when i get some time. may fix a few issues…plus i really want to try kde4 but it appears those packages install to /opt. i left /opt a part of / and don’t have a lot of freespace on there. i had figured that mandriva did nothing with /opt ever. it’s used in solaris and suse…but oh well i won’t make that mistake again while partitioning.

also ran across a utility called “partimage”. it’s basically an opensource ghost type utility used for cloning workstations. it has stable support for the usual linux filesystems and experimental support for ntfs at this point. i’d like to test it out sometime.
homepage: http://www.partimage.org