On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:59:32 -0400,
David Hardy wrote:
> Serious question: favorite new Linux distro? Which will do media
> and amaze and stun the otherwise Winders crowd at various sites of
> various sizes? Anything from desktop to enterprise level.
Mandriva 2008.1 Spring PowerPack. Includes non-free (AIS & AIB) bits
such as ATI & NVidia drivers, Cedega, and Fluendo multimedia codecs.
Provides KDE *and* Gnome *and* XFCE (as well as IceWM, Fluxbox and
several other WMs), so if you prefer one DE over the others, chances
are that it's in there. While Mandr{ake,iva}'s default orientation has
always been KDE, unlike some other distros I've seen they do not IMHO
give short shrift to the other DEs in their implementations of them.
The 2008.1 Free edition contains only free (AIS&B) packages on the
install media, so no proprietary drivers "out of the box", but the
non-free (AIS, not AIB) bits can be easily added post-install from the
distro's official "non-free" repositories. A good single-page rundown
on all of the 2008.1 versions, the repos, and on what distinguishes
Mandriva from most other distros is the 2008.1 Reviewers Guide:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Reviewers_Guide
The various Mandriva One 2008.1 live CDs - of which there are several,
because each contains one DE and a subset of the supported languages
available - also provide the ATI & NVidia proprietary drivers, as well
as OOo, Firefox, the GIMP, Java and Flash plugins, and a selection of
apps that is appropriate for that DE (i.e. Kontact on the KDE ones, but
Evolution & Pidgin on the Gnome ones). The main shortcoming of the One
CDs, IMHO, is an almost complete lack of games in the live environment;
this may or may not matter to you, depending on your audience(s).
Just my $0.02USD ...
--
Bill Mullen
RLU #270075
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