It’s been nearly six months since the arrival of the eeePC, and while there have been options to replace the default Xandros OS (baby mode) with another distro for nearly as long, none come close to the latest release of Mandriva ‘One’ 2008.1 (KDE). The latest iteration of Mandriva has only been out a day, but news that it would work without any configuration (i.e., ‘out of the box’) has been around since late February/early March.

Claiming to work without any config and actually doing so are two very different beasts however (as a number of failed distros will attest to); but when the folks at Mandriva state this capability then one is wise to take notice. And indeed the Mandriva 2008.1 delivers, and in grand fashion; booting up the live CD from an external usb CD drive attached to the eeePC loads the desktop in a very short time, and with the odd desktop resolution on the 7″ screen perfectly displayed.

Installation itself is an equally speedy affair, with the installer doing its initial work in around eight minutes, dividing up / and /home into 2.4GB and 1.2GB slices respectively; following installation one removes the live media (and in this case the cd drive) and is asked upon reboot to offer a root password, a name/user name/password before finding oneself in the newly installed system.

Everything does indeed work as advertised ‘out of the box’, from wireless (identified as Atheros 5006, though it is in fact 5007) to webcam to all of the fn + Fx keys (volume up/down, wireless on/off, etc.); Mandriva 2008.1 ‘One’ goes the Xandros one better in the suspend/hibernate category by not losing the wifi connection upon sleep, a small detail but nice nonetheless. Another big improvement is the use of PulseAudio, in this case with driving a large external monitor/TV; while the Xandros system provides a tinny sound at very limited volume, the Mandriva system really cranks out clear loud sound, making one fear for the tiny eeePC built-in speakers, and in the case of the external monitor/TV one has to actually reduce the sound on the external device itself, while in the Xandros system maxing the sound on it allows one to hear the action (unless someone nearby is crunching on some popcorn, slurping a drink, or humming).

Whatever you use the eeePC for, be it as an alternate lightweight notepad, wifi browser, or media centre for a larger external monitor/TV, Mandriva 2008.1 has made it significantly better, to the point that you will be wondering if they somehow packed a hardware upgrade in that tiny 697MB CD in addition to the excellent system on offer. If you have an eeePC and are tired of the limitations put on it by the default system, then this is a highly recommended choice: effortless to install and several upgrades that bring even more out of this little appliance.

There is going to be a rush for the exits sometime in the next couple of months as XP finally is interred and users are left with the nightmare that is Vista; in the next ‘year or so’ that it takes for Windows 7 to arrive expect even more switchers away from MS’ products and towards sanity.

An important new feature in Hardy Heron (not officially supported until now) is Wubi, which allows you to install Ubuntu within your Windows install, and simply remove it from the add/remove utility in XP/Vista.

This is a bit of an odd development (the support not the program) as it has a chance of sundering the Open Source support community; a number of those who spend their time helping others with their Ubuntu installs have quailed or even outright refused to have anything to do with this program; for the first time Windows users will know how to use and operate a Linux program better than those that have never used Windows, which is a bit scary to say the least.

In order to become more knowledgeable about this, Linux stalwarts will have to pay for a XP/Vista install disk, go through the agony that is such an install, and then run Wubi within this most disliked of systems. I had tried to get this going a week or so ago, and was appalled at how really bad the XP installer was; this was a legitimate XP install disk, and after around 20 minutes of loading drivers it informed me that it could find no hard disk to install to.

After some research, it turns out that one has a couple of options to avoid this calamitous situation: either load the drivers for your SATA disk via floppy (?!) or set the BIOS to ATA if it has such an option. Loading the drivers for a hard disk? Wow. I can understand having trouble with a broadcom wireless device (notorious in the Linux community), but a SATA hard drive? And loading drivers from a floppy? Perhaps I will try to tackle this again at some point in the future; though the fact that most of the world (including businesses) will be using Open Source in a few years time gives me an excuse not to.

In order to get a true feel for Kubuntu Hardy Heron one has to run the system for quite some time; just installing it will only let you know how much better the installation procedure has become, while leaving you with little understanding on how many changes this new system brings, particularly the Kubuntu-KDE4 brand.

I began running the 3rd Alpha release of Kubuntu-KDE4 as soon as it came out, and apart from a single show-stopper libc6 bug that caused one to be dropped into a shell prompt instead of reaching the new and improved desktop there has been little to complain about and much to herald.

Just a few days ago I switched my main machine over to KDE4 as well, and if you are using Kubuntu Hardy Heron you really need to go that route to appreciate how much lighter and faster it is over the KDE3 version of Hardy Heron; Firefox3-beta4 is tailored to this new environment very well (which is odd since it is a gtk app) and the speed is nothing short of astonishing. Similarly the new DragonPlayer (which replaces Kaffeine as the default movie player) and Juk (an Amarok substitute) are grand departures from their predecessors.

The Dolphin file manager offers everything one could want in that department, and is especially notable in the degree of polish and speed it exhibits. While the desktop widgets are a bit slim in the picking, the ones that are there a fully functional and a joy to work with. One feature that stands out for me is the new behaviour of desktop files; under KDE3 one could right click copy to/move to, whereas now a mouse-over said icons now yields a small sleeve that has a resize, rotate, configure and hide option–quite a big adjustment if one is used to the KDE3 way of moving files about.

One of the things that really impresses is the fact that apps run so much faster and lighter, something unimaginable when ‘upgrading’ to Vista, or even moving up to Leopard (from either XP or Tiger, respectively); it seems that the open source developers forgot the mantra of forcing new users to buy faster and more powerful systems for nothing much worthy of note in the OS.

There are still a large swath of this system that I have yet to examine and fully try out, as the transition from KDE3 to KDE4 is such a big step, and many of the KDE3 apps are still hanging about and tempting their use (amarok being a case in point). That being said, I will continue to use this system until it reaches final (and beyond) and report back more of what I discover; this goes beyond Hardy Heron and its speed and stability and more into waiting as KDE4 fully replaces all of the components in KDE3 that make Kubuntu such a wonderful computing system.

Comments will be left on (though still in moderation) so if you have any questions feel free to ask away, or stop by the freenode channel #ubuntu+1 where you can receive real time help with your system; if you have a comment that consists only of ‘nice post’ or something similar it will be deleted, so fair warning.