Mandrive 2010 Spring Rocks!

I am purposefully making the title a bit more showy with the hopes that it get ranked better by the search engines. SEO this ain't. But I feel a responsibility to do so because I have been using Mandrake and later Mandriva for so many years. I've lived with it's idiosyncrasies and sometime severe limitations but more recent versions have repaid my faith. But just as the more recent version, Mandriva 2010 Spring came out, I read of the discord amongst it's developers and the desire to fork it. I won't comment on the politics but as a distribution Mandriva 2010 delivers.

I am writing this on a HP Mini which many has been written by others, shouldn't be able to install a standard distribution but is yet running Mandriva 2010.

It is sad that most reviewers out there take the easy way out and install the Mandriva Live version and use it to pass judgement. Installing Mandriva 2010 from the DVD (officially called Mandriva Free) is a different experience. It does have it's bumps due to it's commitment to go open source all the way, in the way of Flash and Java. However, that can be worked around.

..upgrading finally works.

I think I will have to dedicate the next few entries to how I've installed Mandriva (for the last several versions) with the hope that some one reading this may find it of some use. This is above and beyond my other post on moving or upgrading distributions. I am overjoyed to announce that finally, choosing the 'upgrade the distribution' finally works. Everything transitioned ok from Mandriva 2010 to 2010 spring on all my machines. No loss of shortcut or even non-standard applications (ie. installed from non-Mandriva RPMs or sources not added yet (yes PLF, I am talking about you :) )). I've even tried it from Mandriva 2009 Spring and it works ok. This is a big deal because I tend to loose sooo much time with the transition (backing up, installing fresh, updating and restoring files). Yes, upgrading does take a long time, on the average of 2-3 hours. But that is 2-3 hours of unattended installation