With 'bated breath, I downloaded the ISO files using BT . . . and it took some time. But eventually I cut my Silver Edition of 2007.0 to disk and then backed everything up. A perfect installation? Er, not quite . . .

I had waited a long time and had been through trials trying to make KDE 3.5.2 and then 3.5.4 work. Just as I had figured the latter out and everything had settled down, there was the news! "Mandriva 2007.0 will be available blah blah blah . . ." I downloaded the files using BT and cut them to disc; I even dipped briefly back into Windoze (!) to print the nice labels for them. Installation was relatively trouble-free (as far as my experience of OS installations goes). Was it perfect? Er, well . . .

The first thing was that (yet again), "Login as root is not allowed" raised its ugly head and necessitated some editing of the /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc file (mentioned previously). The system is basically fine, but perhaps the biggest drag is that I won't be able to try out the new 3D Desktop because, er, my graphic card (Radeon 9200SE) does not support it. Even more of a bummer, the installation of all the compiz components prevented me from getting in as root later, so they also had to be uninstalled!

Later, however, the new 3D software kept cutting in and preventing me from getting in as root and after some correspondence at the Expert Support Mailing List (and people there not really having any idea), I went into Konqueror as su and explored the /root/ directory.

Briefly, each user directory, including that for root, has the default setting for the Display Manager in a file called ".dmrc", and in my user account directory, this has a setting:

Session=default

which prevents the drak3d dm from kicking in. It was this which prevented me from getting into the root account, and so it was then a simple matter to change the default setting for the dm from:

Session=drak3d

to:

Session=default

and thereafter, there was no problem.

This also brought me into the modified Software Manager in MCC. This seems to have been changed to a "halfway house" between the straightforward listing of installable/uninstallable packages (which I actually preferred) and the original "Mandriva choices" of the previous distro. Not all of the packages seem to show up and hence, I have had to resort to Konqueror with some frequency to see what is there, and then add what I want to add to the KDE menu manually.

One "failing" which I had never noticed before, but have now, is that it seems impossible to add extra menu items to the KDE menu, by which I mean more categories than "Office/Internet/Multimedia/System/More Applications", that would be nice but I can find no way to do it using the KMenueditor (note: I have since found the menu file).

We were told in advance that MDV2007.0 would arrive with BitDefender installed, and I did notice this, but as it is a non-GUI application, it of course would not show up in the KDE menu. Nor would it update in the normal way. This was therefore the first thing to be discarded, to be replaced with a fresh install using BitDefender's own rpm, which would then update and worked fine. Quite why it should be that a MDV rpm of this should not work better than the original, considering that this is a Mandriva system, fails my understanding completely. The copy of Rootkit Hunter, as supplied and installed with the OS, updated and worked fine, however.

I was surprised to find that Gambas was not on this installation, and had to go to Rob Kudla's web site to find it all and then reinstall it; seems to work fine, but last time it was part of the distro, why not this time? On the other hand, Opera 9.0x, my preferred browser, was part of the distro, and no problems have been observed..

The one thing upon which I had to waste a significant part of a late evening, however, was when I decided not to stick with the mirror addresses as supplied with the distro and wanted to replace them myself. This was because some of the functions which interest me (i.e. codecs and the like) needed to be obtained from the PLF and guess what? The Easy URPMI page is not up to date (yet). Some educated guesswork (and a bit of Internet digging) put me right there (note: Since writing this, problems have reappeared as the directories at the mirrors have been rearranged).

Other quibbles:

When updating the rpm database, the "updatedb" command now gets a response: "/usr/bin/slocate: option requires an argument --l".

Another annoyance (which was also present in previous distros) is the inability of SCIM/SKIM to interface properly with any text processor other than Leafpad, which is surely the simplest, and AbiWord, which I use regularly (because it is lightweight and gets the job done). KWord, Kate, KWrite and OOo 2.x cannot apparently detect it at all, and since I have to prepare documents in both Korean and English here, this is very unhelpful.

Another useful utility, Xkill, was not installed into the menu system as previously and had to be introduced manually; also, the original Xkill icon appears to be absent.

Also, despite setting up the screen saver as normal, I keep getting a blank screen. Why?

Apart from these things, the installation appears to have been largely trouble-free. The question does seem to arise, however, as to whether many of the "default settings", not only in Mandriva but also in a new KDE installation, are really appropriate. The previous settings would not have been "inherited" because a complete install was undertaken rather than an "upgrade"; checking for 3D capability before applying it irrespective of the user's wishes would also seem a good idea. Correspondence at the Expert Mailing List confirmed that other users who, like myself, are using a Radeon 9200SE-series video card are not necessarily having problems, and here the trouble seems to be the ability to get into the appropriate place and change settings.

So I now have Mandriva 2007.0 working perfectly (as previously) minus the promised 3D display, which at the moment cannot be persuaded to function without locking me out of root access. My video card is apparently not too old to allow 3D to function - but it will become too old eventually, and the question will then arise as to whether to (a) upgrade the whole system, or (b) just upgrade the video card.

Now we just need the mirrors to settle down . . .

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