Mandriva (formerlly Mandrake) Linux has gone VERY commercial.

For whatever reason their website REALLY turned me off. It was so generically commercial marketing hype/fluff. The generic/stock photos and layout had me thinking I was on a spammer site at first. it didn't feel at all inviting or encouraging to consider using their products. I forged ahead however and waded through all their marketing redirection junk and found the free version known as Spring 2007.1 DVD.

During the installation it was required I create a /boot directory. ALL of the other distros did NOT require/use a /boot (surprisingly not even the Redhat distros), but the Mandriva install would not proceed until I created one. That's quite a throwback to "the old days". Not a big deal, but something to note.

The RAID detected fine (NOTE: only Ubuntu failed on the raid portion).

Hardware detection was the best yet. Audio, NIC, even webcam all detected and worked right out of the box!

Unfortunately however, the ipw3945 wireless card driver is NOT available in the Free version of Mandriva (maybe it is in the commercial version?), so the card was not able to be initialized without going online to get the drivers/firmware, etc. manually.

Mandriva seems to have a lot of polish to it in some areas, but is notably lacking in others. I don't know if the commercial version is more consistent.

I may have to try out a commercial version just to see if there is any reason to consider buying it versus the download version.

1. CentOS/RHEL 5 = FAIL
2. 64 Studio = FAIL
3. Fedora 8 (test 2) = FAIL
4. Ubuntu 7.04 = FAIL
5. Mandriva 2007.1 Spring Free DVD = FAIL