I installed the One version of Mandriva in order to have an installation that already comes with proprietary drivers, I don't like to chase drivers, especially for an outdated distro. I also have the DVD media of Mandriva 2010.2 that I use as a repository, thus I can install a lot of applications without problems, like KDE games, KTorrent, Filezilla, Inkscape, Scribus, the GNOME environment, wine, printer/scanner drivers, and other minor programs.
Regarding softwares of video and audio, which has codec issues, I downloaded some gstreamer packages and Mplayer from rpmfind website (I downloaded the "tainted" Mageia 1 packages), I couldn't download the newest versions of these packages, but as the videos work fine, I am happy.
From rpmfind website I also downloaded audacious, KMPlayer, SMPplayer codeblocks, fontforge, goldendict, puddletag, recordmydesktop, unrar and other applications. All of them are outdated, the newest packages I have are from Mageia 1. But frankly, as I can edit the tags of songs with puddletag, consult words with GoldenDict, unzip my .rar files with Ark thanks to unrar and record my screen with recordmydesktop, I don't care with the age of my programs if they work as expected.
Suite Office: It's impressive how LibreOffice could be installed without issues, it didn't asked any dependency, I only extracted the rpm packages then I runned the command rpm -ivh *rpm. Now I have LibreOffice 5.2.4.2 in my Mandriva 2010.2. It's funny how smaller applications require a lot of dependencies, but LibreOffice doesn't.
Now the most important thing, without it an operational system is unsable for me. Internet! Even Firefox 19 (provided by MIB Mandriva 2010.3) can't work properly in Reddit. Fortunately I found out that the newest Pale Moon is installable in my system and after a time I noticed that I can install Firefox 45, since Firefox 45 doesn't need GTK+3. I believe that if I install GTK 3 in my Mandriva I could install the new version of Firefox, but as I even have access to many HTML 5 things with Firefox 45 and Reddit and Facebook are usable in Pale Moon, I don't care in having a newer browser. I believe that I could install GTK 3, but I would have to remove a vital package for my GNOME and many GTK applications; I don't want headaches, so I didn't install it.
Oh, and I could install Flash Player Plugin 24 without issues.
I only have two little problems with Mandriva 2010.2.
- I have not access to Android phones through USB. I know I could use an app like AirDroid or start my computer in Windows XP, which has the drivers to access Android phones, but I would like to access Android phones per USB in my Mandriva 2010.2. Is there a package to make my Mandriva able to access these smartphones?
- It's not an actual problem since I very rarely use it and my Windows XP has support for it, but my SD card reader is not recognized by Mandriva. Do you know where I find the package to solve it? My SD card controller is:
SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter.
Why do I use an outdated operational system: Because of my SiS video card, the only distributions that really work well in my computer are Mandriva 2010.x and PCLinuxOS 2010. Believe me, folks, I already tested a lot of distros, most of them even didn't booted (Korora, Manjaro, Sabayon and Gecko, I am looking at you) and all of the Ubuntu-based distributions which I tested didn't recognize my video card when installed (in the live mode they worked perfectly, but when they were installed...); I could install manually the video drivers in the Ubuntu-based distros, but the result is the same of Mageia and new PCLinuxOS. Only Mageia and PCLinuxOS work in an acceptable way, but the graphics of the desktop enviroments and LibreOffice are buggy, that's why I used OpenOffice in them. So, in order to have a minimally decent experience with GNU/Linux, I use Mandriva 2010.2. Note: my computer supports a 64 bit system, I used PCLinuxOS 64 bit during a couple of months