How is the using of Mandriva 2010.2 nowadays

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How is the using of Mandriva 2010.2 nowadays

Postby hmslima » Jan 31st, '17, 23:07

It's 2017 and I am using Mandriva 2010.2. Certainly you're wondering why I am using a so old Linux distribution, the answer is in the final of this post, I don't answer it right now because my reasons of using it are not important here, the important thing is to tell whether Mandriva 2010.2 is usable in 2017, or at least whether it is useful for an user that only wanna access internet and use a suit office.

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to have an installation that already comes with proprietary drivers, I don't like to chase drivers, especially for an outdated distro.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 All of them are outdated, the newest packages I have are from Mageia 1.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.

  1. 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?
  2. 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
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Re: How is the using of Mandriva 2010.2 nowadays

Postby xboxboy » Feb 2nd, '17, 00:04

This might seem obvious, but I'd really avoid using such an outdated, unsupported Linux OS, especially with the few big security issues found over the last 12-18months, eg heartbleed, COW etc..

Now that said, I went to install mageia on my grandparents older pc at Xmas, and I couldn't get the GUI to display, yes like you I had driver issues.

So there's two ways around that:
A: Either persevere and get the display to work
B: Add a cheap video card that is supported

As for the android phone thing: I've never used airdroid, and only recently they got outted for having an unsecure app, so you may want to think twice before using that. I use Sshelper app, it's open source, and then connect via sftp in dolphin. It works ok for copying photos etc.

As for the SD card reader, would that be a kernel/driver issue?

I'm sure someone much more knowledgeable than me will come along.
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Re: How is the using of Mandriva 2010.2 nowadays

Postby hmslima » Feb 4th, '17, 19:52

I know there are security issues in outdated distros, but between an outdated distro, which supports my hardware, and a updated distro with bad support for my computer, I prefer take the risks.

Unfortunately the videos in Mandriva were not so smooth as I expected, maybe with VLC I could fix it, but to install a "tainted" VLC I would have to change the phonon-vlc and it would mess my KDE system.

But fortunately I've discovered how to have a good screen resolution in Ubuntu-based distros. The Ubuntu-based distros actually didn't use the SiS driver, but the vesa driver (yeah, vesa driver is practically better than SiSimedia driver!!!). So I had to generate the xorg.conf file when in live mode and copy this file into the folder /etc/x11 of my installation. Honestly, there is only one thing that the new SiSimedia drivers are better than vesa driver, I can watch video smoothly, although I have to open the video file three or five times to it have a good image.

With vesa driver I can do most of my tasks, I have a good screen resolution and I can play games I could run in my Mandriva 2010.x, I only have problems with the videos, I can't watch them in full size without losing performance, they only play smoothly in their original size. But I have Windows XP in another partition, so when I wanna watch some serie or movie, I simply open Windows, all my documents and downloaded files are in a NTFS partition anyway.

Now I use Lubuntu 16.10 64bit, but I'll test Mageia 6 when it be released, I love the Mandriva-family (Mageia and PCLinuxOS) and how they deal with many things, I owe a lot to this family. I have no much hope of seeing my video card be supported as it was in 2010, but I'll test the next versions of Mageia.
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Re: How is the using of Mandriva 2010.2 nowadays

Postby filip » Feb 5th, '17, 18:03

You can use vesa driver in Mageia. Just set it up in a Control center.
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Re: How is the using of Mandriva 2010.2 nowadays

Postby johanliebs » Feb 6th, '17, 04:11

Still running 2010.2 on my Asus netbook 701 modified with a touch screen, 2GB ram and bluetooth controller built in. Mainly use it for GPS navigation (Wine + OziExplorer + USB GPS dongle). Tried to connect to Gmail HTML via Firefox 10 the other day... got kicked out! :D

Time to upgrade... :roll:
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Re: How is the using of Mandriva 2010.2 nowadays

Postby hmslima » Feb 7th, '17, 01:12

I was thinking, can I use the SiS drivers from Mandriva 2010.2 in the new Mageia? I know I can't simply install the .rpm files, it would crash the system (I know it from my own experience), but what about extract the .la and .so files and replace the new drivers for the Mandriva's drivers? Hmm, maybe I'll try in the weekend.

filip wrote:You can use vesa driver in Mageia. Just set it up in a Control center.


Yeah, but I'll wait the final release of Mageia 6, until there I still use Lubuntu.

johanliebs wrote: Tried to connect to Gmail HTML via Firefox 10 the other day... got kicked out!


You can use Firefox 45 ESR in Mandriva 2010.2, and I believe that you even can use newer versions of Firefox if you update your GTK libs to the third version, you can download the GTK+3 packages from here.
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Re: How is the using of Mandriva 2010.2 nowadays

Postby doktor5000 » Feb 7th, '17, 20:21

hmslima wrote:I was thinking, can I use the SiS drivers from Mandriva 2010.2 in the new Mageia?

No you can't as those drivers usually consist of a kernel module part and also an X driver module part. The former will not go with current kernels and the latter will not go with current X server.

But did you actually try some current Mageia version and get some logs after choosing the correct driver? I know there are a few more Mageia users that still have some of those older SiS cards, there are even a few forum threads.
Check viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3556 and viewtopic.php?f=23&t=10258 or maybe viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1890
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Re: How is the using of Mandriva 2010.2 nowadays

Postby jiml8 » Feb 8th, '17, 22:28

I'm rather surprised those drivers have not been brought forward. I interpret it to mean that no one who develops for the kernel is using a platform with that video chip.

The linux kernel has not undergone any radical transformations since the 2.6.x series used in Mandriva 10, so porting the drivers shouldn't be difficult. I know I've ported a number of older drivers from as far back as 2.6.29 to 3.x and 4.x with no trouble to speak of.

I can't do these; I don't have the hardware. But you might search around to see if someone, somewhere has done that.
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Re: How is the using of Mandriva 2010.2 nowadays

Postby xboxboy » Feb 9th, '17, 00:00

Jiml8, I tried to install mageia on my grandparents old XP powered box and I ran into Sis driver issues, so it's definitely an issue, but it effects very few systems now-a-days... I think in there case I'll just grab a video card and install, I may have one laying around at home. They're 1.5hrs drive away, and I don't get there near as often as I should or I could have messed around with it a bit to see if I could get the driver up.
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Re: How is the using of Mandriva 2010.2 nowadays

Postby hmslima » Feb 24th, '17, 21:22

Well, I am using Mageia 5.1 now. I have a better support for my video card in Mandriva 2010.2, but I only could use it for browsing in internet and writing, even videos were not playing well, I don't know why. Surely I could correct this problem by installing a "tainted" version of VLC, but it would break my KDE system because phonon-vlc. :/ Unfortunately I have to use Apache OpenOffice now instead of LibreOffice because of graphical BUGs, but it's not a actual problem once OpenOffice has everything I need.

I've never had a perfect support for my video card in GNU/Linux, actually I even had many issues with other non-mandriva-based distributions, the Ubuntu-based distros never supported natively my video card. The better experience was in Mandriva 2010.x, when Mandriva 2011 and Mageia 1 came, the graphical system crashed when I tried to play a video. Since Mageia 2/3 until nowadays the support was not the same, there are some graphical BUGs in the desktop environments and in some programs, especially in GTK-based software.

doktor5000 wrote:But did you actually try some current Mageia version and get some logs after choosing the correct driver?

How do I do it? Well, I'll see these threads.
I am using Mageia 5.1 right now.

jiml8 wrote:I'm rather surprised those drivers have not been brought forward. I interpret it to mean that no one who develops for the kernel is using a platform with that video chip.


The SiS video cards are very problematic when we talk about drivers and people prefer drivers like NVIdea. I only bought a computer with this video card because I didn't know how problematic it is and there were not cheap computers with better video card.

Even in Windows it is a headache, I hadn't sucess in installing a video driver for my computer in Windows 7. Only Windows XP (and theorically Windows Vista) has real support to my video card.

jiml8 wrote:The linux kernel has not undergone any radical transformations since the 2.6.x series used in Mandriva 10, so porting the drivers shouldn't be difficult. I know I've ported a number of older drivers from as far back as 2.6.29 to 3.x and 4.x with no trouble to speak of.


I tried the simple replace of the Mageia SiS drivers for Mandriva SiS drivers within the Mageia and PCLinuxOS and I had problems, the graphics system crashed before the start.
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