Frustrated mandriva admin

[stephenliberty]

Hi folks,

I've been pretty much given the cold shoulder by Mandriva and what little community there seems to be left. As it turns out, I had never heard of Mageia but ran into it when investigating other distros. I administer three small offices all with Mandriva machines. The 2011 release caused a lot of issues and I needed help to resolve them.. but to no avail it seems. So, I'm turning to you guys/gals for a better experience (for which I can contribute). I've got a few questions though, so I hope someone can help me here.

Is this a distro that is stable enough to be used in a business environment? It seems to be through my first pass - keeping in mind that I do all the setup and tweaking, then unlease the computer illiterate upon them.
Are there any points of contact for 'emergency' bugs, or at least how often are bugs triaged? My users do not tolerate bugs, and I get chewed on for them. A seemingly silly example is how the mailto handler is broken in 2011 - it brings up Thunderbird but doesn't fill in the email's 'To' field. They have a lot of web based stuff, and that's one of the things they use quite a bit.
Mandriva was historically known as being a bleeding edge distro, or at least that's what I remembered. Will you folks be continuing that 'tradition'? I did some poking around but didn't really nail down any desires regarding the 'bleeding edge'/'stability' debate. For example, Mandriva was the first distro that I was aware of that had PHP5.3 packaged and ready to rock.
Important - how easy is it (or is it possible) to transition from Mandriva 2011? I'm about four timezones away from the computers I maintain (all hail the great internet).. so it's a bit of a pain to switch to something that works if I'll have to have someone physically there to reformat the machines.
Will Mageia work decently on the iMac? Unfortunately the company I work for full time is an apple shop and that's what I'm provided with.. I'd prefer to be using the same system that I am responsible for.

And that's it.
Thanks,
Stephen

[doktor5000]

Is this a distro that is stable enough to be used in a business environment? It seems to be through my first pass - keeping in mind that I do all the setup and tweaking, then unlease the computer illiterate upon them.

Well, it is more stable and up-to-date than Mandriva 2010.2, so why not?

Are there any points of contact for 'emergency' bugs, or at least how often are bugs triaged? My users do not tolerate bugs, and I get chewed on for them. A seemingly silly example is how the mailto handler is broken in 2011 - it brings up Thunderbird but doesn't fill in the email's 'To' field. They have a lot of web based stuff, and that's one of the things they use quite a bit.

Well, if it's really urgent you can always use IRC to contact the triagers or developers. Normally all newly reported bugs are now triaged within the day they are reported.

Mandriva was historically known as being a bleeding edge distro, or at least that's what I remembered. Will you folks be continuing that 'tradition'? I did some poking around but didn't really nail down any desires regarding the 'bleeding edge'/'stability' debate. For example, Mandriva was the first distro that I was aware of that had PHP5.3 packaged and ready to rock.

Mageias first goal is to be rock stable. That does not mean we're using the oldest software, though

Important - how easy is it (or is it possible) to transition from Mandriva 2011? I'm about four timezones away from the computers I maintain (all hail the great internet).. so it's a bit of a pain to switch to something that works if I'll have to have someone physically there to reformat the machines.

Well, that's a hard one. Mainly due to RPM5 and newer software than in Mageia 1, there is no successful upgrade i know of.
Basically you need to dowgrade the RPM database because it uses a different format and you'd manually need to exchange
all packages which are in a higher version in Mandriva 2011.

Will Mageia work decently on the iMac? Unfortunately the company I work for full time is an apple shop and that's what I'm provided with.. I'd prefer to be using the same system that I am responsible for.

PPC or Intel? If Intel, yes, if PPC, no there is no PPC port available.


Other than that, a warm and magical welcome to you

[stephenliberty]

Good replies. Yes, the iMac is an Intel one.

Two other questions, and these are just general linux ones that would help patch up the last of "why isn't this working, why can't we just use _____".

The printer that was picked up for one of the offices doesn't seem to work very well.. the pictures are printed very, very dark. It's an HP so I found it odd because HP's are usually the most compatible. Any recommendations on a color printer? (The one we picked up was an Officejet 4500) Also, I'm not sure if a network based one would work better, as it would theoretically be able to just accept pure postscript?

I've got a site that a couple of the agents use for their work.. it pulls up public documents. For whatever reason, it works fine on 2010.2 but doesn't work on 2011 or Mageia (Java + Firefox, same versions on all). Haven't a clue why, and I've been banging my head against the wall for the last two weeks over it. I'd be more than happy to pay someone a few hundred $ to get the thing working, as it's quite a pain point right now and it seems to be beyond my ability to figure out. Is there anywhere here that I could post a 'bounty' of sorts? It'd be incredibly helpful to at least have the root cause be public knowledge so some other poor sucker doesn't run into the same issue with another site and have to go through all this. And if the coin helps support the project, why not right? I had already set aside the cash for Mandriva, but nobody emailed me back on the support request.

[doktor5000]

The printer that was picked up for one of the offices doesn't seem to work very well.. the pictures are printed very, very dark. It's an HP so I found it odd because HP's are usually the most compatible. Any recommendations on a color printer? (The one we picked up was an Officejet 4500) Also, I'm not sure if a network based one would work better, as it would theoretically be able to just accept pure postscript?

FWIW, i'll deviate from the golden rule "one problem per thread" as this is more of a Q&A thread.
So far we've only had one user who reported something similar, although we've not been able
to find out what causes this. Tried different drivers, different PPDs, different hplip versions
and also the PPD which was working for Mandriva.
If you find out what causes the color changes, drop me a note and i'll fix it.

Theoretically you should aim for a printer which does native Postscript and/or native PDF.

I've got a site that a couple of the agents use for their work.. it pulls up public documents. For whatever reason, it works fine on 2010.2 but doesn't work on 2011 or Mageia (Java + Firefox, same versions on all). Haven't a clue why, and I've been banging my head against the wall for the last two weeks over it. I'd be more than happy to pay someone a few hundred $ to get the thing working, as it's quite a pain point right now and it seems to be beyond my ability to figure out. Is there anywhere here that I could post a 'bounty' of sorts? It'd be incredibly helpful to at least have the root cause be public knowledge so some other poor sucker doesn't run into the same issue with another site and have to go through all this. And if the coin helps support the project, why not right? I had already set aside the cash for Mandriva, but nobody emailed me back on the support request.

Care to share a link? Is Java needed for that site? If yes, is the problem the same with OpenJDK and Oracle's Java (java-1.6.0-sun)?
Firefox error console or web developer console shows any warnings/errors?

[stephenliberty]

Thanks - I get ahead of myself sometimes. Anyway, I've tried all sorts of drivers and etc.. but nothing as of yet, so we were considering just dumping the printer and getting a new one that was better supported. Wasn't sure if there were any recommendations on that front, but yes.. I'll do some lookups of native postscript printers.

Regarding the site, it's a private site (that is paid for) so I'd need to find someone to work with on the issue due to the username/password. We're using the Sun version of Java, all in the 1.6 update 2x range. The consoles don't give any feedback except for the java console, which complains about not being able to load a file (and that seems to be an error that is from the plugin rather than java).. and again, the oddity is that it works fine on 2010.2 with the same versions. I've even installed the 2010.2 versions of java and firefox on 2011 to see if it was something there.. but that didn't make any difference.. so I think it's a system configuration issue.

If you'd like, I can split off into two different threads now. Also, a few of the other issues that we've had work fine in Mageia so it looks like it'll be a go for switching.

Stephen

[doktor5000]

If you'd like, I can split off into two different threads now. Also, a few of the other issues that we've had work fine in Mageia so it looks like it'll be a go for switching.

Yeah, please do so, helps to keep the clarity

[ghmitch]

Stephen, I currently have four desktops running Linux. When Mageia forked off from Mandriva after 10.2 I was undecided as to which way I would go. In fact I am still dual booting Mageia with Mandriva on my home system which is SuperMicro based with a full 3ware hardware RAID setup. My experience thus far as a user is that Mandriva has a far wider range of apps available whereas Mageia concentrates on the most commonly used apps and ignores a lot of the more bleeding edge esoteric choices. In spite of more limited choices, I find myself spending 95%+ of my work time on Mageia because it mainly "just works" and has had very few problems for me. Automatically provided upgrades are well thought out and have NEVER broken my system. The software manager works well and has not left me with any problems thus far. Additionally I have three systems that I use for business. Of those three I have already converted the main one to Mageia and when I did a lot of my headaches went away. The other two will likely be converting eventually.

As for bugs, I was used to submitting bugs to Mandriva and having most of them "resolved" after a couple of years as being to old to address. In other words they never got around to them and come back a year later to tell me to resubmit them if they are still valid. A small percentage of my submissions actually got addressed seriously. With Mageia, my experience has been that stuff gets fixed in no time. Most problems in fact that I have experienced, I locate the bug and prepare to submit a bug report only to have an update from Mageia drop down which resolves the problem. They have been that quick and it has been very refreshing.

On the printer side, I switched long ago from cheap inkjets to relatively inexpensive lasers with postscript support operating off of network print servers. My advice would be lasers with built in network support. Its more expense up front and slightly less quality for high end color printing, but it certainly makes most of your problems go away. I use HP exclusively.

Those are my thoughts and perceptions from the user side.