Mandriva - Day 1

I finally had some free time yesterday to begin playing with Mandriva - my chosen Linux distro.

I'd already downloaded and burnt the CD image I needed. This is "Mandriva One" - which includes everything I need for a basic system and comes as a "live" CD, meaning the system can be booted from the CD before installing onto disk.

So feeling a small frisson of excitement, I booted the CD. About 15 years ago I remember a colleague at work taking the - then extraordinary - step of installing Linux on a works desktop. Back then he'd had trouble getting it started on account of there not being a video driver for the proprietary video card in that model of PC. This was the first time the massive benefits of the open source community had been brought home to me in a concrete way. He posted the spec of the video card on a Linux forum and when he came back into work the next day, someone in the States had written him a driver.

Fifteen years on, and I expected no such problems. Linux has matured into an OS that is suitable for moderately computer literate users to use, and the hardware I'm using has become much less proprietary. What I DID expect to have a problem with, is the fact that I haven't touched any flavour of Unix for about ten years, so I'll be crawling up that learning curve again almost as a novice (but with some dimly remembered snippets of information about file systems, forks, processes, and strangely-named utilities).

Mandriva booted without incident, and I ran through the initial config to set language, keyboard layout, and timezone. Faced with a desktop that was at once familiar and different, I launched Firefox. The Linux version looks very slightly "clunkier" than on Windows but other than that it appeared unchanged. However, I had no network connection. There is no LAN cable in this PC, and the wireless network was not configured. After a few seconds scratching around I found the right place to set up a wireless connection, but the distro did not include a native driver for my Netgear WG111T USB wireless dongle, so (I discovered) I'd need to use the Windows driver with something called an ndiswrapper.

I marked this down for future reference as I figured there wasn't much point doing the configuration while booted from the CD, and moved on to try a Live Install. I quickly learned that I couldn't install onto an NTFS-formatted partition. The boot partition has to have a native Linux filesystem (thus negating my formatting of the new disk earlier in the week). I used the Linux partitioner to recreate a boot partition. This looked extremely scary and reminded me how powerful Linux is and how easy it is to wreck an entire system if you don't keep your wits about you. I was glad I'd chosen to install Linux onto a completely separate disk. It was easy to stay away from doing any damage to Windows, as that is all on "sda" (Mandriva's name for my primary hard disk) while Linux is going on "sdb".

Having created a boot partition I tried the Live Install again, only to find it was asking where I wanted it to put the swap space. I backed out of the install. I'd rather spend some time reading up exactly what I need to do, instead of attacking each new requirement as it arises and getting through the process one painful step at a time.

Before closing down, I took a look at Open Office Writer - the Linux equivalent of MS Word. Again, it looks kind of familiar but with some differences. I had hoped that I'd be able to hold a single central document store and access it from both Windows and Linux (while I'm in this transitory stage), but I couldn't get the Writer file open dialogue to navigate outside the filestore of /usr/guest. I'm hoping this will be a restriction of the CD boot.

It was time to reload Windows and do some reading. I found out where the Netgear driver is, and I read up a few forum entries on installation prerequisites. Apparently, I need:

1. A swap file. Formatted as "Linux swap" and about 512MB in size. One of those dim memories tells me the swap space needs to be at least as big as the PCs memory, so I figured I'd give it a gig.
2. A root partition, mounted as "/" and formatted as "ext3" (Linux has a bewilderingly huge list of alternative file systems, which as a long-time Windows user, where you have the choice of FAT, FAT32, or NTFS, I found somewhat daunting. But as usual with such things, you appear to be able to ignore most of them - which probably have specialist functions - and stick with one or two basic types). The forum said 1GB is "more than enough" for this, but since space isn't a problem for me, and the entry may be outdated, I decided to go with 5GB
   
3. A home partition (where all the user files are kept). This can be "as big as you like" but given that it's readable only by Linux I decided to restrict it to 50GB to start with. At some point once everything is working I'll format the rest of the disk as NTFS and use it for media files, which should be readable by either system

Armed with this new information, I rebooted from the Mandriva CD and completed the Live Install successfully, choosing a graphical GRUB loader to replace the Windows loader. At one point the install told me it had found a whole load of hardware drivers that I didn't need, and asked whether it was OK to leave these out. I figured yeah, why not? Going ahead and rebooting from the hard disk, my first task was to get the wireless connection working. I think some of you will be ahead of me here, but guess what? Yep - the wireless package was one of those things the install had decided I didn't need. Ouch.

I tried to search for a way to install the wireless package from the CD, but with my woefully limited knowledge I couldn't find a way of mounting the CD so it was accessible to the software installer, and using the file browser I couldn't find anything on the CD that looked like it might be a wireless package. Time to reinstall.

I hoped there'd be a way to select individual packages to include - the wireless one was clearly visible in the list - but it is an "all or nothing" exclusion, so this time round obviously I had to elect to include them all. Rebooting AGAIN (this could get boring!) I navigated successfully to the Wireless configuration page and hit my final frustration of the day - I'd forgotten to make a note of our WEP key. I'd run out of time for playing with Mandriva - and almost run out of patience if I'm honest - but I'd learned a lot even though it didn't feel as though I'd achieved much. Better luck next time, hopefully.