I'm not sure but I doubt it. The cheapest membership is standard which is $60/year and gives you access to the closed-source drivers, java, flash etc packages. The difference between the $60 and the $120 memberships is that you get to download the Powerpack DVD (with all the closed-source packages on it) with the $120 membership, whereas with the $60 you can download a 4CD download version and then once you've installed that add a urpmi source for the club RPMs and get flash, java etc.


How has firefox been modified? I've never had any trouble installing Flash or Java to work with it - its the same process as I had to go through on other distros like Centos. Admittedly though I've used the club packages for the last couple of versions.

I'm not trying start a big argument here but I don't think that's very accurate. Your complaints so far have been that Mandriva doesn't include closed-source software, this only makes it more open in my view. Also other distros, eg. Suse, don't include closed-source packages in their download versions either - you have to add repositories after you've downloaded it.

Yes and mp3 libs are installed by default unlike some US-based distros (*cough*Suse*cough*Fedora )

No.

Agreed, that's one of the main reasons I don't like Fedora - even with dag and livna or whatever its still not anywhere near as much as in the Mandriva repos, and some of the Fedora repos conflict with each other (dag and livna I think for eg.).

Its actually deleted everytime you use one of the urpmi/RPMDrake tools. If you're running urpmi from the command line you can add the --noclean option everytime. Search around this forum because there's been lots of posts on this, esp. about how to do the same for the GUI tools, which I'm not sure about.

"Admittedly though I've used the club packages for the last couple of versions."
Really, in any distro that I tested, you use firefox, and firefox automatically downloads the flash plugin.
It's a really nice browser
In Mandriva, it tells you that the plugin installation has failed, and gives you a link to a page that's protected, stating that you need to pay in order to become a member and download the flash

Really folks, really annoying I am not 100% sure that firefox was changed, but that is my main impression

Before I had the club membership I'd just goto www.macromedia.com, download Flash and install it. It worked fine.

Yep, I concurr with tkedwards I don't know what you're talking about, xbaez....

if you need to know how to install it for the 64 bit version, read my post (post #7) in this thread on how to manually install it.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...61#post1995261

Ok, I'll guess I'll give Mandriva a try this weekend at my office.
Already tried on my dad's laptop, it's a REALLY nice distro for a WindowsME/XP customer.

What I want is to install flash, adobe acrobat reader, java, and cxoffice 4 (and install Office XP and IE) in order for my mom to have a fully functional computer, and chat with me via Skype, in a friendly distro such as Mandriva.

I'll make sure to take Mandriva 2006 free with me in the trip to the US that I'm doing, and install Mandriva on her computer.

Really, about the firefox, I really think it's changed, not a nice way (from what I think) to 'force' users to pay at Mandriva. I mean, they are actually (from my hypothesis) removing nice features to firefox.

I will download the firefox installer and install it on Mandriva, since 1.07 is a really nice browser

Does anybody knows were I can do that?
I found links to version 1.5 of firefox only

Thanks for all your help guys, appart from the firefox issue I'm really happy with the distro for my relative.

Firefox 1.07 is included in Mandriva and if you didn't get it installed in the initial installation, you can access it for FREE by going to easyurpmi.zarb.org and setting up your urpmi repositories and then typing this command as root in konsole:

urpmi mozilla-firefox

for java, you can go to java.sun.com and get the installer. really quite straightforward. or you can use the opensource alternative by typing:

urpmi j2re

If you mean macromedia flash, it is freely downloadable from the internet at macromedia.com as was said repeatedly before. I'm not sure why this is a problem for you. I am running the club(read: paid) version of Mandriva, and it doesn't have flash installed as default.

Mandriva does not require you to pay for anything. It just means that if you want perks like Adobe Acrobat for linux, non-public drivers, and other miscellaneous things then you must purchase (a) a club membership, or (b) a boxed set. If you want most of the things that is included in the paid versions, then mostly all you need to do is go out and get them yourself.

Is that cleared up now?

Here's all the firefox releases:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.o...efox/releases/

I'm downloading a lot of software for my Mandriva 2006
However, I one to ask one question, just for the records
even though I found:
eclipse
kshowmail
openoffice.org 2

I will like to know if Mandriva and Ubuntu (not to mention, Debian), include the largest repositories

If you will compare Ubuntu to Mandriva (repositories), which one will contain more software?
One thing that I really like about Mandriva is that it's a really well-done distro, graphically atractive, and it's menus are all neat and well organized

Do a on Mandriva and you'll see it has around 12 or 13 thousand packages depending on wether you've got the club version with the closed-source drivers/apps or not. According to debian.org the latest Debian release has more than 15000 packages. So I'd say that Ubuntu/Debian has a few more packages than Mandriva, but its not a huge difference.

suse 10 is better than mandriva in terms of aesthetics

Whats interesting about Debian is that a quite a sizeable number of those 15000 packages are dummy packages that actually don't do anything, but are there to satisfy dependency issues.

I didn't find a Mandriva 2006 Free DVD installation, can someone give me a link ? (fast one I hope)

not sure if this is the right thread anymore but heres the link:

http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=29

Mandriva 2007 beta available or not?

The iso's for both CD and DVD are out on the ftp sites. Choose a Mandriva ftp mirror close to you, then navigate to "Mandrakelinux/official/iso/2006.0/i586" if you use a 32 bit processor, or "Mandrakelinux/official/iso/2006.0/x86_64" if yours is a 64 bit one. Note that there is no DVD image for the 64 bit version yet AFAIK.

HTH,

The ISOs for 2006 are at www.mandrivalinux.com and have been since october or november last year when they released it to the public, even the x86_64 release AFAICT.

They released and alpha for 2007 about a month ago - http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/vie...Linux2007Frige
The alpha is interesting to play around with (and update to the latest status of Cooker) but I wouldn't try to use it as your main installation - its still too unstable and changes too quick.