oti0sus

I ended the last post writing that I would use the Suse 10.0 OS for the foreseeable future. Well, it didn't last long. I believe Suse has always had a bad reputation for multimedia, and that's what I found the problem was. For reasons beyond me, when I opened a movie on the media player, it played back either in slow motion or it skipped frames. There were other strange issues, such as the download speed to my MP3 player through the USB. Again for reasons unknown, the downloads proceeded only at the most trochian speeds I seen for a long time. It would take almost 30 minutes to put an album of 50 MB or so onto the MP3 player. I decided to give the Mandriva 2006 distro another try.

Mandriva 2006 has to be the fastest installing OS I have encountered. It couldn't have taken much more than 15 minutes. There are three install CDs, and I used the Gnome gui which I still wanted to give a try, though it isn't the default for Mandriva. On the first install I opted to change the default configuration to use the "vesa" driver. This led to instability and I had to re-install following the wizard more closely. After finishing, I went to opt for the "vesa" and it seems to have worked fine.

I had decided to try to install Mandriva with the plugin SB Audigy sound card. It had never worked, and required making a selection in the BIOS. It's a big plus for Mandriva that it correctly recognized the card and installed the drivers automatically. On the other hand, Java and Flash had to be installed manually.

One feature I like about Suse was the automated update notification. Every few days a little lizard on the panel would turn red telling my that updates were available. I would click on it and decide whether or not to install the updates. It's a comforting procedure. Nothing like that exists for Mandriva, unless you shell out some money to join the club. I would consider doing this but, I might just as easily abandon the OS and install another one whenever another attractive alternative comes along.

There are still problems with the USB external MP3 player, which is mounted at booting, but otherwise ignored. It may take a little bit of work in getting it to work properly. I also found that I have to log out as user and log in as root to delete or change any files that don't sit in my HOME directory. A bit disconcerting at first until I discovered the trick to it. Using the "su" command and my attempts to "chown" or "chmod" were to no avail. It's not a bad idea really, as it's very easy to delete valuable data files. The Gnome applications I found so unsatisfactory on the Ubuntu 5.10 distro were better on the Mandriva. (By the way, 5.10 refers to October 2005, so I was mistaken in calling it 5.1 in the previous post.) I found some advice by searching the net for changing the default font size for subtitles for the Totem Movie Player: Among the hidden files in the HOME directory, is the folder .Gnome2 and in there is the totem_config file. Open the file and make the appropriate changes. I believe it was this page that helped me. I had better luck with the Rhythmbox audio player, but it was short-lived. I removed it a few days ago when it seemed to stop allowing me to expand my library. I'm on the look-out for a good Gnome audio player.