Review : Mandriva One Spring 2010

Todays review focuses on Mandriva's One operating system from the Spring 2010 range of products. Tested on a system with the following tech specs:-
AMD Athlon 64 1.60GHz, 2048GB DDR2, 160GB HDD, ATI Graphics, Atheros Network Card.

Mandriva One edition is the latest free operating system from Mandriva. Unlike the Mandriva Free edition, One does come pre-bundled with certain proprietary software including Adobe Flash. In short 'One' is a completely functioning operating system right from the moment you install and is available on live CD/DVD with 32 and 64 bit editions. This review focuses on the 32bit edition installed to the hard drive.

Mandriva sports an easy and fast installation package which makes installing the system a breeze, with most options being pre-selected for the configuration of your system so all it really needs from the user is to input the username and root details and select the partition to install on, from then on all you need to do is sit back and wait. On my computer standard installation took around 10 minutes, after which the computer reboots and you are asked to create a primary user name and password.

Once you finish installing Mandriva you will be presented, upon logging in with a modified KDE desktop (worth noting that this modified desktop is faster than a standard KDE install), Your start menu is easily accessible through the blue star icon in the corner of the screen. Setting up a wireless network is a breeze with Mandriva's custom built network settings wizard which auto-scans all networks and connects in second (as well as auto-connecting on start-up after you have set the network up).
Mandriva also comes with a selection of software including open office, amarok media player (mp3 codecs need to be downloaded from fluendo.com, although this is free and takes only a few minutes, make sure you media player is closed before installing), Firefox web browser and RPMDrake which enables you to download software quickly and efficiently from Mandriva's own repositories.
The Mandriva control centre is also customized and laid out for easy access to system configuration.

Conclusion:-
Mandriva is a fast, capable and compatible operating system with support for a large number of applications and with a nice selection pre-bundled, clean and uncluttered interfaces and stable operating environment make it a very easy distribution to use and get along with on an everyday basis.

Pros:-
Easy and fast installer, pre-bundled with a selection of software to optimize your productivity from the start including office apps, very easy network configuration and easy installer for adding additional software.

Cons:-
Package manager is a bit slow to start and does not include some proprietary codecs needed for multimedia, the software settings also only list applications with a GUI by default so lib files won't show in a search, this setting is easy to change but if you don't notice it could be confusing. Occasional software bugs can also be slightly annoying but are easily fixed with a trip to the community forums at forums.mandriva.com

Overall Rating - 9/10

Highly recommended but software repositories could be made better and automatic dependency support for software downloaded outside of the repositories could be included.