One week of KDE

Posted on March 23, 2008 by Frederik

Last week, I swtiched back from GNOME to KDE for one week. I used KDE 3.5.9, not 4.0.2 because I think that one will very probably not be mature enough for my needs.

What is nice in KDE, is that it is often much more advanced than GNOME functionality wise. For example, Kopete has much better MSN support than Pidgin: it supports sending and receiving of away/personal messages, there’s webcam support,… The KDE notifications framework is a great way to fine tune all kinds of different notifications to events, such as sounds, passive pop-up notifications, etc,… K3b is by far the best Free CD burner application, while Amarok is still unrivaled in its combination of power and GUI attractiveness and GNOME’s F-Spot does not even have half of Digikam’s features. KDE’s memory usage also felt better than GNOME. My 1 GB system seemed to swap less than in GNOME, running comparable programs.

The big problem with KDE however, still are the random crashes and various things which do not work as expected. In one week of time, I experienced two random Kontact/KMail crashes. GWenview/nspluginviewer is crashing when entering a directory with movies if you have mplayerplug-in installed. KMail sometimes gives new mail notifications for old, unread e-mail and changing the file associations for MIME types, does not always seem to work correctly, especially when using the right click – Open With menu, and selecting the option to always use the selected application in the future. KDE does not support mounting LUKS encrpyted file systems and the fact that you have to explicitly open a removable device first in Konqueror in order to have it mounted, can be annoying at times.

So I am back to GNOME again now. While it has generally less features than KDE, the features that are there, generally work very reliably, which is not always the case in KDE. Unfortunately, I am afraid that the Linux desktop will only really start taking of if there’s a desktop which can nicely combine stability, features and ease of use, which is not yet the case to my feeling. I am curious to see what KDE 4 will bring in the future. Based on Mutt’s motto, for now I dare to conclude: all desktops suck, GNOME just sucks slightly less.

Bye Bye PulseAudio

Posted on January 22, 2008 by Frederik

Some time ago, Mandriva decided to install the PulseAudio sound server by default in its distribution. Personally I did not really like the decision to activate PulseAudio by default in all desktop environments: I have been using Alsa with great satisfaction now for years, and I did not have any problem with that, so having to depend on yet another service did seem overkill to me. Nevertheless, I let PulseAudio be activated on my system too, in order to help as much as possible with bug hunting.

I think this was very useful, as I could help debugging some problems which are now fixed already or will probably be fixed soon, like some policykit related problems, problems with libao applications and pulseaudio, an amsn crash due to a bug in pulseaudio’s oss wrapper, some PulseAudio menu entry fixes, suggestions about the the default choice of PulseAudio applications installed by default.

PulseAudio has improved a lot during the last two months, and it’s sure that Mandriva’s current implementation will be a lot better than what was shipped in Fedora 8. Still I am not conviced at all it is a good idea to activate PulseAudio by default like will be the case now, and I have decided to remove it from my system.

To explain why, let’s first take a look at the advantages which PulseAudio claims to offer:

Sound mixing: different applications can produce sound at the same time without any problem. I have been using Alsa for years now, either with sound cards which support hardware mixing, either with Alsa’s dmix software mixing. I’ve never had trouble playing different audio streams at the same time with this set up.
Moving sound streams between different audio cards. I only have one sound device, so I do not need this feature. This feature could be handy for people using headsets for VoIP application, because they can move their VoIP application to the head set, and keep their music player on the normal sound card. I am not sure a sound server is really needed for that: I would expect VoIP applications to have a configuration panel where the user can change the audio device to use.
PulseAudio makes it possible to set different volume levels for all applications. Most applications today already use their own internal volume mixer like for example Rhythmbox, Amarok, Totem, Kaffeine, Pidgin,… Because of that, I have never felt the need to use this PulseAduio PulseAudio feature during these months, and I doubt even lots of users will know of the existence of this possibility.
PulseAudio does higher quality resampling than Alsa for sound cards supporting only 48Khz output. I have such a sound card, and did some listening tests with headphones. I could clearly hear a difference between PulseAudio’s low-quality “trivial” resampler and its better “speex-float-1 resampler”, however I could not hear a difference between PulseAudio’s higher quaility “speex-float-3” resampler and Alsa’s resampler: both sounded good to my ears. I did not really find any reliable listening tests proving that Alsa’s resampler is bad, only some vague claims.
PulseAudio makes it possible to send sound over the network to another machine running PulseAudio. Without any doubt, this is a great feature for thin clients, but this feature is only used extremely rarely on normal desktop systems.

So I did not find any advantage in using PulseAudio. Still, the potential features could be interesting and make it worthwhile to keep PulseAudio nevertheless, one never knows these features might become useful one day? No. For me there were too important disadvantages when using PulseAudio:

PulseAudio’s resampler uses a lot of CPU time. (Mandriva bug #36084). On my not too slow Athlon 64 3500+ CPU, PulseAudio was using more than 7 % of CPU time when playing music with the default resampler. Choosing the lower quality resampler speex-float-3 made it use still more than 3 %, which is still a lot on such a CPU. Rhythmbox itself also seemed to use more CPU time when using PulseAudio than when using Alsa. There is clearly a lot of optimization to do here. The only reaction by PulseAudio’s developer is that MMX/SSE/SSE2 optimization patches are welcome…
PulseAudio forces every application to use PulseAudio. When PulseAudio is activated, other applications cannot access the sound device directly. Alsa applications are routed through PulseAudio with a libalsa plug-in, OSS applications with the padsp wrapper. As the libao bug shows, this is still not working like it should. Even KDE’s Arts sound server output is routed now through the PulseAudio server: that means KDE 3 users will enjoy running two sound servers at the same time! Not only are there still difficult to debug interaction problems (known by Fedora for months, but unresolved), but it seems clear to me that this has to introduce extra latency for audio applications. In the Windows world, there are different professional studio applications which require very specific sound hardware. How could such applications benefit from minimum latencies and other advantages of these hardware, if they cannot access it directly, but have to pass through PulseAudio?
PulseAudio stops all sound if you switch to another console and/or switch to a different user. If I switch from X to tty0, there is no reason why PulseAudio should mute all my audio applications. In the end it feels like PulseAudio prohibits me to use tty0 and thinks that I should use an X terminal instead. I don’t like being forced to change my behaviour. If I want to stop my music, I will really do so myself, there’s no need to decide this for me.

Looking at PulseAudio’s timeline I currently have the impression that not much development is happening anymore, but instead the developer spends his time writing a rant about Alsa.

In the end it feels like PulseAudio could be a funny toy for geeks who want to tinker with their sound system, but for someone who wants things to just work without too much hassle, Alsa still feels much better. That’s why I removed as much PulseAudio packages as possible. All my sound applications are again using Alsa now. Everything is working fine, and I feel freed from a service which was only causing me needless trouble. In the end, I think the most problems which PulseAudio tries to solve, should have been fixed in Alsa instead of developing a complete new sound server.

Update 23 January 2008: It seems some people consider this post as a “rant” or as “bashing”. Personally I have the feeling this is not a completely fair judgment: I tried to clearly give objective facts for why I do not like PulseAudio, while “ranting” or “bashing” is much more negative and is much more about feelings than about real facts. It should also be clear that I would consider PulseAudio acceptible if it its resampling did not use so much CPU time as it does now, and if it was not so invasive, but let applications still use Alsa directly, like in fact Arts and Esd always have been doing.

Testing Mandriva 2008.1 Cooker KDE

Posted on January 13, 2008 by Frederik

This week-end, I tested Mandriva Cooker 2008.1 KDE. The procedure was the same as last week: a default KDE network installation via my local FTP mirror (only main) in a Virtualbox virtual machine. Here are the issues I noticed. I submitted the most important ones to Bugzilla.

The Virtualbox time synchronization service is started much too early. The first boot, it fails to start because Virtualbox’ dkms modules have not been built yet. Reported as Mandriva bug 36728.
At the first boot the DrakFirstTime wizard says no working Internet connection could be found, but after I logged in, the connection was working fine. Reported as Mandriva bug 36727.
The KDE menu shows the “KDE 3.5” header image twice at the top, and sometimes the Most Used Application header is also duplicated or the All Applications header is missing, making everything appear under Most Used Applications. This was already reported as Mandriva bug 36700.
Like is the case in GNOME, the description for applications (stored in the GenericName field) should be shown next to the name in the menus. There is currently no way for new users to know that Amarok is a music player and Kaffeine a video player, except by starting them up. I reported this already a long time ago as Mandriva bug 29900.
The gnome-media package is installed in a default KDE installation. This causes a More submenu in Sound & Video. I reported this already a long time ago as Mandriva bug 35293.
Pulseaudio’s Volume Control appears in the More submenu in KDE, while there is no native KDE alternative. It should appaer directly in Sound & Video. Reported as Mandriva bug 36726.
Pulseaudio Volume Control and Pulseaudio Preferences are also missing an icon the KDE menu. Reported as Mandriva bug 36714.

Also related to Pulseaudio and arts, I once saw the error: “Sound server fatal error: cpu overload, aborting”. This problem has been noticed by other people already on the Cooker mailing list, but there is no reproducible test case.
The kicker panel at the bottom is terrible in its default configuration: the height is set to small and because there are a lot of applications added to the panel and lots of applications active in the system tray by default together with the 4 virtual desktops and now also the media applet, there is way too less space left for the task list. The current configuration is only acceptible for widescreen and high resolution monitors. People have been complaining about this before (actually for 2007.0 Mandriva reverted to the normal height because of the many complaints for years about it) but I have the impression Mandriva thinks the corporate logo on the program menu button is more important than usability :-(
Related to the above problem, the Mandriva Control Center should not be added to the kicker panel. Reported as Mandriva bug 36725.
The Internet and Tools menus are too long in a default KDE installation. This can be fixed by consolidating the main Kontact applications in one menu item. I reported this already a long time ago as Mandriva bug 32666.
The Kdenlive video editing application is missing a GenericName description in its desktop file. Reported to the Kdenlive bug tracker bug #66.
While Firefox is the default browser in KDE, some URLs still open in Konqueror. Reported as Mandriva bug 36724.
KMail should check for new e-mail immediately when it’s started, like all other mail clients do. Reported as Mandriva bug 36716.
Akregator should check for new feed entries immediately after it has been started. Reported as Mandriva bug 36717.
The KDE ia_ora style still causes wrong rendering of the buttons in Amarok. This problem has already been reported a long time ago as Mandriva bug 33502.
KMilo should be split out of the kdeutils-klaptop package and should be installed by default. This will help fixing the problem that special keys on multimedia and laptop keyboard do not work in KDE. Reported as Mandriva bug 36731.
If Gwenview is installed, personally I think it should be preferred as the default picture viewer, above showFoto, because Gwenview makes it easier to immediately browse the other images in the same directory.
There is currently no easy to find network browser installed by default. Something like smb4k should be installed by default again.
I think the gtk-qt-engine package should be installed by default, because it offers the possibility of changing the theme used by GTK+ applications in KDE. It should not be set set to the gtk-qt-engine by default, but to use the native GTK+ ia_ora theme, like is the case now.
knewsticker and kdeprintfax should not be installed by default. Keeping yourself up to date with news, is better done with a true RSS reader like Akregator, and not many people have the right hardware to use kdeprintfax. The same is true for kpilot and kpalmdoc.

Next on my Cooker to-do list: quickly check out the default applications included on Mandriva One KDE and GNOME alpha2, test Mandriva’s server packages,… I can really recommend other people to do similar things: pick a subject or program which interests you, test it intensively, by preference in a new and clean Mandriva installation and file all problems you encounter in the projects upstream bugzilla or Mandriva’s bugzilla!

Testing Mandriva 2008.1 Cooker GNOME

Posted on January 6, 2008 by Frederik

This week-end, I installed Mandriva Cooker in a Virtualbox virtual machine. I did a default GNOME installation, and noted and reported all problems I found, in the hope of improving the quality for when a new alpha or beta version comes out. I did a network installation from my local Cooker mirror (which only has the main repository, no contrib). Here’s a quick summary of the problems I found:

There are currently problems when installing the / partition on a logical volume using LVM. The problem is known and being worked on. As a work-around, I installed using standard partitions
The keyboard layout selection dialog is very ugly and confusing, especially when the “More” part is opened. Reported as Mandriva bug #36521.
When I set the timezone to Europe/Brussels, in the next screen, the local time and UTC time were equal, which is impossible in this timezone. Reported as Mandriva bug #36522
After the installation, X did not want to start. This was caused by a problem in the Virtualbox display and mouse drivers. This bug was already reported as Mandriva bug #35085.
When X failed to start, the dialog program was used to show a message informing me that X could not be started. While this message was visible, it seemed like dialog was using 100% of CPU time. I need to verify if I can reproduce this bug.
After running urpmi –auto-select, the dkms modules could not be build anymore. My kernel was updated, but because Mandriva’s installer did not select kernel-desktop-devel, the kernel-devel package was not updated too. Reported as Mandriva bug #36524
Mandriva’s update applet mdkonline is way too verbose: when it is checking for updates, it shows a notification bubble stating: “Warning – Please wait, checking for updates”, and if there are no updates available it way say: “Warning – Your system is up to date”. The warning word gives the (wrong) impression something is wrong. And actually these messages don’t really interest me. I just want to be notified if something if wrong or if there are any updates available. Personally, I think this applet should even be completely hidden if there’s nothing to say, so it does not clutter my notification bar. Reported as Mandriva bug #36526
The Firefox GNOME theme was not installed by default. The problem is that the main repository only contains an outdated version of the theme, which cannot be installed anymore with Mandriva’s Firefox 2.0.0.11 packages. Contrib contains the right version. Reported as Mandriva bug #36513
Personally I think subpixel font smoothing should be enabled by default because most people use TFT monitors nowadays and without this setting enabled, fonts look too blurry. Even on an old CRT monitor, I found subpixel font smoothing very acceptable and nice to use, so personally I don’t see any reason not to enable this by default.
The GNOME terminal was unusable: it appeared almost completely transparent and unreadable, including its menus and title bar. Disabling Metacity’s compositing fixed this problem. And it fixed also a problem where the screen would not refresh at all anymore after coming back from screen blanking. When disabling compositing via gconf-editor, the whole GNOME session hung. Reported as Mandriva bug #36527
In GNOME’s menu System – Preferences – Language and location the Region combobox was completely empty. It seems like this configuration tools also duplicates the functionality found in draklocale (run as user). One of the two should probably be hidden then.
The eog image viewer was not installed by default. Because of this, images would open in The Gimp, which is not very handy for quickly viewing an image. Reported as Mandriva bug #36520
When the system starts up, a message is printed: “Warning: Alsa driver is already running”. I guess the alsa or sound service tries to load the module which was already loaded by udev coldplugging before. Actually, years ago, it was said that those two sound services would be merged. This should really be done now, it is confusing because it is not clear what’s the difference between these two services.
OpenOffice.org requires the hsqldb RPM package. This package installs a service hsqldb, which does not even start without Java JVM. As far as I know, OpenOffice.org does not need this service at all, but just uses the hsqldb Java libraries. The hsqldb package should be splitted then, so that it’s not necessary to install and activate an extra service, which does not even start at all. Reported as Mandriva bug #36472 and Mandriva bug #36427
Because the openoffice.org-style-tango package was not installed while openoffice.org-style-gnome was, OpenOffice.org defaulted to the default Sun icon theme in large size, which is very ugly. Reported as Mandriva bug #36519
Personally I would prefer Beagle not to index aggressively when the screensaver is running. I find it very annoying that as soon as my screensaver starts, I hear my hard drive thrashing the whole time.
Personally I find Epiphany‘s minimum font size of 7 much too small. Setting it to 8 gave me comparable and much more easily readable fonts as in Firefox, while not causing any negative effects on web lay-outs (such as unwanted text overflow).
When starting Rhythmbox for the first time and opening the Edit – Preferences menu item, an error pops up that the Podcasts directory does not exist. Reported already as Mandriva bug #29908 and now also as GNOME bug #507541.
Mandriva includes some nice documentation, but none of it is installed by default. Reported as Mandriva bug #36518.
gstraemer-0.10-pulse was not installed because it is in contrib. Reported as Mandriva bug #36517.
I encountered a Yelp crash, but I had no backtrace, and could not reproduce it.
PulseAudio creates a whopping 6 menu items in the Sound & Video menu, which makes this menu look very cluttered. I think pavumeter should not be installed (removes two menu items, not a regression, because 2008.0 did not have any VU meters in the menu too), neither should paman (it only gives some technical information which does not really interest me) and padevchooser. Only the volume control should be installed by default, as that’s the only application normal user might use often. Not yet reported, as I think this should be accompanied by some other changes to the task-pulseaudio dependencies and suggestions, about which I need to think a bit more and about which I’ll start a discussion on the mailing list soon.
I think it could be interesting to install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg by default because it enables playing WMA/ASX files and radio streams in Rhythmbox.
drakmenustyle is installed by default, while we only really support the Mandriva menu structure. The tool in itself still works, but the default GNOME menus were missing some applications present in Mandriva’s menus, as was expected. In that case, we should probably not install this application by default.
Still a bunch of faxing applications are installed by default (hylafax-client, efax). Personally I think the number of people having the right hardware to use their system as a fax and the number of people really using such software, is extremely low so that we don’t need to install this by default. Anyway, I have proposed this many times before, and it feels like I’m banging my head against a wall, so I won’t bring this up again.
Tightvnc and rfbdrake are old applications which are not really maintained anymore. They should be replaced by the much better Vinagre and grdesktop applications, which are much nicer.
Nautilus is somewhat broken, but this caused by the GVFS transition, and the problems are known, so no need to report this again. Let’s see how this evolves during the next few weeks.

Improving Mandriva’s menu structure

Posted on December 2, 2007 by Frederik

I finally started writing a new paper evaluating the new menu structure as was introduced in Mandriva 2008.0. Generally, I think the new menu structure was a huge improvement: no more having to go two or three levels deep to start a simple audio player or an compression utility, is a big advantage.

Some things can still be improved though, especially in KDE, where some menus tend to become a bit long. I’m trying to write down some proposals to fix these problems. I’m also going to write a bit about default choice of installed applications, as this also influences how menus look right after the installation. Don’t expect a complete new menu structure again, as that would be useless now, but some proposals for smaller improvements to the current structure, which should not be difficult to implement.

If anybody has any practical proposals for improvements, let them know here. Which menus are too long for you, and what are their contents? How would you propose fixing the problem? Which applications are installed by default, but do you remove immediately after installation because you never use them? Or the inverse, which extra applications do you install immediately after the installation of Mandriva?

Mandriva 2008.1 Spring ideas

Posted on October 28, 2007 by Frederik

Now is the time to publish all your feature requests for the next version of Mandriva on the wiki. Some of my personal requests: integrated LTSP support, KDEPim 3.5 Enterprise, IcedTea Java installed by default in Mandriva Free, LUKS support in Diskdrake, some more work for reducing power consumption, etc… Make your requests known now before it is too late!

PS: Please don’t post suggestions or bug reports here: they will only be ignored. The only right place for bug reports is Mandriva’s bugzilla, and for feature requests is the wiki.

Distribution review progress

Posted on October 10, 2007 by Frederik

Currently I am trying out Mandriva 2008.0, OpenSUSE 103 and Ubuntu Gutsy in the hope of writing a detailed comparative review soon. Don’t expect it soon, as I’m currently still collecting basic information, and I have not started writing yet. And from my experience I gathered with the “What’s new in Mandriva 2008.0” article, I know that the writing alone will take a long time…

Anyway, here already some early observations:

The Mandriva installer is by far the best. OpenSUSE’s installer crashes in Virtualbox, and Ubuntu’s live installer requires a system with 320 MB of RAM and the alternative installer is text only.
Mandriva has the best support for running as a Virtualbox guest: it will configure the Virtualbox X drivers by default. OpenSUSE is worst here, because it refuses to run at a 1024×768 resolution inside Virtualbox: it just says the VESA driver does not support this resolution…
Performance wise Mandriva feels the fastsest, OpenSUSE the slowest. This is very preliminary though as I have not yet tested OpenSUSE and Ubuntu on real hardware yet, but only in Virtualbox.
I had hoped Mandriva 2008.0 to be a nearly perfect release and that it would be very difficult to find any real bugs during normal use. Unfortunately, some rather visibile bugs are still present, while several of them were reported before final release.
OpenSUSE’s GNOME application menu (originally called Slab) is terrible. Most applications are hidden in a seperate browser window, which actually contains a huge list of applications in a few main categories shown in the left. You can add a normal application menu, but its structure is very bad.

At first sight, the graphical presentation in OpenSUSE is the most impressive, with Mandriva being a close second. Personally I don’t like at all Ubuntu’s brown look.
Ubuntu seems to have a very limited GNOME installation, with a much more limited amount of applications installed by default, compared to Mandriva and OpenSUSE. All in all, probably a bit too limited.

As there are very early observations, some of them are maybe totally wrong, so take this all with a grain of salt for now.

First looks at OpenSUSE 10.3

Posted on October 8, 2007 by Frederik

I downloaded the OpenSUSE 10.3 DVD to test it out and compare it with Mandriva 2008.0. I was interested in reviewing the current state of this distribution and maybe also get some inspiration for improvements I can propose for Mandriva 2008.1.

The artwork in OpenSUSE is very nice. There are some interesting ideas we should really consider in Mandriva: possibility to read the release notes during the installation of packages, some interesting yast modules (the firwall module is way better than Mandriva’s),… But I discovered already a lot of problems by just quickly testing it out in Virtualbox: the installer (actually yast) just crashes completely when detecting the network configuration, there was no possibility to use a 1024×768 resolution in Virtualbox, some strange choices of default applications (especially in GNOME: Brasero is currently still a bit too buggy, and Skencil is extremely ugly),…

So currently I have a strong feeling that Mandriva 2008.0 will be a better and especially more stable distribution than OpenSUSE 10.3. I’ll continue testing out OpenSUSE a bit and noting my remarks, and I’ll probably install it on an old laptop I have here, to see how it works on real hardware. I’ll do the same with Mandriva 2008.0 and I’ll maybe post a review comparing Mandriva 2008.0 and OpenSUSE 10.3 (and maybe Ubuntu Gutsy too?). Well, time will tell.

By the time you read this, there is much chance that Mandriva 2008.0 final is out and downloadable. Go check the Mandriva download page now to check it out!

What’s new in Mandriva 2008.0

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Frederik

In less than two weeks time, six months after the great Mandriva 2007.1 Spring release, Mandriva 2008.0 will be ready and published. Currently, Release Candidate 2 is out, it’s your last chance to test it and make sure everything is working before the final release!

There were great ideas at the start of the development phase, and in in those six months that have passed, Mandriva has always been one of the most active projects on CIA.vc. This gives much hope for lots of improvements, so let’s take a look at what can be expected from Mandriva 2008.0.

Update 2 October 2007: The following translations of this article are now available, with thanks to the translators:

Hebrew (Dotan Kamber).
Brazilian Portugese (Sérgio Rafael Lemke)

Installation

Mandriva’s installation is largely unchanged from a user point of view. The most important visible change, is the fact that the user is now asked which desktop he wants to install, KDE or GNOME. After this choice, no more questions are asked, and a default selection of packages based on the chosen desktop is installed. Of course advanced users, can still do a custom selection of packages to install. After the installation, the user gets welcomed in a web based first time wizard.

Improved graphical and sound theme

Mandriva still uses the ia_ora graphical theme like was the case in previous version. There have been several important improvements however. Especially the KDE version, which was of a much lower quality than the GNOME version, has improved a lot. The menus and the window decoration look much nicer, the vertical separators in the toolbars are not ugly anymore,… For the Mandriva One live CDs a new nice blue colour theme has been created. The strong orange theme is not used by default anymore, but is still available for people who like it.

The wallpapers have been renewed, and also the splash screens (bootsplash, and GNOME and KDE splash screens) and screensaver have received a fresh new look. There is a new start-up sound, which will now also be enabled in GNOME.

Mandriva 2008.0 also has improved font rendering, thanks to the new freetype and the inclusion of the Liberation fonts, which improve compatibility with the non-free Microsoft fonts.

Improved and more stable desktop environments

KDE

The KDE version which is included is 3.5.7, with a lot of recent patches from the KDE 3.5 branch added. It is definitely the most stable KDE version ever. Especially the KDEPim applications (such as KMail and Korganizer), are a lot more stable now. KPDF is based on the latest version of XPDF now, which should improve rendering of some PDF documents. Konqueror’s rendering engine had a lot of bug fixes and when hovering your mouse over a link, an icon will now be displayed to show if the link will be opened in another window or in your mail client.

Kaffeine is now again the default video player in Mandriva’s free edition. Both the Xine back-end and Kaffeine have been compiled with XCB support, which should greatly improve the stability, especially when viewing embedded movies in Konqueror. In the PowerPack edition users can buy in the Mandriva Store, the default video player is Totem with the GStreamer back-end, because it includes non-free and patented codecs distributed by Fluendo.

The Kickoff menu is now available in Mandriva 2008.0, but not enabled by default, because not everyone likes it. If you want to enable it, you can do so by richt clicking on the menu icon in the Kicker panel at the bottom of your screen. The KDE ioslave sysinfo:/ will give a nice overview of your hardware.

GNOME

Mandriva 2008.0 includes the brand new GNOME 2.20 which include a lot of improvements. The Evince document viewer now uses the new Poppler 0.6 back-end, which improves PDF rendering and supports interactive forms. Evolution will now warn you before sending if you refer to an attachment in your mail text, but forgot to include it. If you are using the threaded view in Evolution and a new message is received in a mail thread, the whole thread will be moved to the top (or bottom, depending on your ordering settings), so you surely won’t miss the new message. Keyboard users will like the fact that they can read all of their mail with a single key, the space bar. Pressing the space bar, will scroll further in the message, and when you arrive at the end, pressing the space bar, will bring up the next unread e-mail. Corporate users will be happy with the many improvements in the Exchange and Groupwise support.

The Rhythmbox music player now supports gapless playback, synchronizes with more portable media devices (notably via MTP) and its memory usage has been reduced.

The desktop search application Beagle included a lot of bugfixes. It will be more stable now, and thanks to performance improvements it will interfere much less with normal work.

Other GNOME improvements include the usage of notification messages if special events are happening (when e-mail arrives for example), improvements to the picture viewer EOG, a better documentation system,… Pidgin now replaces GAIM as the default instant messaging application. The popular Windows FTP client FileZilla has just made its debut in Linux with the newly released version 3 and it’s now the default FTP client in GNOME.

XFCE

XFCE also received some attention in this Mandriva release. Mandriva now includes many typical XFCE applications, like Ristretto and Squeeze. Thanks to the task-xfce RPM package, you can easily install a complete XFCE desktop on systems with less powerful hardware. Compositing is now enabled in the XFCE packages. It’s possible there will be a Mandriva One version which uses XFCE as its default desktop later.

Improved applications menu

One year ago, I wrote a proposal for a new menu structure. I dedicated a long time to write this proposal, and in the end I got a bit fed up with it, as I did not knew if actually it would lead to something. So as you’ll probably notice if you read the document, I’ve actually never proofread the whole document :-) Anyway, Mandriva apparently found my proposal very interesting, and decided to implement it for 2008.0. The menu structure is much less nested now: all important applications can now be found directly under the main categories, while before they were nested two levels deep. This will make applications easier to find. If you have both GNOME and KDE installed, the menus will now make a difference between desktop native applications, and applications of the other desktop. The desktop native ones will always be on a higher level, to indicate to users that they should rather use that ones for reasons of integration.

New cool desktop effects with Compiz Fusion

Mandriva 2008.0 includes Compiz 0.5.2 with the Compiz Fusion plug-ins. These are a merge of the old Compiz and Beryl effects. Compiz is generally faster than before, and there are lots of nice new effects, like the Shift Switcher plug-in, giving you Apple Coverflow or Vista window flip effects.

KDE: Kaffeine and Compiz Fusion window preview

Better hardware support

Kernel

Mandriva 2008.0 will ship with a Linux 2.6.22.6 based kernel. It supports much more hardware than the kernel which was shipping with Mandriva 2007.1 Spring: support for all the newest SATA and SAS controllers, support for more DVB devices, improvements to the audio and networking support (for example important improvements to popular sky2, forcedeth, skge drivers and e1000 drivers) and much more.

Especially wifi support should be a lot better now. Linux 2.6.22 includes the new wifi stack mac80211, contributed originally by the company Devicescape. Mandriva has included many new drivers based on this stack, such as the b43 driver for Broadcom based devices, iwlwifi for Intel devices, Ralink drivers, etc…

Mandriva now also ships the pata drivers, which are a new replacement for the old IDE drivers. If you use these pata drivers, your IDE devices will now also be recognised like SCSI devices (sda, sdb, sr0,sr1,…). Because there are still some problems with these drivers, they are not used by default. The old, proven IDE drivers are still preferred for now.

Video card drivers

Mandriva 2008.0 ships xorg xserver 1.3 with many bug fixes included. It is a very stable basis. All latest xorg drivers are shipped, supporting all the newest graphical cards. Intel users will enjoy the randr 1.2 support, giving them the possibility to hotplug a second display. The 915resolution utility, which was needed to set the correct resolution on some laptop systems, is not needed anymore in Mandriva 2008.0.

Mandriva 2008.0 also includes the brand new Avivo driver for ATI r500 based chipsets (ATI X1xxx graphics cards, amongst others). Because the driver is in its early stages of development, it will only be enabled on cards on which this driver has already proven to be stable.

The ATI and NVidia binary drivers can now be downloaded from the non-free repositories. All the latest versions are available.

Laptops: suspend and resume

Suspend and resume support should be much better in Mandriva 2008.0, thanks to the new kernel and also the many improvements in Hal, which now includes more quirks for different laptop models.

Printers

Printer support has been greatly improved in Mandriva 2008.0. Mandriva ships with the latest Cups 1.3, and the latest PPD files from OpenPrinting. The new HPLIP drivers are included for HP devices, and Gutenprint has been updated to version 5.0.1, also adding support for new printer models. Printer drivers have been split, so the printing configuration utility will not need to install all different printer drivers on your system. GPL Ghostscript 8.60 is now included. It is the result of the merge between the AFPL Ghostscript which became GPL’ed, and the ESP Ghostscript systems.

Digital cameras and portable audio players

New versions of libgphoto2 which supports new digital cameras, and a new libmtp version supports new portable audio players, which can be accessed from Amarok and from Rhythmbox. Photographers taking RAW images, will be happy with the inclusion of Rawstudio, a graphical application to import and convert RAW images. Of course UFraw, with full colour profile support, wavelet noise reduction and a Gimp plug-in is included too.

Improved performance

The kernel in Mandriva 2008.0 now uses the CFQ (Complete Fair Queuing) I/O scheduler by default, while it was using the AS (Anticipatory Scheduler) in previous releases. On most systems, the CFQ scheduler will perform better. It tries to prevent disk intensive applications from slowing down other applications too much. It also takes into account the nice levels to determine the read priority. With the ionice command, I/O scheduling priorities can be tuned in yet more detail. If CFQ would cause performance regressions for you (possible with certain workloads, especially on laptops with slower hard drives), you can change the I/O scheduler back to AS by adding elevator=as to the append lines /boot/grub/menu.list.

The new CFS (Completely Fair Scheduler) process scheduler by Ingo Molnar has also been included in Mandriva’s kernel. This process scheduler will give all concurrently running tasks a fair deal of CPU time, so that one CPU intensive application cannot prevent other processes from getting the CPU time they need to work correctly. This is for example an advantage for multimedia applications, as it will make audio and video skipping much less likely.

The swap prefetch patch will preload swapped out pages in RAM if enough memory became free again. This way, the system will be much faster responsive after a “swap storm”.

The whole system has been built with the latest Glibc 2.6.1 libraries and the GCC 4.2.2 RC compiler. Together with many improvements in the different applications all over the board, this gives us a nice overall performance.

Better battery uptime for laptop computers

Mandriva 2008.0 will install a specially adapted kernel for laptop computers. This kernel uses 100 Hz resolution timers, and has the NO_HZ option set, so that timers will only be fired when an interrupt is waiting. USB suspend is enabled on this kernel, and when you install Mandriva 2008.0 on a laptop computer, also AC97 sound driver suspend will be activated.

Thanks to the Powertop application developed by Intel, a lot of other problems were detected and finally fixed in both the kernel and different applications. Most of the system is now tuned to not prevent the processor from entering the power consuming C3 state. The Beagle indexer will not be activated if you are running on battery power.

Improvements to the Mandriva Control Center

In the Mandriva Control Center, the different tools in the main categories, are now subdivided in subcategories, which will make it easier to find the right tool.

The network settings are now consolidated in the Network Center. In this tool, you will see an overview of the different network interfaces in your system (both wired and wireless), you can easily activate and disactivate them, and change their configuration or start a monitoring tool.

Another new tools is the Migration Wizard which helps users migrating from Windows to Linux. It can copy their documents from the Windows partition to the Linux home partition, import Outlook Express’ e-mail client settings, and configure the same wallpaper as in Windows.

Speaking of Windows, Mandriva will now mount the Windows NTFS partition with the ntfs-3g driver, giving stable write support.

Improvements to the package manager and packaging

The packgage manager urpmi has been greatly enhanced in Mandriva 2008.0. Its dependency resolution algorithm has been improved and a lot of performance enhancements were implemented. Urpmi will now show a much nicer list of the packages which will be installed. It also supports the “Suggests” tag for RPM packages: using this tag, a package can be recommended for installation together with another package, without defining it as a real dependency which the user cannot remove anymore afterwards. Thanks to the new devel packages policy, the user won’t have problems anymore with conflicting -devel packages, like was the case in the past when upgrading your Mandriva distribution.

The graphical package management applications in Mandriva benefit from similar performance enhancements.

Servers and security

Mandriva 2008.0 includes the latest server packages, which offer the best security: Apache 2.2.6, PHP 5.2.4 with the latest Suhosin patch protecting your PHP applications from attacks,… The Kolab groupware server package is supported again in 2008.0, and has been updated to version 2.1.

All services which are remotely accessible will not be started anymore and all security sensitive applicatons have been built with strong stack protection compilation flags, to prevent damage in case of a trivial buffer overflow. Like before, a firewall is activated by default. For the first time, Novell’s AppArmor is included in Mandriva. It will prevent further damage if one service (for example a web application) gets cracked.

Virtualisation

Users can take fully advantage of the hardware virtualisation support included in the new AMD and Intel processors thanks to the latest KVM and QEmu. Virtualbox is now updated to version 1.5, enhancing its performance and fixing bugs. The Xen packages finally received some needed attention, and should now be usable.

The right Kaffeine back-end

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Frederik

Big discussion tonight on the #mandriva-cooker IRC channel on irc.freenode.org: apparently the management has decideded that Kaffeine will be the default KDE player (which is fine) and that it will use the GStreamer back-end, which is actually marked as experimental by its developers

The reason why Mandriva wants to ship Kaffeine with the GStreamer back-end, is because they can then include the non-free decoders by Fluendo, which implement patent-protected formats. Mandriva has always been shipping xine and mplayer with complete ffmpeg support by default, and this supports formats like MPEG4 (read: divx), WMA, WMV, MP3 which are patent-protected. Most other distributions, actually don’t even support these formats out of the box, because of the patent trap. Now instead, Mandriva wants to use the Fluendo decoders in the Powerpack edition. These codecs are non-free (in both senses), but there are no legal issues, becaues Fluendo has signed agreements with the patent holders.

Some Kaffeine developers joined the discussion, and gave arguments why this should not be done. Actually they consider the Kaffeine back-end as experimental. It is not included in a lot of distributions, and thus has not been well tested. The Kaffeine developers don’t even plan to fix and maintain the GStramer back-end in the future, as it will be removed in favour of a Phonon back-end in KDE 4. The Gstreamer back-end does not support DVB, unlike the Xine back-end. Unlike Xine with XCB support, GSTreamer is not thread-safe, which could cause again the instabilities when embedded in Konqueror. This was the reason why Kaffeine was actually not the default video player in 2007.1, but instead, KMPlayer was installed. Also because of the change this late in the release process, Kaffeine + GStreamer would be very badly tested by Mandriva users before 2008.0 final is out.

Anyway, thanks to the discussion and the arguments given by the Kaffeine developers, it seems like Xine will after all be the default back-end in 2008.0. I think that’s the only right decision. It’s stable, it’s mature, it has been very well tested. So after all the consternation, the right decision will probably be taken, and Mandriva will release with a good video player by default!