Will Mandriva work "COMPLETILY" with AA1?

I'm tempted by Mandriva because of the 100% compatibility. I'm currently running Ubuntu. Can a former ubuntu user comment on performance comparison?

Cheers,

xtr.eme

 

What kind of performance comparison are you looking for? Boot times, software load times, software availability, speed of programs or what?

 

Any/all of those would be good.

 

I can't help with measured times as I don't pay much attention to them but the boot time for both Ubuntu and Mandriva 2009 Gnome are the same for all practical purposes on the AAO. I think Firefox starts slower with Ubuntu but access to the web is faster with Mandriva as far as I am concerned. Multi tasking is better with Mandriva, but that may just as it seems to me since I always had trouble with wifi on Ubuntu. Open Office opens at least twice as fast in Mandriva as it did in Ubuntu and no alterations were needed. Wine works smoother and faster with Mandriva for me. That's a start and I hope it helps. It will undoubtedly be the cause of controversy for the Ubuntu readers but this is just how it is for me and my setup.

 

I installed Mandriva 2009 One (Gnome) on my 8GB AAO and have been using it for the last few days. My thoughts/observations so far, please bear in mind I'm a Linux noob, Linpus was my first dip in the penguin pool:

- Booting up takes more than 90 seconds, that's way too long.
- Every now and then, the system will freeze for a few seconds. This actually happens quite often and I find it irritating
- Wifi works, it automatically detected my WEP protected network and joined without difficulty. My right orange LED blinks on regular basis (the left LED never worked, even under Linpus). On a side note, I have no idea how to turn off wifi! I can disable the network, but the wifi LED still keeps blinking. I would like to do this to conserve battery life)
- Installing and removing programs using the packet manager is much faster than in Linpus
- Gnucash, VLC work fine, NTFS support OOB
- No rar support with the built in archive manager. I installed Xarchiver (which comes with unrar built in, unlike in Linpus where I had to install unrar myself)
- KeepassX installs fine, but doesn't show up in the Apps menu! I had to manually associate my keepass file with the app to get the file to open.
- My AAO autosuspends and wakes up without any problems.
- Very nice to have Firefox 3.
- My main reason for switching to Mandriva is my personal holy grail of syncing with my WM2003 SE PDA. Followed the steps on the Mandriva sync wiki, but synce-hal does not detect my PDA. Very frustrating.

I'm now considering switching back to Linpus. For anyone considering testing Mandriva, I highly recommend you backup your AAO using macles' fantastic AAO backup program. The only reason I was brave enough to do a proper install of Mandriva is because I know I can revert back to Linpus without having to go through the pain of reinstalling all my programs.

http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/12/acer-aspire-one-aa1backup.html

 

The freezing issue is the File system doing alot of journalising, w/c slows down the SSD. Reinstall using Linux Native filesystem or EXT2. This will virtually elliminate that freezing you're experiencing.

 

Thanks for the tip! If memory serves me correct, I think I did install as Linux native filesystem.

At the moment, I'm still pretty undecided. If I have to reinstall everything, including my programs, I may just go back to Linpus. Especially since Dropbox (under Wine) seems to run much better under Linpus - I can actually get the little Dropbox status icon on the task bar, and KeepassX actually shows up in the app list. But I like Firefox 3 so much better that I'll take the plunge and install it using macles' tutorial.

 

I wanted to say that but I could not figure a method of testing it. Do you have any way to tell for sure?

 

For the ubuntu user - I have kubuntu running on all my machines - except now the one. The first install of mandriva 2009 in the internal SSD gave me two problems - kwin wouldn't start (I had chosen metisse, choosing no 3d and it was all well again) and bluetooth wouldn't work, the usb adapter wasn't detected properly. After doing all the upgrades, even the backports, adding the plf repository using easyurpmi.zarb.org, and doing two small changes to modprobe.conf, I now have it working better than when I was running kubuntu.
What did I change - I disabled pulseaudio (as described in the first post on this thread), added the two lines below to modprobe.conf:

Code:

options snd_hda_intel model=acer-aspire
options pciehp pciehp_force=1

and added the following line to /etc/modules:

Code:

pciehp

I've also installed sudo, and used visudo to add my user to the sudoers list, as I am more used by now to not use root at all, just invoke sudo when needed.

Big differences - Firefox 3.0.5 is usable on the SSD! With (k)ubuntu, it would stall for minutes, here, it doesn't stall at all. Of course, I disabled the safebrowsing/malware options of firefox, but I had done that in kubuntu and didn't help.
Bluetooth works under kde (even kbluelock).
Free space after install was +- 5.4Gb (df -h).

Overall the whole system feels snappier and better integrated. Of course, I don't use the gnome versions, so can't comment on those. Presumably might be better integrated under ubuntu.

 

I can tell for sure as I have installed Mandriva 2009 both on EXT3 and EXT2..... on EXT3 it is soooo slow, SSD light always lighting up due to the journalising. But on EXT2 it works like a charm.

 

- Booting up takes more than 90 seconds, that's way too long.

Linpus seems to boot in 30 seconds (or less), but after the desktop is displayed, there are a LOT of processes still being loaded. Truth is, full boot is over 1 minute. This will be about the same no matter what distro you use.

- Every now and then, the system will freeze for a few seconds. This actually happens quite often and I find it irritating

This could also be updates "calling home". Next time you get an icon in the tray saying "updates are available", right click and disable "load at boot" or whatever it says. Then, be sure to do your updates manually at regular intervals (every couple weeks should be fine) via the Mandriva control centre.

- Wifi works, it automatically detected my WEP protected network and joined without difficulty. My right orange LED blinks on regular basis (the left LED never worked, even under Linpus). On a side note, I have no idea how to turn off wifi! I can disable the network, but the wifi LED still keeps blinking. I would like to do this to conserve battery life)

This one is a no-brainer (but I did the same thing!). There is a slider switch underneath the wifi lights on the front edge of the case. Slide it to toggle wifi on and off.

D.

 

most of us can't get the LED to work, and you can't turn it off LOL

I wouldn't worry about it, the battery drain will be negligable

 

This is realy strange.
The LED doesn't work for me, but the wireless lan is easily turned off by just pulling the little wifi-switch on the front :lol:
(And it IS turned off, 1. i see no more wireless networks, 2. the batterymonitor shows me a lower power drain).

 

I had never tried it so I wasn't sure but I just turned off my wireless via the switch under the amber LED and then waited about 5 min and turned it back on and it work fine.

 

How did you get wifi led working?

I type these commands, but an error message says: "dev.wifi0.softled" is an unknown key

sysctl -w dev.wifi0.softled=1
sysctl -w dev.wifi0.ledpin=3

 

I didn't have any problem getting the WIFI LED to flash with the Internet access. To see if it is working try and do a speed test via speedtest.net and during the test the light should flash steady during the upload and download.

 

But the Wifi Led should bright when you are near a Wifi access... not really?

 

The LED is only going to light when you are either sending or receiving data through an established Internet connection. It has nothing to do with being near a WIFI access, WIFI signal strength or for finding WIFI.

 

Don't know if it is of any help, but I ended up having to do 2 installs of Mandriva (I messed up my partitions the first time around). Anyway the first time I had a wired internet connection and afterwards when I connected wirelessly the orange light just wasn't interested in lighting up. Second time I established a wireless connection and then installed. Result: orange led blinks.

 

I'm trying the next Mandriva release, known as Cooker, the 2009.1 RC2 KDE4 One 32 bits.

Every thing works well out-of-the-box (Wifi, Webcam, Touchpad, Sound...), but it needs some tweaks for the Intel 3D and KDE4 desktop effects, and for the slow SSD. For the slow SSD, look for "aspire one imarune" on Google. There are also some pages on the fedora wiki or opensuse one.

The main idea is to put elevator=deadline on kernel options, put /var/log, /tmp in RAM disk |tmpfs] in /etc/fstab, and to adjust vm parameters in /etc/sysctl.conf to make all the writes to ssd happen only every 2 minutes or more : the SSD is definitively too slow to keep the Linux kernel default parameters of 1/2s and 3s for the vm.dirty_writeback_centisec and vm.dirty_expire_centisec. Some people have put a delay of 360000 centisecs, ie a full hour with no real writing, and it seems to work fine ! The only drawback is when you shutdown the computer : all the cache is physically written to SSD, which can take a lot of minutes if you have made a lot of writes, because the SSD can't become magically faster ! But during the session, you get a very responsive machine, with no freezes.

It's a great version, KDE 4.2 is very responsive, and with these tweaks, my Aspire One A110 boots in only 28 seconds ! And thats really 28 seconds : all the icons in systray are there, the Wifi is on, and I can start applications in KDE Menu. 28 seconds is really fast, and we have the advantage of a real and rich linux distribution, a very modern desktop, not a limited one like Linpus.

Again, the main problem is really the slowness of the Aspire One SSD, that's why I have delayed the first "physical" writing 2 minutes after the boot : that's not a problem, since thanks of its battery, the Aspire One can't power off if unexpected unplugged, and I have made the mod for 1.5G RAM, which gives me enough space for disk caching. I have also removed laptop_mode service, which take 15s, and doesn't seems really necessary for a SSD machine, only for HDD (and my battery life is still about 2 hours)

The definitive version of Mandriva 2009.1 will be out at the end of april. If not all the tweaks are included, I will try to create a wiki page about this (but certainly in French in a first time, as my English is not perfect)