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Mandriva One 2008 on EEE PC

March 26, 2008 – 7:02 am

In a previous post, we’ve reviewed how to create a bootable USB disk with Mandriva One 2008 Spring. Our first impressions will follow.

The boot process took about 2mn20s. The Mandriva One sleek interface is based on KDE 3.5 desktop.

Every hardware part of the EEE PC is well recognized. Multimedia features work out of the box.

Tested and working hotkeys:

• Fn+F2 toggles on and off wifi.
• Fn+F3(F4) to tweak the screen brightness
• Fn+F7 does mute the sound, and Fn+F8 (F9) changes the volume.
• Fn+Ins (PrintScreen) as well starts KSnapshot.

You can activate the Compiz Fusion 3D desktop from Configure Your Computer; the 3D effects are quite useful with a device like the EEE since you can easily choose from many windows. You can have a peek at it towards the end of the following video, if you’ve never used Compiz before.

Speaking of windows, they are well optimized for the Asus EEE PC. If a system window is higher than 480px, you can scroll it down. I have had issues with some other distributions on that matter.

The WiFi connectivity was functional, even my silly Trendware router. The Signal Strength was at 3 bars out of five though, even if I was very close to the router.

On the software part, the applications are the standard ones for all of the modern linux distributions. The Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, and the OpenOffice suit are included. We can mention, as more exotic apps, Codeina to install codecs on a user friendly way or TVTime, a TV viewer and recorder. Of course, synaptic is present to update and install software packages.

The official Mandriva distribution cannot bundle some proprietary software, for obvious licensing problems, and you may experience problems if you want to watch multimedia files or unpack rar files for instance. There is an easy method to add those software to synaptic: visit http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/, click on Add PLF Media, and open it.

While it can be needy in terms of ressources, Mandriva One 2008 Spring Linux is a stable and fully featured alternative operating system for the EEE PC.