PreviousFriday 13 January 2006, 1:45 AM
Think carefully before buying this
Once upon a time I bought Mandrake 8.0 powerpack After a lot of messing about I finally had a small network with dial up internet sharing working fairly well . Then along came Mandrake 9.1 powerpack which I duly purchased and installed only to find most of the configuration tools and updater were broken bugged and unusable.
Last year I downloaded 2005LE
and mandriva 2006. Strangely although both were download editions The 2005LE installed easily the Nvidia card and display worked and after the usual fiddling I had a broadband connection to Tiscali using the supplied Sagem fast 800 USB modem.
The 2006 version however was not a success and I stuggled to get the display working and never did get the broadband modem to connect.
Undeterred and in the nieve belief that you get what you pay for I bought the 2006 Powerpack edition and did an upgrade!!? install over the 2005LE. Ah well I should have known it would trash everything leaving me with a display trying to go into meltdown and a broadband connection that no longer worked and defied all attempts to fix it. I did leave the option to boot into the older version however so maybe all was not lost. Alas it was now that too failed to connect and the display was garbage.
Well then no point in waiting so I went ahead and did the clean install of 2006 which installed the nvidia driver and got the display back but to date the broadband modem has failed to get me back on line because it appears the Mandriva tools for the job (and there are many if you include eagle and raving penguin offerings)all fall down in the simple task of communicating with the Sagem fast800.
If you want to use Mandriva my advice would be try the download edition first, if it doesn't work then dont delude yourself that the full product will. Also from my experience I would suggest 2005LE is better anyway.
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