For a successful Mandriva 2011 install, follow these steps!

Mandriva 2011 is a very decent and innovating Linux distribution but is sadly let down by a few fixable quirks. The biggest show stopper occurs when trying to update Mandriva 2011 for the first time. Unfortunately many newbies are struggling with this pain in the backside so let me tell you what to do in easy to follow steps.

1.After installing Mandriva 2011 read the Errata -  http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2011.0_Errata

Familiarise yourself with some of the known bugs, it isnt necessary to run every fix listed in the errata and I cannot tell you what to run as my system is totally different to yours :-)

However, the unused locales / drivers will apply.

2. Remove the unused locales and drivers left behind by the installer

Open a terminal and run these commands as root

remove-unused-packages
urpmi xorg-x11
urpme --auto-orphans

3. Speed up KDE by disabling the debugging.

Why was KDE debugging turned on by default is beyond me, distributions such as Fedora KDE, Kubuntu, Mageia have this disabled. When enabled there is a performance hit.

To disable it, run this command as your normal regular user.

kdebugdialog

And tick the box to disable all debugging.

4. Update Mandriva

Open the Mandriva Control Center, select configure media sources for install and update.

Click on Add, then choose "Full set of sources"

You are now ready to update Mandriva, go back to the Control Center and select the "Update your system" option. If you get a prompt asking to resolve a dependency, please select the following option,


java-1.6.0-openjdk

The update should run smoothly after this.

5. Reboot and enjoy Mandriva 2011!

Well almost, if closing Firefox causes LibreOffice to launch, remove the sym link in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libnpsoplugin.so