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Tomorrow Openmandriva is releasing it's first beta called OpenMandriva Lx

They can be downloaded here:
x64 and x86

They are still named alpha but they are betas now according to the mailing list - so they will be renamed.

After months of bug fixing and stabilizing the Alpha, we are happy to announce the availability of OpenMandriva Lx's first ever Beta. Lx has undergone many changes since Alpha, and this release fixes many major bugs reported during former's testing. Most of the boot issues have been ironed out, and Beta is now more USB boot-friendly.

Lx Beta comes with KDE 4.11, with a focus on a clean and unified desktop. This release comes with a set of four (!) launchers -- Lancelot, KickOff, SimpleWelcome and Homerun -- for you to try and give feedback. Eventually, we'll settle for only one, the winner based on your feedback.

Installation has also changed. DrakX installer is no longer available [what's the alternative?]. The bundled installer no longer prompts for the removal of unused hardware and language packages.

For a detailed list of changes, upgrading instructions and errata, please check the release notes. Download the latest ISO and help us with the beta testing (the preferred download channel is BitTorrent). You can make use of our forums and/or mailing lists for sharing thoughts, opinions, views, criticisms, praises and suggestions. And there's always our trusty old issue tracker to record any bugs you might face.

Try the OpenMandriva Lx Beta, open your faucet of thoughts and let the suggestions flow to us, because that's what we value above everything. Happy testing!

I will give them a spin and let you know...

So I am installing it now and so far it is a very pleasant experience.
It looks nice and lots of fancy sounds (a long time since I have heard any sounds in Moondrake/OMV).



The installation went fine even if that start sound is horribly distorted. And I am prompted to set up the accounts...
And i proivided the root password.
This is a no-brainer and really userfriendly
So I log in and get to hear Gizmo practicing his piano lessons

It makes me smile though and that is a good thing - and it is impossible to discuss sounds and music anyway
And this is the first impression of OpenMandriva Lx:


I must say it looks good and it sure was easy to get there.

So far I am positively surprised .. even shocked
Now I am gong to start using it...

The first thing that strikes me is that both the "Rosa menu" and the traditional "KDE menu" can be fired from the panel.

I think this is a good idea - and it will prevent endless and pointless discussion of what is the best.
Interestingly they have chosen to put the traditional KDE menu to the far left so that is what people will fire first.

The Rosa menu will pop when you click the OMV logo third from the left

Choice is good; and it is easier to remove the one you do not use than to add one - good thinking there.
Next I thought I should do an ALT+F2 to check if I could fire up MCC....
And that broke the GUI and dropped me to a terminal login...
But I was able to log in and
su
password

after that I got that distorted sound/noise again and it popped back to the GUI with that animated circle

..and stayed there forever.
Edit: I have not been able to reproduce this error so chances are that I made a mistake with that key combination.
Time for some brutal powering off - and there we are again at that pleasant desktop -moving on...

This time I do it like all good boys should and picked "Configure your computer" from the menu.
There I do the "update your system" and there are no updates.
Then I thought I should install the flash-plugin since flash does not work out of the box.
and the search for flash produces no result - it is not there.

Ah probably time to add some mirrors then so I press the Add button

And it hooks me up with the mirrorlist.
Then it is time for an update again...
This time there are 19 updates.
And by the end of the update I am asked to remove the orphans - which I do.
And now it finds flash-player-plugin which has a bad signature - but it is Adobe so I would expect that
Closing and opening FireFox and it works like a charm time to check Java then....
I installed icedtea-web
Re-opened FF and it seems to hang on that java site....Maybe I should reboot...
I usually test java at anfyteam.com and it will simply not load in FF so I want to install Chromium-browser.
And that cannot be installed due to missing libevent.so.5()(64bit)

Ok I am beginning to feel that this is a beta...
Nepomuc is not activated by default but it is needed by the excellent TimeFrame function in the "Rosa menu"
I activate it; and that timeframe system works right out of the box

I install inxi and update it twice with

because the man page has changed the name - that worked just fine.

This is promising - I think OMV will pull this off now (I have not always been convinced about that)
Here is my test envorinment:



Chromium bug report
Java bug reported here

It is no good idea to do an update now.
The MCC (Drakconf) will be gone so you cannot configure the computer there you have to use the KDE control panel.

But that sets my resolution just fine - so I get it done. What is worse is that my repos are gone so I cannot even install nano...
It looks like this has been broken since yesterday.
Does any guru have the cli command with the correct repos?

*s*

Hi, i don't use OM anymore with this crap installer ..(i want back my Drakinstaller )
at moment i use an other distro.. which is just uninteresting .. how ever..

try it out there :
http://downloads.openmandriva.org/mm/

best regards
Blacky

Thanks I'll have a look.
Also the Norwegian locale is "wrong". There is only Norwegian nynorsk which only 10 % in Norway write.
Everybody else uses Norwegian bokmål (nb)

That was the language I picked during install so it should be present as an option under locales.

*yawn

Well at least they put something out there that people can work with. It probably is far fetched to call this a beta but it beats talking about something that does not exist.

I will have to re-install now - the last update removed urpmi.
It seems that the update requires a lot of files to be removed - among them urpmi - but it does not seem to be among the ones that will be (re-)installed.

I have re-installed and am updating via MCC now - I hope it will come out with a working urpmi at the other end this time....
This time a get a message during the update:


Something about me wanting to update my database because some files are missing - and do I want to continue with the update.
Hell yes I want to continue so I go on.....
I bet urpmi will be one part that is still missing though...and that should not really happen.

In the middle of the update MCC refuses to go on:

aria2 failed so the downloading will simply not go through.
I guess I should have updated the database first.
Ok everything is canceled so I will now remove the database

and then rebuild it:

......
Well that did not help urpmi is gone:

And confirms it; urpmi is not installed - caramba!

Ok lets conclude this then.

I downloaded this and installed it.
To get any software at all I added the repos via MCC by simply clicking "add".
repos were added and the software was there.
This worked nicely one time.
After that something must have happened in the repos - and it is a showstopper.

The update requires the un-installation of a lot of draktools and urpmi. and the update does not re-install urpmi.

So there we are then with no urpmi and no GUI to install software - that kind of puts an end to the testing.

Here is the bug:
https://issues.openmandriva.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214

The two other bugs are now FIXED - but I cannot check them because I cannot download or update anything.

One of the things that are required on a Beta - is that you actually will be able to test it....
This worked once on the day I installed (64bit) on the 18th of Oct.
After that, and since the official beta release on the 19th it has not been possible to actually test the beta.
The error is still present and an absolute showstopper.
People will re-install and update re-install and update rebuild databases etc and feel like .... (me, in this case) and then they will develop a temper (me in this case .
viewtopic.php?f=32&t=2968&view=unread#p17290

I might continue testing this if the OMV Gurus come here and tell me how to fix this without re-installing yet again...

Well I am to soft I tell you - so I re-installed and did a

Again it needed to install some rpm stuff first, but now I did not get the "remove all drak and urpmi" first stuff.

In the MCC it still came up with the remove this first list so I canceled that one.

I set my resolution and rebooted and now urpmi works (as long as you stay away from the software update - in Drakconf or CLI - I guess).

Time to install chromium then:

and yes - that installs nicely now.
Let us check java too

And yes that works too.

If they had not fubared the very basics of urpmi this would have been great

So the tip in the bug is to install apper before updating; that way you can continue to install programs anyway.
Monkey see monkey do so apper is installed.
Time to update then

The shitload list pops up and I must accept to remove it to be able to update.
After the update urpmi is gone and apper cannot install it
it cannot install anything and stops with this message:


And the tip said to use Apper for the first update - so this is my fault

I used the torrent to get the iso and installed it. The next day they announced that the wrong iso had been torrented. The release process has been a bit chaotic, with multiple versions of the iso floating around. There does not seem to be an effective release manager. I'll wait for the next iteration before testing. They say it'll be the RC, but from what I've read they really should have another beta.

The fix for the missing urpmi is supposed to be to download urpmi and perl-RPMDB, install those with "rpm -i" and then run urpmi --auto-update, but I have not done any testing of this beta and so can't confirm.

I recall reading somewhere that for rpm5 the rebuilddb command has been replaced with some exotic incantation. Perhaps this:

http://junlu.com/list/32/782224.html

Jim