I guess the title might be a bit misleading, but I guess as this forum is called ‘coffee break’ anything is OK, right?
I’m new on this forum, new to OpenMandriva… not at all new to Linux though, but it has been a while since I’ve used it on the desktop.
I used to be a part of the Dutch mandrivaclub.nl forum, where we had our own repo with packages we created ourselves and off course the MCNLive ‘distro’ (which really was not much more than a preconfigured Mandriva installation with some stuff pretty well installed and configured out of the box). When the main developer of MCNLive stopped I gave it a shot and created MCNLive ‘Kris’ (2010). Seems like ages ago. Is there anything like MCNLive now?
Anyway, I have not used Mandriva for quite some time, haven’t even been using Linux on the desktop in between 2015-2020. Got a laptop from work with Fedora 31 which works quite well since January 2020.
Now I’ve setup an old pc at home to fiddle a bit with. Installed OpenMDV Lx4.0 on it since that was the latest release available from ftp.nluug.nl (found out later there ís an iso for 4.1 available, why is that not synced to mirrors like that?).
Installation went… not very smooth… fstab was f’ed up after installation. Had to fix that by hand to get it booting! Most users would have been done with it right there but I’d very much want to give OpenMDV a try. After that I tried to update it. The graphical updater didn’t even try… so I went to the terminal and did a ‘dnf update’. Yeah, that failed because of dependency issues (say what!? on a clean install!?). After the update I’m suddenly on 4.1, so that might explain something (though I still think this should be working without me having to ‘rpm -e --nodeps’ stuff to fix dependency issues).
Well, with that out of the way I must say Lx4.1 looks good! When searching for repo’s I found the graphical repo-picker tool which seems to work great! Nice!
Eager to find our what more you guys have been working on the past ten years or so.
Ah the old as Linux problem of install operating system first and read about it after! I have done this myself. (More than once. )
This just for perspective: OpenMandriva is a very small all volunteer group much smaller (well less than a tenth) of what Mandriva had. About 4 part time volunteer developers and about that may other active contributors. Unlike Mandriva there are no paid employees. In fact the OMA yearly budget is not enough to pay one full time employee.
In particular we do admit documentation is not as complete as we would like but we are working on this.
This is unfortunate and I still don’t understand why we have not gotten OM Lx 4.1 posted on our mirrors. However we expect new users to first go to what we call our landing page @ openmandriva.org. Right under the “Download” button there is a link to “Release Notes”.
This is the first report of this I have seen. Normally what user sets in Calamares Partitioning step is very faithfully created. If you happen to see this again if you could give more details we can attempt to problem solve whatever is wrong. What to do if user has problems installing OM Lx is discussed here.
Yes there would be dependency issues because the ‘Rock’ repos had been changed from 4.0 to 4.1 so the tool-chain packages are completely different. This was explained here.
So in summary it does seem we have set up something that is confusing to users especially new users. I hope this explains things better about current structure of OpenMandriva. There are more informative articles here.
We do have active discussions after posts like yours about what we realistically can do to make things better.
For all users: I need to mention that mirrors are not working for OpenMandriva currently. Users need to update from abf-downloads.openmandriva.org or Index of /openmandriva/. Any other mirror is likely to be weeks or months out of date. The repo files are currently correctly set to do this with no intervention by user.
Offcourse I should have checked the website first, which would have solved at least the upgrade issue. Most users probably would. I’m just used to picking an iso from a mirror.
I didn’t know OpenMDV was purely community driven. So Mandriva S.A. is completely gone? If this is build purely by only 4 developers then I must say I’m pretty impressed by the work they’ve done!
About the fstab issue; after installation the system would not boot:
But I’m not sure if it’s worth looking at, as things might have been fixed in the latest release already. You know what? I have ordered an SSD and wanted to copy the OS over from the harddrive to that one, but I think I’ll try reinstalling with the 4.1 iso.
So, yesterday the SSD disk was delivered! Downloaded Lx4.1, disconnected the harddrive, connected the SSD and tried to do a clean install.
Started the installation and chose to manually partition. After submitting the installer started to create partitions but somehow failed (something meaningless like ‘error creating partition’) and quit.
Created partitions by hand with fdisk. Ran the installer again. Chose to manually create partitions again but this time just added mount points to some partitions and chose to format them. No problems anymore, installed like a charm. Seems like the partitioner has some issues with completely fresh disks? Idk. Not that important (people who buy and install their own hardware usually know how to partition a disk as well).
No issues after reboot. This time fstab was created fine.
Selected te repo’s I’d like to use. Ran an update without issues. Installed some extra software. All good!
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