For those of you who have seen my posts you know that i'm not the sharpest stick in the box in linux.

however I may have a spare pc opening up soon.

the more I use MCNL the more I am reminded about how much i LIKE mandriva as a whole.

unfortunately there was always 1 or 2 critical apps or functions that wouldnt work for me.

What are the varying opinions on using MCNL as the 'core' or 'base' for a Mandriva installation and then building from there.

Right now, my main Linux desktop and my laptop are both running Xandros.

I would LIKE to have a copy of Mandriva to play with and possibly overcome those barriers on.

BUT whether its here or in the CLUB forum, everyone seems to have their own issues using 2007.0

PERHAPS, the bright thing to do, would be to start with MCNL as the HD install?

Its light, its tight, its fast, its stable (I've never had a crash with it).

And its stripped of SO much of the stuff that I never use anyway, so it seems to ME that it would be a GREAT building block for a full scale desktop OS?

any opinions?
\
j

Just for your info, Jerome.

The base of both MCNLive Cherbourg and VirtualCity is the Mandriva-2007-free-DVD.iso, the download version. Added are some very few rpm's from the official MDV mirrors, from the known PLF MDV mirrors and from our own packagers.

Also all official security and bug fix rpm's from Mandriva are applied.

I made very few changes to some config files (for the live system), and I usually change some KDE settings (all doable in KDE controll center), to make the system faster.
I disable some services which MDV likes to enable after a default install.
And because I am aware of those small annoying things ( I am following some mailing list), I apply the necessary changes to stop the annoyances. Usually I forget what it was, after a while

One big difference is the lack (on MCNLive) of man pages and doc pages. You can't recover them for the already installed software.

You can get almost the same (or a better) system by installing the official MDV 2007. It takes some time, though, adding stuff, tweaking the system etc. - if you want a similiar set up as MCNLive.

Oh, and to answer your question as a normal MDV user.

I am running MDV 2007 (installed from the free DVD edition) as my main installed system. It is rock solid, I have no issues at all.


Personally I would never use a Live CD (no matter if MCNLive, MDV One, Knoppix or whatever) for my main installed system, but maybe that's just me. I know a little bit too much about the inner 'features' of such a system.

Kris,

Maybe you could tell us more about the downsides of running a Live distro as a main system? The only downside I found running One on my laptop, was that too much stuff was started during boot, making it boot very slow in comparation of the DVD install.
Other then that, there were no manual pages, but hey, we have Google don't we?

Are there any other issues than just the slow boot and the missing man pages?

Slow boot? Huh? With MCNLive you would get a fast boot.

1) A normal installation installs a system by installing packages . These (binary) packages are tested, signed, checked - if it is a professional linux dristibution and not a home brewed one.
You have access to the source packages as well. They have gone through a QA (if it is a professional linux distro), an open and community driven development model (if it is a professional linux distro) with a svn/cvs system, with a bug tracker system and mailing lists made sure that it is secure system.
2) A Live CD is made by doing the following. You (as the live cd creator) are installing a system. You can make all changes to this system you want. You are creating an image off this 'manually installed and changed' system.
Inside this image you don't have only verified packages but, well, every idiot can put everything there. In binary form. You can manually alter/manipulate every single file, no one will find out.
When you are installing a Live system to your HD, it is the following: this uncompressed 'image' is being copied over to your harddisk.
Basically, I as a live cd developer, place a fat trojan on your hard disk And you personally trust me that it is a clean Linux distribution.

3) There are some technical disadvantages as well, but these issues vary with the used live cd, they are different for example for mcnlive and MDV One, very different for slax and for knoppix and so on.

Well I'm getting a chance to try out my own theory. My SATA 200GB drive crashed, and after 4 attempts at installing 2k7PP from 3 different media on 2 different HD's I decided to try the MCNL from my laptop.

Loaded and booted just fine so far.

i REALLY like the ability to set up the pc, remaster and then save that CD/dvd in case I have a major failure again sometime in the future. I mean if ALL my data goes to a different drive and ALL my APPS/OS are on a single drive that i RE-ROLL then in the event of a failure I should be able to just pop the media in, reboot, reinstall and everything will be as i want it eh?

Any opinions on THIS theory?

Chris, could you elaborate what these disadvantages might be?

Jerome:



You are the master of the master in this case. The perfect backup solution!



In case of MCNLive: some changed config files, no doc and man pages, you need to manually change the user and root password, you don't get the installation wizard of a normal MDV system (with a lot of choices), you need to check which services you want to run (I disabled some and enabled others you might want to get rid of), you have zillions of drivers and firmware installed, but on a fixed system you would only need some specific for your hardware, and so on ... a normal MDV installation for example would choose the best kernel for your specific hardware. With MCNLive you get the kernel we have chosen - hoping that it is best for the majority of computers.