Mandriva 2007

I always had a preference for Mandriva, having tested the distro when it was named Mandrake. The installation was the smoothest of all the distros I'd tested then.

Mandriva 2007 was another distro I had with me, along with Mandriva 2008, probably downloaded sometime back.

In contrast to the "user is too dumb to be given access to root account and control panel" approach of Ubuntu, Mandriva is more liberal. The 2007 live distro was fun to work with, installation was smooth with all hardware getting recognised properly and drivers installed.

Mandrake 2008 for some reason would always stop with a command prompt rather than the desktop. I concluded that the ATI drivers were the cause.

The insistence on a password that was atleast 6 letters long was part of the Unix tradition of security. But since only the user could be autologged in (and not the root account), and everytime the control panel or some other admin tool was accessed the password had to be entered, the best way to use Mandriva was to login as root always.

For some reason I faced a lot of incidents of data corruption, with almost every boot being accompanied by a disk check. I have doubts that had the user account been used the incidence of the data corruption could be minimised.