Want to Install OpenMandriva Lx 2014? Some Things You Need to Know

OpenMandriva Lx 2014 was recently released.  I had three installs of OpenMandriva Lx 2013 and, to be honest, I was not convinced to upgrade the systems (one desktop and two laptops).  After all, the previous released did pretty much what I needed and I did not want to ditch SimpleWelcome and use Homerun, the new default in OpenMandriva 2014.

When I learned that it is possible to change Homerun, I decided to install the distro.  Interestingly, not using Homerun proved to be a smart move for me.

The Partition Problem

This is how my OpenMandriva Lx 2014 desktop looks right now.  I placed the ROSA Rocket bar panel on top and as auto-hide.  I also added Cairo Dock at the bottom:

OpenMandriva 2014 running on my ZaReason Strata Laptop: workspace 1

As expected, when you click on the ROSA SimpleWelcome, you get this:

ROSA SimpleWelcome on OpenMandriva Lx 2014

The Timeline on OpenMandriva Lx 2014

Now, here's the interesting part.  When I installed the distro, I first tested Homerun.  I discovered that, if you have a multi-boot system, Homerun acknowledges the presence of your other partitions, but refuses to open them. 

For example, when I tried to access my home partition in Mageia, this is what I got.

The path indicated is correct, but the contents displayed correspond to what I have in my freshly installed OpenMandriva Lx 2014 /home.


I tried it once again, this time with my home partition in PCLinuxOS:

As you can see, the path indicates that you are in home_PCLOS (the tag of my /home in PCLOS), but the contents you see are exactly the same that Homerun displayed for the home partition in Mageia...that is, the contents of /home in OpenMandriva Lx 2014.   This happened in both laptops and the desktop.

I then switched the interface to KDE launch to see if it was a generalized problem with the desktop environment.

KDE launch uses Dolphin to open up the contents of your other partitions.  There was no problem whatsoever accessing my files with Dolphin from the KDE launch interface.

The ROSA SimpleWelcome interface does not show the strange behavior displayed by Homerun, either.

The Repository Problem

The other interesting problem I discovered had to do with the repositories.  After I finished my installations, the first thing I did was to update the system.  OpenMandriva Lx set the repos, so I just ran the control center and clicked on update.  There were several packages found, so I installed them.

Once I did this, I tried to install Steam and Skype.  All I got was a message telling me that a fatal error had occurred and that the mirrors were not available.  I set then some FTP mirrors manually (the main32 repo was absent) and tried to install Steam and Skype again.  The answer this time was also negative, but because of missing dependencies. 

The solution was to re-install the OS to all three machines.  Right after completion, without updating, I could successfully install Skype and Steam.

Other Problems: Wi-fi, Printer, Japanese IME

On my HP Pavilion laptop, OpenMandriva picked up the Wi-fi out of the box.  The story was different on my ZaReason Strata.  I had to use a cabled connection to get to the repos and downoad the appropriate package, which did the trick.

Regardless of my many attempts, I could never get my Epson Stylus TX 200 to print.  I mean OpenMandriva 2014 configures the scanner out of the box, but the printer is simply missing.  I installed the driver manually and, even so, nothing has happened.  UPDATE:  I finally made the printer respond.  It turns out that OpenMandriva Lx 2014 does not like the Stylus TX200 drivers I use in Mageia.  So, I downloaded the printer driver (epson-inkjet-printer-escpr-1.4.0-1lsb3.2.x86_64.rpm) from here and that made the printer work.

Last and sadly, success has eluded me trying to get iBus to work on OpenMandriva Lx 2014 so far.  This was not new; the same was true of the previous OpenMandriva release.

Conclusion

I guess that the main question is: after seeing those problems, do I intend to keep OpenMandriva Lx 2014?

The answer is yes.  I find the distro responsive, beautiful, and functional for pretty much all I need (except printing or typing in Japanese so far :-P ).

Those, however, are very specific problems that other users should not expect to find, I suppose, and I can live with them.

OpenMandriva Lx is a very nice distro.  You can read a good review by Prashanth here.