[Wylug-discuss] Has Mandriva regained the polish? was Re: [Wylug-help] Edimax Print Server Configuration

[shaun laughey]

On Thursday 18 January 2007 22:34, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 January 2007 15:15, Shaun Laughey wrote:
> > Although if only the mandrake printer one worked reliably and was widely
> > used because it's nice and straight forward and I'm sure it used to do
> > autodetection of all printers on the network segment.
> >
> > Fond memories of my Mandrake laptop finding all 10 printers in the
> > building for me, URL's the lot while my colleague had to go round asking
> > for ip addresses and playing the Windows "wheres the driver disk?" game.
>
> I have Mandriva 2007 on a laptop, and it still does find the printer
> attached to the server.  I've never set it up to print to the ethernet
> printer yet, though.  FWIW, this is the first time I've had anything to do
> with either ethernet printers or Brother printers, and this was easy from
> FC6.  I don't see why the downloaded drivers wouldn't work equally well on
> MDV.
>
> Sorry to have drifted OT
>
> Anne

Hi Anne,

Sorry for the confusion there, I think the OP was using Ubuntu and I was sad 
that they don't get the magnificent printerdrake. Still one of the best 
things I've seen when printing on Linux.

You have reminded me that I've been meaning to look at Mandriva again this 
year.

One of the many things that made me jump from Mandriva and cancel my licences 
was the butchering of all those great tools in 2006 in favour of new ones 
that just were all gui and no brilliance and a buggy X when it had been as 
stable as a rock for the previous 4 years. 

Every upgrade was perfect. Every install smooth. All my servers, all my 
desktops everything upgraded and patched and ran well for years. Occassional 
driver issues were easily solved or bypassed until DKMS came and spoilt some 
of that.

Well, I missed that polish during the 2006 release - it just felt like a rush 
job to coincide with a stock market announcment and their merger/takeover.

With lots of things dropped for no good reason and new features poorly done or 
partly implemented they lost my custom and support fairly quickly. Even the 
lovely new members site was a pain and didn't work with lynx unlike the old 
one.

So I wonder if Mandriva have regained that professionalism they seemed to have 
ditched last year or is it just another gentoo -like cutting edge crash test 
dummy?

Shaun Laughey.