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Mandriva Linux Setup Guide

Personally, I like Mandriva Linux. One of the things you'll tend to find about Linux users is that every user has one distribution (or "distro") which he thinks is the best. There's also a lot of snobbery and rivalry (especially from the people who feel that they "keep the faith" on open-source software better than you do; I'm looking at you, Ubuntu fans).

Anyway, I've used plenty of UNIX and linux flavours over the years: Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, RedHat, SuSE, and Mandrake (now called Mandriva), and for me, Mandriva represents a pretty good balance of convenience and flexibility. I'm not out to prove my credentials as the most pious open-source advocate out there or the most "hardcore" Linux user; computers are tools that I use for my convenience, not altars of worship.

In any case, Mandriva is a free download from their website, it's got a slick installer, it's quick, and it comes preloaded with all the stuff you need for basic home/office productivity and net surfing activities. Its installer and setup features have been greatly improved over the years, but configuration can still be confusing for newbies. It won't be a problem for an experienced power user, but for the kind of person who calls tech support to change his screen resolution, a Linux installation is probably out of his league. However, it's still a fairly familiar GUI interface, and once you've got it up and running, even a neophyte should be able to use it without problems.

Tips

The 2008.0 version's installer is much more streamlined than previous versions. If you go with the default options, you'll end up with a bootable OS that can surf the Internet, answer E-mail, watch DVDs, and do some basic office stuff. But there are a few extra things that you'll need to do:

  1. From the Start Menu, go to "Tools", "System Tools", "Configure Your Computer". This tool is called drakconf, and it's basically the control panel for Mandriva Linux.
  2. From drakconf, go to "Security" on the left-hand panel. This area is fairly self-explanatory; you'll want to set up a firewall if your machine is directly connected to the Internet (in fact, this should be done immediately). After that, you can set the security level. This defaults to "high", which is good enough for most users. The "higher" setting is for people who want to run a server which acts like a typical commercial webhost, and allows people to log into it from across the Internet.
  3. From drakconf, go to "Software Management" on the left-hand panel, and then choose "Configure media sources for install and update". Click "Add" and then add one of the "Official Updates" mirrors, so that your system can download and install the latest security and bugfix patches.
  4. From drakconf, go to "Software Management" on the left-hand panel, and then choose "Manage Software". From here, you can add extra software from the installation DVD that was not installed by default. One package that you'll probably want to add is grip, for ripping CD audio to hard disk. If you want to develop websites or web apps, you'll want to add:
    • apache, apache-mod_php, and apache-mod_ssl
    • mysql and mysql-client
    • php, including the php-cli, php-gd, php-mbstring, php-mcrypt, php-mysql, and php-zlib modules
    • phpmyadmin
    That may sound like a pain in the ass, but just try installing all of that on a Windows box, and you will appreciate the convenience of picking them from a menu here.
  5. From drakconf, go to "Hardware" on the left-hand panel, and then choose "Set up the printers ...". From here, you can configure printers that are hooked up to your machine, or network printers, or printers on Windows machines on your LAN. This widget is a huge improvement over older versions, which required you to enter funky configuration lines in order to access Windows printers. You can also configure scanners, fax servers, and UPS units from the "Hardware" tab, although I've found that the configuration of these devices is still a bit flaky, due to driver issues.
  6. From drakconf, go to "System" on the left-hand panel, and then choose "Manage date and time". This will let you set the date and time, or choose the far better option of synchronizing time with an NTP server, so your computer time will always be accurate. From the "System" tab, you can also add more users to your system (the installer only asks you for one, which is good enough for your average clueless home user, but not for a power user).

Now, you might want to install a few other key add-ons which you'll have to acquire from the Internet:

  1. Lame (a top-notch MP3 encoder). Google it, download the source code, and then do the usual "configure", "make", and "make install" commands in order to build it. Then, open up /etc/ld.so.conf and add the line "/usr/local/lib" to make sure that the linker can find the libraries.
  2. Libdvdcss (you don't strictly need this, but if you feel like playing commercial DVDs and you don't like LinDVD, you'll need it in order to play them on kaffeine or some other software. Google it, download the source code, and then do as you did with Lame.
  3. MPlayer and/or VLC (two media players that come bundled with Mandriva but only in crippled form). These are best obtained from the Penguin Liberation Front (Google it).
  4. DDClient (if you have a dynamic DNS-based website; if you don't know what dynamic DNS is, you won't need it).
  5. Sitecopy (if you have a website and you want to keep a local copy synchronized with it).
  6. Captive. This is an NTFS filesystem driver that allows you to read and write to NTFS partitions on your system. Very handy. Keep in mind that you'll have to install FUSE first, which is a separate package. FUSE comes on the Mandriva Powerpack DVD, but I'm not sure if it comes with the free version.

Other configuration hints

  1. If you want to have a "family login" screen, Edit /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc to replace the line "UseTheme = True" with "UseTheme = False". You can now use the "Configure Desktop" function to select icons to go with each username.
  2. If you want to use NFS, add the following line in the "Advanced" area of your firewall setup:
    111/tcp 111/udp 2049/tcp 2049/udp
  3. Edit /etc/hosts.deny to add the line "ALL:ALL EXCEPT 127.0.0.1:DENY". This will lock out access to any apps which check /etc/hosts.deny (such as sshd or nfs) from any IP address except your own. You can add lines like "sshd:192.168.1." and "portmap:192.168.1." to the hosts.allow file if you want to let LAN users access services.
  4. Assuming you installed Apache, in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, edit the ServerName to whatever you want your webserver to look like in your address bar, and edit the AllowOverrides directive to "All", otherwise .htaccess files won't do anything.

Upgrading

One of the best things about Linux is the fact that user settings are generally stored on a completely separate partition from the OS, so you can upgrade from one OS version to the next by completely overwriting it, without wiping out your user settings in the process. If you partition Linux so that your /home partition is kept separate, you can format all of your partitions except for /home when you upgrade. But as a general rule, you probably want to keep copies of the following files and/or directories from your original OS partition(s) in order to make an upgrade go smoother:

Personally, I've never really trusted upgrade scripts. If you're going to switch from one version of an OS to the next, you should just wipe out the old OS entirely, and as long as you keep your /home directory separate, you can do so relatively painlessly.

Last updated: 2007-11-16

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