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Low-cost student laptops to run Mandriva Linux

desktoplinux.com — Mandriva, the France-based Linux distributor, will have a version of its Mandriva Linux 2007 pre-installed on Intel's new low-end laptop for students, the "ClassMatePC."

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  • schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24Quanta has just announced that it would use its OLPC tech to produce a ~$200 PC as well, also with Linux. So now there are (at least) 3 low-cost units... maybe sub-$200.
    • Elranzer, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4This laptop seems to be the better deal. This unit is made by Intel, features Flash storage and is missing that dreadfully ugly hand-crank.
    • Yogurth, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11That crank is quite useful/must have in 3rd world countries where electricity isn't everyday treat. That is for whom OLPC laptops are for.
    • Disfnord, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Didn't OLPC ditch the hand crank, like, a looooooooong time ago?
    • Fratm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7The OLPC No longer has a crank.

      Here is a picture of it http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Green_and_white_machine.jpg

      -Fratm
  • RobsDeals, on 10/12/2007, -17/+0you can buy low end windows machines for not much more. Make sure that the operating sytem supports a version of the software you plan on using. Remember, you use the software on the machine not the operating system to accomplish most things.
  • spindrift, on 10/12/2007, -2/+37I love how Windows is used in the product shots.
  • bm8631, on 10/12/2007, -31/+5I would just rip out Mandriva and install Ubuntu instead.

    Ubuntu, FTW!
    • brstilson, on 10/12/2007, -10/+33This post is a perfect example of how Ubuntu fanboyism can be as bad as Apple or Microsoft fanboyism.
    • Schpariel, on 10/12/2007, -17/+5Ubuntu is made of win.
    • Elranzer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14I normally would agree with this, but did you miss this part:

      "Mandriva says it spent eight months working with Intel to customize the Mandriva Linux operating system for the ClassMatePC; the process included integrating drivers and adapting applications specially developed for the education-oriented project, according to the company."

      I would wait until these drivers are ported to other distros. Official drivers work loads better than the open-source ones. Generally, Intel is very good about Linux drivers.
    • jrtcs, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8brstilson: I challenge you to name 3 self-proclaimed Microsoft fanboys.
    • solidcube, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13@brstilson: Back around when Digg started, I often wondered if there was a funded effort to promote Ubuntu here. It seemed like every other post was something gushing over ubuntu this, ubuntu that.

      I even ordered CDs just to see what all the fuss was about. I expected to hate it.

      Now, I run Ubuntu and only Ubuntu. All my machines run Ubuntu.
    • nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@Elranzer (#5929166) said: "I normally would agree with this, but did you miss this part:

      "Mandriva says it spent eight months working with Intel to customize the Mandriva Linux operating system for the ClassMatePC; the process included integrating drivers and adapting applications specially developed for the education-oriented project, according to the company."

      I would wait until these drivers are ported to other distros. Official drivers work loads better than the open-source ones. Generally, Intel is very good about Linux drivers. "

      Linux drivers are in the kernel and don't get ported from distro to distro! It sounds like you've bought into some FUD about how the # of distros hurts Linux and requires duplicate effort (the latter holds some truth). Unless Mandriva infringes on Linux' copyright by shipping binary drivers (like Nvidia & ATI) then the work they do will benefit everyone with the hardware present in this notebook. That's how Linux and the GPL were designed to work.

      And what the hell are you talking about "official" drivers work better than OSS ones? Perhaps with video cards that is the case but even then it's not necessarily that the binary ones work better they just provide more functionality. At least in ATI's case the "official" drivers are notoriously bug-ridden. On Linux the OSS drivers ARE the "official" drivers. You have no clue what you're talking about.
  • KrylonWolf, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3Nicely done, but I'm with bm8631 on this one. Have to use Ubuntu. Its much better than Mandriva. Im kind of curious as to how well something like that could be modded. Honestly, 7 inch LCD display. Yes its sort of convenient for something of that proportion but I'd still like to get at least 10 on something of that size.
  • williamdyer, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1Mandriva? Sounds like a act I saw in Provincetown last summer. Uh... don't ask.
    • williamdyer, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Oh, come on. Sense of humor much? Can't you picture Mandriva in size 17 high heels a feather boa and fruit hat?
  • artoisval, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11I use Mandriva since 2001, I really like it, except the bugs in the 2007 release. I even tried Ubuntu and I switched back to Mandriva. In my humble opinion, Ubuntu isn't mature as Mandriva...

    Personally The day I will buy a new laptop, I will chose it for it hardware spec not wich os is pre-installed, it can be easily changed by the os I want.
    • bejayel, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1I think almost anyone you talk to will tell you that mandriva pretty much sucks :P. I would even rather use (God forbid) Fedora Core to mandriva.

      The only reason you liked mandriva better is because of its choice of desktop manager are my bets. Try using Kubuntu, i bet you will like it much better than mandriva. Not to mention is has much better support.
    • bryantthesmith, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6@artoisval:
      I had the same experience when I tried switching from Mandriva to Ubuntu last month. I gave it a good honest effort, but I couldn't pull myself away from the wonderful configuration utilities Mandriva has. Ubuntu just didn't give me the tools to customize the system the way I wanted to. As it is an older distro, Mandriva has had more time to perfect its utilities and configurations. I imagine Ubuntu will eventually surpass Mandriva because of the number of people using it and giving the developers feedback, but for now I will keep using Mandriva.
  • solidcube, on 10/12/2007, -14/+1Low Cost Student Laptops to run Low-End Kiddie Linux.
    • nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10LOL ... if *nix is for kids what the hell do you use? (you big man you)
    • solidcube, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2Ah, my child, there are many different kinds of linux.
    • tech42er, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Oh, so Ubuntu?
      /it's a joke
    • nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@solidcube (#5935210) said: "Ah, my child, there are many different kinds of linux."

      And you can open up a shell on all of them. Everybody has their distro(s) of choice but when it comes down to the nitty gritty *nix is *nix, whether that's Gentoo, Fedora, OS X, OpenBSD, or Solaris if you can use man and you know the basics you can probably figure things out. Things like free vs vmstat or requiring flags before args may trip you up but the core utils are similar.

      So yeah Mandriva may suck to us who prefer debian, gentoo, or slackware but to others it may be nice. Many people *love* Suse and Fedora and I don't care for either one much at all. In the end they are all Linux.
  • bwesterman, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1don't really care.
  • artoisval, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5>>The only reason you liked mandriva better is because of its choice of desktop manager are my bets. Try using >>Kubuntu, i bet you will like it much better than mandriva. Not to mention is has much better support.

    No, it's because Im used to it, used of how Mandrake/driva is installed, how it is configured, how to install software, etc, etc,etc. But sometime Im realy aggravated about the bugs in 2007, it remember of 9.2
  • JrGhoull, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1so twice as powerful, 50 to 100 bucks more than the olpc (depending on how u wanna look at it...the olpc right now is around 150 though by the time they distribute it it'll cost around 100 bucks) but REALLY ugly (the olpc is not only really functional/useful but also looks really good)

    so...(shrugz) hopefully we'll get some version of this in the usa so that the quality of education in our public schools goes up. it takes alot more than throwing money at something as big as education to make the problem better....but the peer to peer network could make the classroom sooo much more interactive and therefor successful that i think this could really work.
    • elev, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I can't believe people actually believe that throwing technology into out public school system will solve ANYTHING. Better Technology != Better Education. (period). Better teachers who feel empowered to teach in creative and innovative methods equal better education. I can tell you from first hand experience that educators are not supported in the current system. No Child Left Behind has helped floundering school districts realize how far behind they are, but it ties their hands in regards to fixing the problem.
      The opinion that every student should have a laptop to better their education is completely missing the point. Do better cars make better drivers?
      If we gave every student a computer three things would happen. The smart kids good kids would take advantage of it and use it to excell their work to college levels, making them ideal students. The smart kids who are less, let's say "academically motivated" (I'm not knocking anyone, I was one), will find a way to take advantage of the technology in a direction that has very little to do with formal education. The kids who would have dropped out or failed grades multiple times *read: "the ones who NEED help"*, will not be able to use this to better themselves because they are already unable to survive in the current system's level of autonomy. I would LOVE for every student to have a laptop but any tool is useless without education. "A tool is only as good as it's he who wields it"

      Summary:
      Technolgy doesn't educate better.
      Better educators educate better.

      Sorry for rant. I hope someone gets my point.
    • williamdyer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3More homeschooling is the only thing that will save the primary and secondary education system in the U.S. Outside of wealthy communities that demand results and are willing to pay for gold-plated ashtrays in the teacher's smoking room, the public schools are ***** beyond fixable.

      I predict Google School will be the Next Big Thing.
    • megaloid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Dugg up for "***** beyond fixable." May it become a slogan scrawled on every government building across the fruited plain.
    • tech42er, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@will,
      so wouldn't private schools help, too?
  • copperteeth, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3This is a great idea for students who cant afford a top of the line notebook for school! I wonder if you could get it with ubuntu though?....
  • childprey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3But... will it run lin~
    er. wait.


    I'd throw a *BSD on just to spite the man
  • flak9, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Wow, that laptop looks like something I would give a child! Not trying to slam Mandriva, but could the laptop be slightly more attractive?
    • tech42er, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Um...the OS does not control the beauty of the laptop.
  • starguy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2I use to be a big fan of Mandrake Linux... mainly because I was so sick of Windows 95 and 98 blue screens of death. If you knew what services to turn off in Mandrake, and what extra rpms to install, and were fairly proficient in Linux, you could actually make it a usable and comfortable system. A lot of Mandrake was always bleeding edge at the time (hard to say today), so you had to find a "build" that worked and stick with it, as sometimes later builds would be worst than what you had.... so you would figure out a build you loved, install the apps you had to have that weren't included, figure out the commands you really needed (mcedit, linuxconf, etc) and you were set.

    Then XP came out with its "sleep" function, better DirectX, and far more Wifi driver support, which totally made Linux look like so much junk at that point. For me, it was the "sleep" feature that sent Linux to the dustbin of obsolescence. Being able to put the computer to sleep, just keep the refreshing the ram, and then hit a kep and be right back where you were was a dream and still is. Finally, a computer that acts like an instant on appliance.

    Recently I wanted to revist the old friend, so I downloaded Mandriva and burned out the ISO. I installed in on my AMD 3500+ machiens with 2gb RAM and Nvidia 7800 pcie cards. The screen shots looked great online, so I was looking forward to seeing how far it had come, only there was just one problem. It didn't boot after it was installed. It was broken. Kaput. Shot. I couldn't even get to a shell prompt. It was as pathetic as a lot of the linux installs were for the Itanium plantforms. Broken on install. So I reformated the drives and installed Windows Vista Ultimate. Which gets the whole sleep function down pat even better than XP.

    Vista just totally destroys Linux on the desktop, and here's why. (I don't support DRM, or Genuine Advantage, or its pricey price tag, but if you can look past those blemishes, it is amazingly stable and once you switch off a bunch of useless eyecandy, fast and very, very comfy to use).

    First MAJOR problem with Linux: no sleep. Linux was designed by hardware hackers and got its foothold in the door running as a stable scalable server platform... such as for web and ftp servers. As such, the linux mentality is to leave the computer on all the time running. This doesn't work on the desktop anymore. People don't want to leave their computers on all the time, they don't want to leave them on at all. It burns up electricty, its noisy, puts hours on harddrives, generates heat, and its just annoying. Unless the Linux community grasps how much being able to put your computer to "Sleep" is a killer app, Linux is going to end up getting marginalized off of the desktop and relegated to a cheap OS to run on bulk servers and as a stripped down embedded OS's

    The second problem with Linux is that it gets in your way. An OS needs to, as I like to say, get the F**K out of your way. It needs to get out of your way and be as intuitive as possible to let you do what you need to do. An OS that is well written is written so that it gets so much out of your way, that you forget there even is an OS there. VIsta is great at this. It gets out of your way, so you can do what you want to do. You don't care about the underlying OS, you don't care about hacking or tweaking it or figuring out a Samba config file, or debugging why Xwindows won't start, or how to get two applications to install that have completly incompatible package dependencies. Linux, as I say, gets nasty and gets all up in your grill. I've spent hours, days, figuring out how to just get something under Linux to plain old *work*. Wrong! It should work right out of the box as the default. Default configs should be for it to work, with default settings that work.

    My third rant with Linux, is the horrid command syntaxes of the bulk of the commands. There is no way most people can remember a long list of bizarre parameters necessary to do complex tasks on the command line. I myself would keep notebooks of these obscure commands and their parameters written down to have handy when installing a new system. You have to have an excellent memory and work with these things every day, otherwise you're forced to searching the net for an example of the usage of the command you want to use on the command line. Don't even thing of going to go to the man pages, which are the hugest pile of stinking useless garbage ever written on the planet. Linux FAQs are far more helpful, but still, plenty of reading to do. As a programmer back in the day when I was younger I could remember all these things, but as you get older, and diabetic from years of guzzling soft drinks, your memory disappears and you can't remember this junk anymore. And you ask yourself, what was those flags again to untar a file with? Or to pass to wget to mirror a site? Or to pass to netcat to do such and such? No, at that point, a GUI is no longer a luxury, its a necessity. You need to be able to go into a control panel, and find what you need where you need it in the logical place you need it, and all the places where you need to configure or do something is already there and already switched on with settings that work by default. Vista does a great job of this. Under Linux, there's two or three different control panels or more under KDE or Gnome you have to rummage around, and most of them are missing a lot of what you need to do.

    I still run one Centos Linux system, to run Perl Scripts, but I don't use it anymore. For one thing, there is no Itanium flashplayer support, and this is admittedly Adobe's fault not Linux, but it drastically cuts down your ability of what sites you can surf, and I need to surf a lot of video sites.

    Vista doesn't yet support a lot of drivers for every this and that gadget, but neighter does linux, so I've gotten use to that. All those things are nice to have working, but when you get right down to it, really all you need is the video card to work, the network card to work, usb to work, and the soundcard to work, and in that order. After that, getting anything else to work (like a webcam, twain scanner, etc) I consider gravy.
    • troymcdavis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1First MAJOR problem with your argument is that suspend/hibernate have indeed been implemented in the GNOME and KDE environments. As far as how well it works... I can say it works for me with no problem. Obviously this is no scientific analysis, as it might not work for the rest of the Linux community (the fact that I haven't heard much leaves me to think it's just fine). But you didn't say anything about how well it worked; you said "Linux was designed by hardware hackers and got its foothold in the door running as a stable scalable server platform", which may be true, but I think GNOME and KDE are aimed at the desktop (hence "Desktop Environment"). One of the two are included with pretty much every major distro (you do see the occasional XFCE or distro that opts for a WM rather than a DE).

      My second response would be that I run Windows maybe once or twice a week, and it gets in my way in that short time frame more than Linux has since I started using it. You should try Linux Mint or PCLinuxOS when the next releases come out.

      Lastly: [command] --help

      Either than that, your criticisms are legit. Sorry it's not ready for you yet, but maybe in time.
  • troymcdavis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Did anybody notice that in one of the screenshots, the computer is running Windows XP?
  • glyj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3about suspend/hibernate : you should be happy with the upcoming mandriva 2007.1.

    have a look there: http://www.dailymotion.com/fr/mandriva/video/x1fctc_mandriva-linux-2007-spring-benchmar.

    about "bleeding edge": there are special media repositories for those who can't wait : main-backports and contrib-backports.

    also new in the 2007.1 : a new repository : non-free (with drivers, players and so on), gnome 2.18, and access to the kde 4.0 pre-version (in a separate directory to preserve stability of the system...)

    everything for free of course.

    regards,
    glyj
  • najmo991, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0I think am gonna give Mandriva a try, I really like it, . In my opinion, Ubuntu isn't mature as Mandriva...
    Personally if i want to buy a new laptop, I will chose it for it hardware specs not wich os is pre-installed, anyway since i like it and am French am gonna add the Mandriva website in All my directories http://www.indexpedia.net http://www.jojodirectory.com and http://www.jubblo.com !
    DUGGED!
  • kizio, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Perfect post! This makes me smile. http://catszone.blogspot.com
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  • mhmdkhamis, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0http://www.paramegsoft.com/forum/
    http://links.paramegsoft.com
  •  

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