Mandriva was the first Linux OS that I ever used and I suppose it appealed to me because of it being a very user

friendly distro. Actually when I first stumbled upon it I was extatic. I was stuned with KDE 4.1 and its amazing ability to allow you to customise everything. But eventually I realised that I didn’t want to customise everything and that some things are better left to the distro designers! Mandriva, for me, was kind of a bridge into the Linux world. I learned a hell of a lot while using it and I am now quite familiar with the Konsole and all it’s various

commands. But after a while I did feel like I wanted more, more Linux that is – and less Windows. Because at the end of the day Mandriva is designed for Windows users and in my opinion it is a bit Windows like.

Anyway I better start talking about Fedora. I went of to a faulty start with this distro. I had previously tried Fedora 9 on my laptop but it rejected my graphics card and I decided to wait for the release of Fedora 10. I know it has been released for a couple of months at this stage but I was waiting for a packaged release. I got this last week in the Linux Format magazine. Unfortunately Fedora 10 also rejected my graphics card. But not to worry the local Linux guru was happy to help! Once I got the graphics sorted I had free reign!

The CD I got with the Linux Format magazine had everything! I distinctly remember in Mandriva having to download ever

ything that you would expect to have with a distro, packages that a hell of a lot of programs depend on, such as glibc. Not the case this time though thank god because my internet connection would probably get stressed and stop working or something…. The CD gave me a pre-installed web server! Brilliant because frankly I could not have been arsed learning how to set up Apache vhosts again! It also came with a wide range of extra programs such as GIMP 2.6 (I tried to get this for Mandriva but urpmi was still stuck on 2.4!), Transmission Bit Torrent (usefull for downloading music) and rythmbox music player. I was surprised at the fact that it didn’t include Konqueror – I thought that all distros did. It could be a KDE program.

Another choice that I had to face was KDE or GNOME? As I earlier emphasised Mandriva One 2009 came with KDE 4.1, which was the first stable release of KDE 4, and Mandriva was the first distro to be released with it. It certainly had a lot to live up to after KDE 3, not that I would know – it’s a bit before my time! I had enjoyed KDE and I wanted to take it with me when I made the switch to Fedora. But i still haven’t actually got round to setting it up and for the moment I am stuck with GNOME 2.24. That is not a bad thing though because it is ever so slowly growing on me. I am at the point now where I think that I might just not bother setting up KDE…

So Fedora 10. All round it’s impressive. The last release I toyed with was Fedora 8 and it has certainly changed for the better since then! The new graphically animated boot proccess is much better than the old jumpy thing and the desktop photo of a blue star is very interesting. For those of you that reject it’s animated state you are wrong! I spent ten minutes yesterday staring at that screen and I am certain that it moves! However slightly and smoothly, it does move!. Thats about it. Fedora 10 gets top marks by me, great distro! Hopefully the team can keep up with their twice a year releases because I for one can’t wait ’till Fedora 11.

Oh and be expecting some Fedora Magik in the form of USB!

Method 1

This method is recommended all over the internet and i’m sure it does work – but with a great work around. I spent a lot of time trying to get this to work and I couldn’t so I reverted to method 2 below. I strongly recommend trying method 2 because it simply just works! If anyone can point out what I’m doing wrong here please let me know.

Assuming that you have urpmi installed type the following:

urpmi mysql

Blah Blah Blah and it is installed. Now lets enter mysql.

mysql -u root -p
Enter Password:
ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

No! I have got the infamous error 2002! I spent so long trying to fix this error and in the end I estabalished that the mysql.sock file was simply never created. I could go on and list all the solutions that I tried that don’t work but at this point I think the best thing for you to do at this point is to uninstall.

urpme mysql

Good all’s good and now lets revert to method number 2 which actually does work without much trouble.

Method 2

Now this method is easy and will take no longer than five minutes. We are going to install a package called XAMPP which contains Apache 2.2.9, MySQL 5.0.67, PHP 5.2.6 and phpmyadmin among others. It is very usefull. To download just type:

wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/xampp/xampp-linux-1.5.5a.tar.gz

Then to install:

tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.5.5a.tar.gz -C /opt

It should now be installed – simple as that! To start XAMPP:

/opt/lampp/lampp start
Starting XAMPP 1.5.5a…
LAMPP: Starting Apache…
LAMPP: Starting MySQL…
LAMPP started.

Now that it is started type http://localhost in your browser and there you go!

Now you have XAMPP working which has phpmyadmin which you can use for mysql. If you would rather have MySQL in a CLI (like me) then you can simply follow the instructions below.

MySQL will not work initially because you need to locate the mysql.sock file. To gain immediate access just type:

mysql -u root --socket=/opt/lampp/var/mysql/mysql.sock

Brilliant its working ! This is only a temporary fix however because you don’t want to have to type in the socket location every time. To set the socket location permenantly to the new location do the following:

vim /etc/my.cnf/

This will open up the documet. Type “i” to get into insertion mode (to edit the text). There are two sections here that you need to edit – client and mysqld. They both have a socket location, if you replace both of those locations with the new one (/opt/lampp/var/mysql/mysql.sock) it should do the job. Press escape to exit insertion mode and press “:wq” to exit and save. Now your MySQL should work by just typing:

mysql -u root -p

Hopefully that works for you, it did for me. As I said earlier I couldn’t find any decent solution online. If you see any problems with what I have written just let me know!

When I got home I stuck in the CD, not expecting much since I was disapointed with both Fedora and Ubuntu. Oh My God it is brilliant!! Mandriva is the best operating system that I have ever stumbled upon! Absolutly brilliant! It combines all the good visual aspects of Microsoft’s Window Vista and the good old back end of Linux! The graphical ‘flowing’ widgets and the availability to completly customise everything visually creates a great user friendly (and more importandly Windows user friendly) interface.

So I set about getting rid of Fedora. I only had 12 GB hard drive space reserved for Fedora but I was so impressed by Mandriva that I managed to clear 34 GB for it! The OS is now installed and almost fully functional.

I have to say I am surprised that a Linux distribution has finally achieved what I have been waiting for. The things that I want in Linux are finally available, which are:

• The graphical, ease of use, user friendly aspects of a Windows distribution. Mandriva in my opinion has achieved this, and to my great suprise it has out-done any Windows OS that I have ever used in this section in particular.
• No Viruses. This has allways been available – but without the other points it means nothing.
• The ability to code properly, I have learned the hard way that this isn’t possible on Windows.
• Oh and everything is easy! Like MySQL for example, i found it impossible to set it up on Windows without using PHP MyAdmin.

Over all i think Mandriva is brilliant and I cant wait to get it working properly. The only one problem that I did find with it is that my 02 3G modem won’t work properly on it. I have found some articles to hack the config files, which I intent to do as soon as I find out how to log in as root!!! oh it will all work eventually…

Just to note I got The Strats website up at http://www.thestrats.com please check it out and give me a review here or preferably at http://www.webdesignforum.com/5904-review-my-new-site.html#post22842