Somewhere in the middle of 2008 my wife’s computer kept making very disturbing noises upon boot up. She had told me she would move to Linux when her current computer broke. So I bought her a new computer and loaded Kubuntu on it because she wanted “the version that looks like Windows”. I new she would want KDE for the desktop and I liked Ubuntu’s user-friendliness from when I installed it on my laptop. I had a feeling Fedora would be a bit much for her. She’s not afraid to learn about her computer, but she doesn’t want it getting in the way when she wants to get work done.

Dang that’s a mouth-full! Let’s break it down a bit for anyone who may not be familiar with the lingo surrounding this very blue Linux. Mandriva Linux is the name of this distro. One is the name of the sub-distro. The choices are Free, One, and PowerPack. Free only contains free software. One is free as in beer, but may contrain some non-free software - perhaps, for example, MP3 playback capabilities. PowerPack costs money and contains commercial software such as Cedega, which would cost money if you got it anyway, and other software like Adobe Reader. The French and Brazilian folks at Mandriva release twice a year (Like Ubuntu and Fedora). This is the Spring release for 2008 and later we’ll have the Fall release.