Re: [Cooker] Doubt: x86_64 or i586?

On Fri, 2008-08-08 at 21:22 +0200, Olivier Blin wrote:
> Liam R E Quin <liam@...> writes:
[...]
> Arch can be chosen at the bootloader step of the installer (first
> screen, handled by gfxboot)
> It defaults to 64 bits for systems supporting it.

That may be true, if you download the right thing.

If I go to
http://www.mandriva.com/
I see links to download One, or powerpack, or to by flash.
There's no mention of Free or 2008.1.

Well, OK, maybe Free isn't supported, only One.

So I click on the One download button, and still no indication of
whether it's for a PowerMac, Sparc, Intel, or what.

But it does now say Linux One 2008 Spring
And oh look, the URL is
http://www.mandriva.com/en/download/free
so maybe One and free are the same thing?

No, I knwo they aren't, but mandriva's web site is too fucked
up for anyone to guess this.

(on the left of that page is a box, navigation * Home, where Home
takes you to http://www.mandriva.com/en/oem_home
with "You are not authorized to access this page". Hmm.

Let's go back to Mandriva.com, maybe we missed something.

Ah, here are some links under Help.  let's try them.
Knowledge Base might help us.
It goes to
http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view/KB/
which (at the bottom) mentions it was last modified
on 12th October 2007 by Arkub.  Hmm, so not much on
2008.1 Free there.  But there's a link to Installation,
so i try that.

And now I do get to,
http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view/KB/InstallIndex#HChoiceofinstallationmediaforyourprocessor
The versions marked "x86_64" are for PC's with recent 64 bit processors

OK, so now I'm getting somewhere.  I follow the link to download by ftp,
since bittorrent doesn't work here.

And I get to
ftp://ftp.free.fr/pub/Distributions_Linux/MandrivaLinux/official/iso/2008.1/
(before, I used the mirror list and went to a mirror in Canada), and now
there are indeed files marked x85_64.

But wait, rememner that I got here by looking at Mandriva One.
There's no mandriva One with a 64-bit label here.  There's something
called Free, but that is not mentioned on the Mandriva Web pages.
Should I trust it?

Maybe to anyone at Mandriva this is all obvious, but I didn't find it
obvious.  In the end I used a "Free" dvd from the cover of a magazine,
having been incorrectly told by mandriva support that Free was dual
architecture.  I only get 10 gigabytes per month, so no downloading any
more DVD images for me until September, at which point it probably won't
be Spring any more :-) (which is part of why in the past I have bought
the powerpack, but from what you and others have said the powerpack
edition is obviously 32-bit only).

A comparison, let's see how hard it is to work out what to download
with Ubuntu, or Red Hat, and see if you have to download something
that's not a supported product, that's not even mentioned in their
list of products, and where there's not even a readme explaining what
the files are for?

Well, at ubuntu.com I click Get Ubuntu.
then I'm asked, what type of computer do you have, and
which release do you want (desktop or server). OK, I can handle
that for now.

And then it gives me a list of mirrors, I choose a country and
the download starts.

Easy, and they kept me informed, no guessing.

OK, I try www.fedora.com. It's a portal site for spam, oops.

Then I find www.fedoraproject.org.

Click on Get Fedora.
There's a list of Install media, and guess what,
it clearly marks i386, x86_64 and ppc

So I don't think my frustration with Mandriva is
unjustified.  Yes, make things simple, but not so
simple that there are no longer any roadsigns.

Liam

--
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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