By Mitch Meyran
Online on: 2007-11-09
For those of you that follow my blog, you must have noticed that I’m a Mandriva user. Recently though, I took an interest in Ubuntu: I installed version 7.04 on a laptop, and it did look interesting, enough to make me doubt my commitment to Mandriva’s products.
Thus, when 7.10 came out with a bang in the media, and I got another laptop to de-borgify, I downloaded the Ubuntu 7.10 ISO along with the install CD for Mandriva 2008.0 Free.
So, I did a test drive, trying to level the field as much as possible. Here are the results.
Test hardware and distributions
I tested the latest version of both Mandriva and Ubuntu on various desktop and laptop systems with various hardware configurations (and with them, the distribution it ended up running):
- Packard Bell laptop, Celeron M, 512MB of RAM, integrated ATI graphics. Troublesome sound and wi-fi card. Running Ubuntu 7.04.
- Dell laptop, with SATA hard disk drive, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, Athlon64 X2 mobile, discrete ATI graphics. Running Mandriva 2008.0 first, then finalized with Ubuntu 7.10.
- Personal workstation, discrete NVIDIA graphics, 2GB of DDR RAM, Athlon64 X2. Running Mandriva 2008.0.
- Job workstation, discrete low-range NVIDIA graphics, 1.5GB of DDR RAM, Sempron64. Running Mandriva 2008.
- Job workstation (assistant), discrete low-range NVIDIA graphics, 768MB of DDR RAM, Sempron64. AGPGART detection problems on cold boot, running Mandriva 2007.1.
- Test workstation, various graphics cards, 512MB of DDR RAM, AthonXP. Running both Mandriva 2008.0 and Ubuntu 7.10 (dual boot).
- Dell laptop, SATA, 2GB, Core2 Duo, NVIDIA graphics. Installed Ubuntu 7.10 first, now running Mandriva 2008.0.
To those telling me I didn’t test enough generic hardware, please direct your messages to /dev/null 
. These systems have various levels of power and resources, and different hardware add-ons. Some are very close and allow direct comparisons, first between revisions, then between distributions in general. The following article is written based upon my experience with running and tweaking these systems.
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