[Mageia-discuss] Mageia Rant ;-)

[KevinO]

My new Thinkpad came Friday morning: A T520, quad Core i7, 8GB RAM, 15.6 inch
screen, built in WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth, etc..

After burning 4 DVDs to create a boot and restore disks for the Win7 Pro and
other software that came pre-installed, I shrank the main Windows partition down,
leaving a couple hundred GB of free space for a Linux install.

I decided it was finally time to give Mageia 1 a try. I burnt a DVD from the x64
iso and proceeded to install. I chose Gnome over KDE, this time, because of the
modestly smaller footprint. (I'm comfortable with both)

With no CLI tweaking at all, I got everything to work... and I mean _everything_.

Sound and video worked immediately. WiFi worked once I was online and the system
could fetch the correct driver. (No NDISwrapper wanted nor needed here)

All of the special buttons work. The WiFi toggle button, the volume buttons, mute
button, sleep mode button. I fired up Firefox and browsed using WiFi to my music
server. Selecting an album to play, I found that the buttons to pause, skip
tracks forwards and backwards, and stop, all worked correctly with the default
movie player.

Making the Bluetooth mouse work required merely using Gnome's Bluetooth config
tool and pairing the devices. Poof! The mouse was working too. No hand editing of
Xorg.conf!

CPU speed-stepping works. Sleep mode kicks in if I either close the lid or press
the sleep button, and comes back up correctly later. Pressing the lock button
locks the screen, causing the usual login prompt to appear. Scrolling works in
both axis if I slide my finger along the edge of the track pad.

I've done a lot of Linux installs, but I've never seen this much hardware work
right-out-of-the-box on any machine, let alone a laptop. The Win7 side couldn't
see the Bluetooth mouse without the driver CD, but Mageia 1 had it covered. Amazing.

Tis truly a sweet machine with a very sweet Linux install.

Long Live Urpmi!
-- 
KevinO