Mandriva Beta part 2

The more observant among you will remember that the whole point of getting the Asus WL-HDD was to make space for Mandriva's 2007 operating system. That was a month and a half ago, so what's happened in the meantime?

Well, I downloaded the first beta, Thor, and tried to convince it to play nicely with my laptop. A "beta" release in software is a "test" version. The developers are reasonably happy with it, but need to have it tested on more hardware combinations than they have access to, and tested by more "real world" users.

Obviously, a Toshiba Tecra 8000, with Linksys WPC54g network card was not the primary market for Mandriva. This beta version contained no "non-free" software. Drivers for most laptop wireless network cards are "non-free", as they contain at least some proprietary code. "Free" in this context does not mean "without cost", but "without restriction".

In the "Open Source" world, "free" is a very contentious issue. For my part, I want an operating system that "just works", and can't get too hung up on the morals. I would probably pay for a window$ license, if I could trust it.

Well, I tried to get the bits & pieces together to manually configure the network card, and was reasonably successful. I had the card recognised by the operating system, but was unable to get any kind of security active on the wireless link.

No security, no network, as far as I'm concerned. You can't be concerned about bad people opening "back doors" to your machine, if you leave the front door wide open.

Luckily, Mandriva released beta 2 - Odin. And that is another story.....