Mandriva rocks!. Review on Mandriva LE 2005 Linux

I am writing this review after using Mandriva 2009 as the only OS in my computer, so I am pretty much into Linux.

I am no geek, just another average guy using a computer. A few months ago I bought an assembled PC from a vendor without any pre-installed OS. Not wanting to go the traditional way of the average Indian PC user, that is loading my machine with heaps of pirated software, I decided to go the Open Source way. After trying out a few live Distros.

I zeroed in on Mandriva 2009 Free. And I was hooked from day one. Installation is a breeze even for any first time user. The interactive graphical installer guides every step. Whats the best thing thogh is that this is not as resource hungry an operating system as Windows Vista.Any Pentium4 machine with 512Mb RAM and the OS works fine. The live DVD has dozens of third party software for the average user. The following software more than covers my needs:

*Office Applications**: **openoffice.org** office suite

*ocular **for viewing pdf files

*Graphics: GIMP** for image and photo editing

*Gwenview** for image viewing

*GTkam** for tarnferring images from digital camera

*Blender** for 3D modelling

*Multimedia: Amarok **for listening to music

*Vlc** for watching video

*Avidemux **for video editing

*Audacity **for audio editing

*Internet: Firefox **for web browsing

*Thunderbird **email client

*Filezilla **ftp client

*Archiving**: **K3b** for CD burning

*Ark **for file compression(WinZip replacement)

There is hardly any need to install any additional software unlike Windows. And just in case someone needs to run Windows applications, he can download and install the latest version of WINE(** http://www.winehq.org**). In all, if we want to play legally(not using pirated software) and yet want it cheap(this one is free to use and copy or distribute) and easy(for Windows users) Mandriva is the way to go. Anyone looking for the latest version of Mandriva, can look forward to Mandriva One Spring 2009, which will be out in a couple of months(a beta version can be downloaded from ** http://www.mandriva.org**). Hopefully LinuxforYou magazine will have a copy. Or it can be ordered from ** http://www.rainbowcomputech.com**, they have a wonderful collection of Linux distros.