Hi, I'm just looking for opinions, and perhaps a little clarification! I'm a second year computer science university student. Everything we've done so far uses Unix, and a lot of people (who pretended they knew something? Idk) told me to get a Windows laptop. What I'm looking into right now is getting Mandriva Linux, mostly for ease in doing my homework.

 

I've tried out the OS a bit on university computers, and while it's different than Windows 7 (<3) it's a lot nicer than the macs I've used. :P I was looking at the Mandriva site and 60$ seems reasonable to me. What I'm mostly curious about is the flash drive version they seem to have.. How does this work? If it works how I think it does (plug it in, and you have access to Mandriva on boot-up?) then I think this is perfect for me! I can keep using my laptop exactly how I always do, with Windows and everything. When I want to do my homework I can just boot up from the flash drive instead. If that's NOT how it works, I can always install the OS on my laptop and choose which one I want on boot-up right? I'd prefer not to do this however, as I don't have as much hard drive space as I might like, so I want to conserve it.

 

I welcome whatever anyone has to say, opinions, advice, information on Mandriva. Thanks to everyone who can reply!

Have you ever used a live linux cd? It's the same concept, only on a usb so you can save stuff to it.

 

Why not just get ubuntu and make the usb yourself?

Personally I'm more of a debian based OS user, I tend to prefer Ubuntu/Debian/Mint and as a lot of packages (30k+) are compiled for Debian based systems it seems best to me. But Mandriva is fine too, and the package manager is really the only major difference.

 

Booting from a flash drive really works the same as booting from a HDD. The only difference really is what you're booting from. It could work well that way, however unless you are looking to support Mandriva development I would buy a good flashdrive and make the live disk myself. If you choose to go with using a flashdrive for Linux though, there will be a difference in performance and I think that certain features might be disabled. (Hibernation and sleeping, I'm not sure though) On top of that if you accidentally take out the flash drive bad things could happen.

 

Alternatively you could install it on your HDD, and, like you said, you would get a choice at startup. The downside of this is that you would want to make a partition for Linux at least 10GB.

The flash version is missing a few features it looks like, but I'm not really worried about that. I won't be using it for my everyday stuff anyways. I have no idea how to make my own usb version of an operating system. :P I would give it a try if someone made it sound easy though!

Well it's really easy to do in Ubuntu, I've done it a few times (Just a few clicks after downloading an ISO), but I don't know about Mandriva.

 

Found this article (First Google result for "make a mandriva live usb"), and it doesn't look hard at all. http://www.pendrivelinux.com/make-your-own-portable-mandriva-flash/

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So what would be the advantages of making my own live USB as opposed to ordering the one from Mandriva?

Saving yourself $60 is the first thing that comes to mind :P

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Wouldn't I have to buy the OS before I can make it into a live USB anyways? The OS is 60$, and its still 60$ on the flash drive, not more.

Linux distros are free, and not only pricewise. http://www2.mandriva.com/downloads/free/ for the live cd for example.

My economics degree is demanding I make the clarification that it isn't free, you are forgoing the bandwidth that could have been used for something else and other opportunity costs.

Maybe, but on a home connection, even those that have caps, we pay for a certain amount of bandwidth and we never use all of it, at least it was my case, so it was wasted money for the bandwidth I had paid for but not used.

Clearly you aren't downloading enough porn.

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