Quote Originally Posted by Marmite the Dog
Did the Mandriva installation go easily? Any problems with drivers, especially networking ones?
Mandriva One is one of the easiest Live (install) CD, as it come with proprietary drivers for graphical cards and some common plugins (flash). The Mandriva Free CD comes without any proprietary driver or plugin.

Download | Mandriva

You can download iso, burn it on a CD and launch Mandriva in "Live" mode to check if your hardware is compliant. On my new COMPAQ laptop nearly everything worked out of the box. Most common ethernet drivers are included in the kernel as well as wireless one. On this laptop I had to install the wireless driver using ndiswrapper though (Broadcast chipset), the ethernet nvidia device was natively supported.

The default One Live CD come with KDE desktop environnment, if, like me you prefer Gnome you have to browse a download mirror like ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror...ial/iso/2008.1 to get the Mandriva Spring Gnome iso.