The war has begun. Quite literally. The final release of Windows 7, the latest (and greatest?) version of Windows is just months away. We laid our hands on the RC (release candidate) available for free on Microsoft’s website, and took it for a spin against Mandriva 2009.1 Spring. Who won? The results are most surprising!

The hardware platform

We tested out both the operating systems on a pretty standard multimedia PC. The specs of the system are given below:

• Processor: Intel Core2 Duo E7200 @ 2.53GHz, 45nm Core Fabrication, without Intel VT.
• Memory: 2GB Transcend DDR2-800MHz JetRam
• Chipset: nVidia nForce 630i MCP
• Graphics (Onboard): nVidia nForce 630i/GeForce 7100
• Graphics (PCIe): nVidia GeForce 9400GT
• Networking: nVidia nForce MCP73 Networking Controller (Realtek RTL8139 Chip)
• Sound: Realtek AC’97 8 Channel High Definition On-board Audio (ALSA: Intel_HDA)
• Hard Disk (Primary): Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 320GB SATA2
• Hard Disk (Secondary, Hosting our OSs): Western Digital Caviar 160GB 7200RPM SATA2
• Display: Samsung SyncMaster 510N (15” or 38.1.cm, LCD-TFT, VGA Connection)
• Mouse and Keyboard: Microsoft Digital Media K/B and Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse

Now that you know the specs of our system, it’s time to move on!

The packages compared

Both Windows 7 RC and Mandriva 2009.1 Spring (Free) come on single-layer DVDs. Windows 7 is a smaller download at 2.35 GB, whereas Mandriva weighs in at 4.34 GB, or 1.99 GB more. Both are ISO images, and have to be burned onto a disk.

Installation: Head-on

We started out by creating two empty unformatted partitions of 25 GB each on the shiny new caviare. Then, after starting the countdown timer, we started the computer with the Windows 7 RC DVD in the drive. A little while later, a plain text message greeted us: “Press any key to boot from CD or DVD” with a growing number of dots after it (it’s supposed to stay five seconds, after which it automatically boots from the hard disk). After a jab at the Enter key, the screen went blank.

Not for long. Just a split second later, a screen with the message “Windows Is Loading Files” along with a progress bar appeared. It then completed a graphical boot screen and displayed four balls converging into a Windows flag and a lot of HDR effects. The screen was set at the full 1024×768 pixels resolution, with 32-bit colour. Too little, too late: we already have this animated graphical boot capability in RHGB, which was demonstrated by Fedora 10.

The installer took almost a minute to start, which is way too long for our liking. Anyway, once it was up, a screen came up asking for language and locale selection. We selected English (India) as our language, and let the other settings be. Then we hit OK. A second screen came up, with a big ‘Install Now’ button amongst other things. We hit that as well. The set-up program thus got initiated, taking another minute to load. What’s with Windows and speed?

The first screen showed us a licence agreement. You know what Microsoft EULAs are! Anyway, without accepting it, we could not try it out, so we accepted it with a heavy heart. The next screen threw up a surprise: it was meant to ask us whether to upgrade or perform a new installation. Typical of Microsoft confusion-creating terminology, the new installation option is called ‘Custom’. But accompanying it was a common Microsoft Bug—the upgrade option was enabled, and below it was clearly stated, “The Upgrade option is enabled only when you are installing Windows from within an Operating System that can be upgraded to Windows 7.”

We hit the Custom button. A partition selection screen showed up, where we selected Disk 1 Partition 0 (which means the first partition of the second disk, which GRUB guys will know :-)). It was unformatted (as we had prepared it). We hit Next, and whoa, installation had started before we knew it. Installation took a long time, and at the end of it, the thing rebooted the PC into Windows 7. The first run wizard then asked for a user name, a password, and most annoyingly, a password hint. Now Microsoft is just slashing open a security hole by enforcing that feature. It put the PC through its paces, ran some hardware detection, asked what type of network we were in, and finally took us to the desktop.

Over the entire procedure, the set-up program had installed the Windows Boot Manager onto the first partition superblock and written a new MBR chainloading the first partition, thus effectively destroying GRUB. Windows XP was detected, but no sign of Fedora 10 remained. The entire procedure took 16 minutes plus user interaction time. Way too slow. On the upside, the Windows set-up looks very sleek and superbly streamlined, and it was a pleasure to actually install Windows, save the nasty Fedora busting surprise at the end (but it wasn’t supposed to work anyway).

Mandriva was a whole new story. We put the DVD in, and the first thing we knew was that a cool blue ‘fishy’ menu with some menu items for installing, rescuing, checking our hardware and booting from the first hard disk, had come up. We would have preferred a “Press any key…” prompt to save the overhead of starting the CD boot manager, however. We just hit Enter, and after a text-mode phase the GUI installer started up.

The Mandy installer doesn’t look anywhere near as sleek as Windows 7’s, and at first glance has twice as many steps compared to Windows’ set-up. The installer is arranged rather like Windows XP’s, with a list of steps stacked in a sidebar at the left of the screen, and wizard dialogs exactly like the WINNT32.EXE installer, only a lot prettier. The first screen is for selecting the system locale, of course. No English (India) here, so we had to settle for English (British). We accepted the licence agreement (which informed us that there was no warranty) and then moved on to partitioning. Partitioning manually was a confusing affair for a new user, compared to Windows 7. Then on, it was smooth sailing.

After selecting the root partition, we were asked if we wanted to configure additional repositories (for pulling in updated software from the Internet during installation). This was a feature of the Windows set-up since the days of Windows XP (Dynamic Updates), but was absent in the Windows 7 RC set-up. Anyway, we chose not to use these repos but rather pull the packages from our DVD. Then we were asked if we wanted a GNOME desktop or a KDE. We chose KDE, since it is more Windows like (though a bit more advanced), and is visually better. And then, installation started in full swing.

After the package installation was complete (throughout the progress one could choose to see a slideshow of Mandriva’s other products or read a text output showing each package’s install process), we were taken to the user configuration screen where we were asked for the root (administrator) password, and told to furnish the details of our user account. Here, there was no enforcement to furnish a password hint, and you could use a username other than your full name—two features absent in Windows and two features we really like. We were then asked where we’d like our bootloader to be installed—we chose the MBR of our first hard disk (the one with 320GB)—and then we were taken to the systems configuration screen where we could configure every aspect of the system prior to first boot.

We chose Asia/Calcutta as our time zone and India as our location. There was no need to tweak the bootloader, but we did that just for the sake of giving more descriptive names to the items rather than “linux”, “windows1” and “windows2”. Both our Windows installations were detected, as well as Fedora Cambridge (which had disappeared after installing Windows 7). Video configuration was interesting, where the system defaulted to “nVidia Cards not working with nv” (we were using the 9400GT; the onboard was disabled in our BIOS—and more on that later). That was all. We went through the next step (which asked us if we wanted to install security updates, to which we said, ‘No’) and then the PC rebooted, and Mandriva went through a first run wizard, somewhat like Windows XP’s ‘OOBE’ (out of box experience).