bjoernvold.com

Well I am in this building my own stuff phase so I thought I'd give Unity a shot. And to make a long story short I have a booting Gnome3 based on Mandriva cooker.
Must dive in there again...

What I gather is that Unity has derived from Mandriva with Mathew Dawkins, also a key player for the OpenMandriva Foundation, at the helm. Are you saying you have built a Unity livecd based on cooker? I'd be worried that cooker is a little bit more rocky that usual, right now.
OTOH,

Yup that is what I am saying - basically. And cooker is really rocky right now. I cannot install nano and there is this X11 dependecy problem but still I have a booting Gnome3.
It is a bit rough but it works.
Once it is ok I will make a remaster to let everybody have it.
I still am practicing the use of smart package manager which is not bad - It is a good idea to learn it because you can use it on every distro.

So far I have managed to fubar the network settings completly on the first attempt so I did it again and now I have both Openbox and Gnome on it. In GDM there is a faulty text on the Login screen - Does anyone know where to change that?
I know I did it myself some years ago after an upgrade where the indication said 2009 even if the upgrade to 2010 was complete....
And I think I will stick with Smart as a sofware manager on this one (people who do not like it can install urpmi - but they should not really mix the use of the two).
And I have to make X autostart. But so far this has potential not only as a LiveCD but as a Branch, So I guess Mandriva can have the 2012 Blodax Gnome tech preview soon

Are you taking contributions for Ernie Blodax wallpapers?

Good one! Quality like that must of course be incorporated.
Unity soes only deliver a cli boot cd that has "just enough OS" after you have installed it you can start installing X and all the other stuff that you need. In the Mandriva repos this is a bit chalenging...so some workarrounds are neccessary
Anyway that smart manager works well and soon you have you DE up and can start fidling with it. I have gnome up and running and get the occasional boots without network connection.
This is easily fixed in the CLI by typing but you cannot release it like that.
I have installed drakconf (MCC) and hace adjusted some settings there. The plymouth splash looks a bit strange after I intalled the solar theme - but I do not care to much about that at this point.
So here I am fidling along

It was time to remaster my creaation and it looks like I have come over a bug there - so I am at a halt. Must wait for the smart people over at Unity to help me out...

I think the cooker repos are so buggy that the build is impossible at the moment - so I am still waiting for a reaction but it does not look good. There is also a definite possibility that Unity is buggy.
But all in all I have a fully functioning Gnome3 so Unity does work where Mandriva does not. Even if the MCC has a non working network section, most of the tools there do work too.
I had to cheat and start gdm in rc.local but that does not affect things negatively.
An I am definitely going to install the smart package manager on my other Mandriva installs.
It allows downgrade package, multiple downloads, broken package dependencies check +++
The remastering part does not work on the latest Unity version so I will put it on hold for now.