Slashdot Mirror

fabiolrs writes: "imaclinux.net is running a review on Yellow Dog Linux 2.2. They could manage to run it on the iBook. YDG 2.2 is a great distro with KDE 2.2.2, Gnome 1.4, kernel 2.4.18 and Xfree86 4.2.0." Nice to see PPC systems (meaning "Apple," mostly) getting so much attention in the Linux world lately -- Mandrake's 8.2 PPC is also getting close to a release.

belbo writes "On Friday, an article on MandrakeForum announced the immediate availability of the first beta of Mandrake Linux 8.2 for PPC. Apart from the features of the upcoming 8.2 release for i586, this beta offers network installation via AirPort, an AppleScript wrapper for passing parameters to BootX, a patched 2.4.17 kernel, support for 1394, support for Radeon/Riva cards (via XFree 4.2) and more." Great news. I run Yellow Dog Linux for PPC boxes, but am still waiting for a good Linux for PPC release that does everything well, and out of the box. Maybe this is the one?

keegnotrub writes: "Mandrake just dumped 8.1 Beta on their servers. Along with updated software (KDE 2.2, kernel 2.4.8, etc) they have reworked their control center to include many new features." Word to the wise: there are some reactions to this beta -- as well as a list of known bugs and fixes -- at mandrakeforum.com. What I'd like to know is if a Wacom Intuos USB tablet will work out-of-the-box on 8.1, since I just bought a refurbed one ;)

keegnotrub writes: "Mandrake just dumped 8.1 Beta on their servers. Along with updated software (KDE 2.2, kernel 2.4.8, etc) they have reworked their control center to include many new features." Word to the wise: there are some reactions to this beta -- as well as a list of known bugs and fixes -- at mandrakeforum.com. What I'd like to know is if a Wacom Intuos USB tablet will work out-of-the-box on 8.1, since I just bought a refurbed one ;)

keegnotrub writes: "Mandrake just dumped 8.1 Beta on their servers. Along with updated software (KDE 2.2, kernel 2.4.8, etc) they have reworked their control center to include many new features." Word to the wise: there are some reactions to this beta -- as well as a list of known bugs and fixes -- at mandrakeforum.com. What I'd like to know is if a Wacom Intuos USB tablet will work out-of-the-box on 8.1, since I just bought a refurbed one ;)

Subscribers to Mandrake's weekly newsletter got the news earlier today that "MandrakeSoft is pleased to announce that the company is now listed on the Euronext Marché Libre. As a result of the successful Initial Public Offering, a total of 688.480 shares were sold at 6.2 Euros each. This results in an increase in capital of approximately 4.3 million Euros and represents 20.28% of the company's capital after issue." A good portion of the offering was completed in just the last half-day of availability, according to email received from Mandrake higher-ups, in part perhaps because of the confusion about who could participate in the offer, and how. There's also a story about the IPO at NewsForge, and a discussion at Mandrake's forum. If you're interested in picking up any stock in the company, there are some useful pointers (and more info) at their investor info page.

LiteForce writes: "MandrakeSoft are going public on July 30th on the European Stock Exchange. U.S. residents are not currently eligible to take part (only French residents are permitted). You can read the scoop on MandrakeSoft's site here." This is the IPO (then in progress) mentioned here shortly ago, but now they have the go-ahead; there's also an exchange on Mandrake's discussion forum. Congratulations over there!

As usual, updates and tangents from previous stories in tonight's Slashback. Read on for more on toys from Pittsburgh, the newest iteration of the Magician-named distro, open source directory entries, and everyone's favorite trademark dispute. So hit the button.

For better, for worse, for what it's worth. Thanks to the people who pointed out reviews of Mandrake 8.0 after I complained about a dearth of these when posting a couple of other reviews

Chris "soup" Campbell, for instance, points to his 8.0 review at Binary Freedom, and the_rev_matt writes: "Timothy was bemoaning the lack of Mandrake 8.0 reviews, so here is one." There's also a pctalk.org review discussed at the excellent Mandrakeforum site, as well as quite a few harsher comments when the release was announced. (I wish other distros would put comments in a forum like this, too.)

You know, 'bouncy bouncy'! Illah Nourbakhsh of CMU's CS lab (the same folks who brought your the Palm Pilot robot kit) writes: "... So here is the newest thing we've done. We make one-legged hopping robots that use an unusual spring system. We wondered what would happen if we scale the hopping robot up so it's much larger than 6 inches-- big enough to carry a human being. Then we can throw away the computer and the human can do the control. The result, the BowGo, enables ordinary humans to jump very, very high into the air and over obstacles. It is a far more powerful Pogo stick. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bowgo - there are both pictures and videos available from there. This is from the Toy Robots Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University."

Please give these people your venture capital, because I want to ride one of these! Mountain pogo-ing looks fun.

How can a jump rope be "open"? An unnamed reader contributes: "I've kept my eye on the guys over at the open source directory since I saw them take a good tongue lashing on /. a few weeks ago. They aren't doing too bad getting some listings, but the ones they have gotten seem to be making some waves. By my math, it looks like they've somehow gotten *two* new open source licenses passed through the boys at OSI (open source initiative) since they started three weeks ago."

Well, my tongue is out of lashing practice, but queries for "nano," "bluefish," "gimp" and "python" all return zero matches, so it doesn't seem like the first place I would go "to find Open-Source applications that are stable." The site still looks like a good idea, but is it eclipsed by existing resources? Maybe if enough people go visit it and add entries ...

A high-security remote terminal app by any other name nodvin writes: "In a Slashdot story on Mar. 22, 2001, it was stated Secure Shell Will Remain 'SSH'. However, the draft documents
now start with the title "draft-ietf-secsh-" rather than "draft-ietf-ssh". The charter is now found at: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/secsh-charter.ht ml and the mail archive is now at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/secsh/ "

Say it ain't so.

As usual, updates and tangents from previous stories in tonight's Slashback. Read on for more on toys from Pittsburgh, the newest iteration of the Magician-named distro, open source directory entries, and everyone's favorite trademark dispute. So hit the button.

For better, for worse, for what it's worth. Thanks to the people who pointed out reviews of Mandrake 8.0 after I complained about a dearth of these when posting a couple of other reviews

Chris "soup" Campbell, for instance, points to his 8.0 review at Binary Freedom, and the_rev_matt writes: "Timothy was bemoaning the lack of Mandrake 8.0 reviews, so here is one." There's also a pctalk.org review discussed at the excellent Mandrakeforum site, as well as quite a few harsher comments when the release was announced. (I wish other distros would put comments in a forum like this, too.)

You know, 'bouncy bouncy'! Illah Nourbakhsh of CMU's CS lab (the same folks who brought your the Palm Pilot robot kit) writes: "... So here is the newest thing we've done. We make one-legged hopping robots that use an unusual spring system. We wondered what would happen if we scale the hopping robot up so it's much larger than 6 inches-- big enough to carry a human being. Then we can throw away the computer and the human can do the control. The result, the BowGo, enables ordinary humans to jump very, very high into the air and over obstacles. It is a far more powerful Pogo stick. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bowgo - there are both pictures and videos available from there. This is from the Toy Robots Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University."

Please give these people your venture capital, because I want to ride one of these! Mountain pogo-ing looks fun.

How can a jump rope be "open"? An unnamed reader contributes: "I've kept my eye on the guys over at the open source directory since I saw them take a good tongue lashing on /. a few weeks ago. They aren't doing too bad getting some listings, but the ones they have gotten seem to be making some waves. By my math, it looks like they've somehow gotten *two* new open source licenses passed through the boys at OSI (open source initiative) since they started three weeks ago."

Well, my tongue is out of lashing practice, but queries for "nano," "bluefish," "gimp" and "python" all return zero matches, so it doesn't seem like the first place I would go "to find Open-Source applications that are stable." The site still looks like a good idea, but is it eclipsed by existing resources? Maybe if enough people go visit it and add entries ...

A high-security remote terminal app by any other name nodvin writes: "In a Slashdot story on Mar. 22, 2001, it was stated Secure Shell Will Remain 'SSH'. However, the draft documents
now start with the title "draft-ietf-secsh-" rather than "draft-ietf-ssh". The charter is now found at: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/secsh-charter.ht ml and the mail archive is now at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/secsh/ "

Say it ain't so.

As usual, updates and tangents from previous stories in tonight's Slashback. Read on for more on toys from Pittsburgh, the newest iteration of the Magician-named distro, open source directory entries, and everyone's favorite trademark dispute. So hit the button.

For better, for worse, for what it's worth. Thanks to the people who pointed out reviews of Mandrake 8.0 after I complained about a dearth of these when posting a couple of other reviews

Chris "soup" Campbell, for instance, points to his 8.0 review at Binary Freedom, and the_rev_matt writes: "Timothy was bemoaning the lack of Mandrake 8.0 reviews, so here is one." There's also a pctalk.org review discussed at the excellent Mandrakeforum site, as well as quite a few harsher comments when the release was announced. (I wish other distros would put comments in a forum like this, too.)

You know, 'bouncy bouncy'! Illah Nourbakhsh of CMU's CS lab (the same folks who brought your the Palm Pilot robot kit) writes: "... So here is the newest thing we've done. We make one-legged hopping robots that use an unusual spring system. We wondered what would happen if we scale the hopping robot up so it's much larger than 6 inches-- big enough to carry a human being. Then we can throw away the computer and the human can do the control. The result, the BowGo, enables ordinary humans to jump very, very high into the air and over obstacles. It is a far more powerful Pogo stick. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bowgo - there are both pictures and videos available from there. This is from the Toy Robots Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University."

Please give these people your venture capital, because I want to ride one of these! Mountain pogo-ing looks fun.

How can a jump rope be "open"? An unnamed reader contributes: "I've kept my eye on the guys over at the open source directory since I saw them take a good tongue lashing on /. a few weeks ago. They aren't doing too bad getting some listings, but the ones they have gotten seem to be making some waves. By my math, it looks like they've somehow gotten *two* new open source licenses passed through the boys at OSI (open source initiative) since they started three weeks ago."

Well, my tongue is out of lashing practice, but queries for "nano," "bluefish," "gimp" and "python" all return zero matches, so it doesn't seem like the first place I would go "to find Open-Source applications that are stable." The site still looks like a good idea, but is it eclipsed by existing resources? Maybe if enough people go visit it and add entries ...

A high-security remote terminal app by any other name nodvin writes: "In a Slashdot story on Mar. 22, 2001, it was stated Secure Shell Will Remain 'SSH'. However, the draft documents
now start with the title "draft-ietf-secsh-" rather than "draft-ietf-ssh". The charter is now found at: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/secsh-charter.ht ml and the mail archive is now at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/secsh/ "

Say it ain't so.

Yes, Mandrake 7.2 is ready for download. It hasn't been officially announced or spread to all the usual mirrors yet, but word crept out yesterday on mandrakeforum.com. Be patient if you can't get through at first; you know how these things go; and keep an eye on the official Mandrake site for further news. This release is nice advance over Mandrake 7.1 or 7.0, worth downloading and installing (if you're a Mandrake user) for KDE 2 and KDE Office alone, both of which are incorporated into it. I got a small head start and played with 7.2 a bit last night, and found both some neat stuff and a few small but interesting usability gaps.

The first thing I found myself wondering when I logged in as root was, "Where's my CD supermount icon?" It wasn't there in root. Only users see it. Yes, you can do the usual command line mount/unmount, but isn't the point of Mandrake to be as close to 100% pointy-clicky adminable as possible?

A new Linux user trying to install (say) StarOffice on Mandrake 7.2 from a CD is going to be doing a fair amount of needless head-scratching. It was frustrating to pop in a StarOffice CD as a user and try to install it, only to get a "KPACKAGE has to run as ROOT" error message, then to log in as root and not find an obvious, E-Z method of reading files from a CD. Whether this is the fault of KDE or Mandrake I do not know, but it is a needless bit of hassle.

Another thing that threw me and my friend Joe (who owns Amnet Computer and helped me with the test) was that not only was RealPlayer not included, let alone pre-installed as a Netscape plugin as it was on the previous Mandrake releases we have gotten used to using, but that no PDF reader was preset as a plugin. Mandrake has spoiled us in previous releases, we freely admit, but we wish they would keep us spoiled. It is not hard to install Netscape plugins, but we're busy people so the less time we take setting up a new system the happier we are.

CUPS, the new Common Unix Printing System, was dirt-simple to set up for the Epson Stylus Inkjets both Joe and I own -- as local printers. We were not able to get our printers running through our networks with CUPS. The GUI configuration tool looked simple, but apparently wasn't. Perhaps smarter people can get it to configure network printers, but someone used to Windows probably will probably give up on network printing with CUPS fairly rapidly.

KOffice has been well-described (and rightfully praised) elsewhere; it is a beautiful piece of work. All the Windows people who claim they can't switch to Linux because they need PowerPoint have just lost that excuse. I was able to make a nice-looking slide show in KPresenter after only a few moments of trial and error. Other KOffice components are just as slick, and the new KDE desktop is a thing of beauty, in my personal opinion far more attractive than the default Windows desktop.

The Mandrake 7.2 install itself was flawless; when we followed the defaults (which means about all you have to do is select a keyboard language, then click "yes" several times) and selected "all packages" we didn't have much more to do besides watch The Simpsons. We tested both a low-end desktop computer Joe had just assembled and my Sager (essentially generic) laptop, and had no problems with either of them. Even the laptop's sound and video autodetected correctly and started right up. The only grumble Joe had (in part because he likes to grumble) was that it's about time for Mandrake to start providing support for Winmodems whenever possible; the low-cost motherboard in the desktop we used for our test had a Winmodem built in, and Joe said it was one for which Linux support is now available.

All in all, this was about as fine and easy a newbie-level Linux install as you can get. Yes, we all know Mandrake's partition scheme is not as cool as the preferred Debian one, or even Red Hat's, but Mandrake isn't aimed at old Unix/Linux heads, and its default partitions seem to do the job just fine.

If you download and install Mandrake 7.2, I would appreciate it if you would either post your experience below or email me to let me know how it goes. A Mandrake developer is supposed to be at my house Wednesday to help figure out some problems we had installing and configuring the retail sale version of Mandrake 7.2 they sent me -- a level of service most users can't expect from any software vendor. But dealing with the "boxed set" (and the reason Mandrake is giving me this level of personal attention) is another story for another day, one I hope to have for you either late this week or early next week.

Yes, Mandrake 7.2 is ready for download. It hasn't been officially announced or spread to all the usual mirrors yet, but word crept out yesterday on mandrakeforum.com. Be patient if you can't get through at first; you know how these things go; and keep an eye on the official Mandrake site for further news. This release is nice advance over Mandrake 7.1 or 7.0, worth downloading and installing (if you're a Mandrake user) for KDE 2 and KDE Office alone, both of which are incorporated into it. I got a small head start and played with 7.2 a bit last night, and found both some neat stuff and a few small but interesting usability gaps.

The first thing I found myself wondering when I logged in as root was, "Where's my CD supermount icon?" It wasn't there in root. Only users see it. Yes, you can do the usual command line mount/unmount, but isn't the point of Mandrake to be as close to 100% pointy-clicky adminable as possible?

A new Linux user trying to install (say) StarOffice on Mandrake 7.2 from a CD is going to be doing a fair amount of needless head-scratching. It was frustrating to pop in a StarOffice CD as a user and try to install it, only to get a "KPACKAGE has to run as ROOT" error message, then to log in as root and not find an obvious, E-Z method of reading files from a CD. Whether this is the fault of KDE or Mandrake I do not know, but it is a needless bit of hassle.

Another thing that threw me and my friend Joe (who owns Amnet Computer and helped me with the test) was that not only was RealPlayer not included, let alone pre-installed as a Netscape plugin as it was on the previous Mandrake releases we have gotten used to using, but that no PDF reader was preset as a plugin. Mandrake has spoiled us in previous releases, we freely admit, but we wish they would keep us spoiled. It is not hard to install Netscape plugins, but we're busy people so the less time we take setting up a new system the happier we are.

CUPS, the new Common Unix Printing System, was dirt-simple to set up for the Epson Stylus Inkjets both Joe and I own -- as local printers. We were not able to get our printers running through our networks with CUPS. The GUI configuration tool looked simple, but apparently wasn't. Perhaps smarter people can get it to configure network printers, but someone used to Windows probably will probably give up on network printing with CUPS fairly rapidly.

KOffice has been well-described (and rightfully praised) elsewhere; it is a beautiful piece of work. All the Windows people who claim they can't switch to Linux because they need PowerPoint have just lost that excuse. I was able to make a nice-looking slide show in KPresenter after only a few moments of trial and error. Other KOffice components are just as slick, and the new KDE desktop is a thing of beauty, in my personal opinion far more attractive than the default Windows desktop.

The Mandrake 7.2 install itself was flawless; when we followed the defaults (which means about all you have to do is select a keyboard language, then click "yes" several times) and selected "all packages" we didn't have much more to do besides watch The Simpsons. We tested both a low-end desktop computer Joe had just assembled and my Sager (essentially generic) laptop, and had no problems with either of them. Even the laptop's sound and video autodetected correctly and started right up. The only grumble Joe had (in part because he likes to grumble) was that it's about time for Mandrake to start providing support for Winmodems whenever possible; the low-cost motherboard in the desktop we used for our test had a Winmodem built in, and Joe said it was one for which Linux support is now available.

All in all, this was about as fine and easy a newbie-level Linux install as you can get. Yes, we all know Mandrake's partition scheme is not as cool as the preferred Debian one, or even Red Hat's, but Mandrake isn't aimed at old Unix/Linux heads, and its default partitions seem to do the job just fine.

If you download and install Mandrake 7.2, I would appreciate it if you would either post your experience below or email me to let me know how it goes. A Mandrake developer is supposed to be at my house Wednesday to help figure out some problems we had installing and configuring the retail sale version of Mandrake 7.2 they sent me -- a level of service most users can't expect from any software vendor. But dealing with the "boxed set" (and the reason Mandrake is giving me this level of personal attention) is another story for another day, one I hope to have for you either late this week or early next week.