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Install Stuff
You now have the possibility to add extra media (CD or network) during the installation. This means that you can download only the disc 1 or the new mini disc 1 and add a network source to complete your packages list.

Hardware Stuff
Firewire Networking
On computers with firewire, firewire networking will now be bound to eth0, while all other network cards will become eth1 and so on. People doing an upgrade, should remove their network configuration via Mandrake Control Center, and then recreate it, with the correct ethernet device. Laptop
laptop_mode is used to lower battery usage via the suspend-scripts package. Configure it with /etc/sysconfig/laptop.
PCMCIA network cards

Network cards must be set to ONBOOT=yes now. So you need to change it if you upgrade using drakconnect or any other ways.
udev is now the default device manager
Is there anything the user has to do to deal with this switch?

• Bug #4321 df lists full filesystem device names instead of short form => udev should solve that
• Bug #10821 udev doesn't remember NVIDIA driver devices => put in /etc/modprobe.preload

CD Burning

• there's currently a known bug in kernel-2.6.8.1 for CD burning Bug #10840
• the correction is available / should be included soon : http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3659
• current impact on K3B : K3B news cannot recognize CD writer

PalmOS PDA

• most PalmOS PDA working device should now be automatically detected and linked to /dev/pilot (see Bug #3381), but some can't be autodetected (like Tungsten T, T2). In this case (ie if pilot-link -l failed after starting hotsync on the Palm), add "VISOR_SWAP=true" to /etc/sysconfig/usb to force correct device usage.

Userland Stuff Desktop KDE

• Removable devices

supermount isn't used anymore to mount removable devices, they won't automatically appear on KDE desktop. To have removable device icons back on your desktop, go in the KDE Control Center/LookNFeel/Behavior/Devices icons, and make sure that the "Unmounted Hard Disc Partition" option is checked. This will be fixed in 10.1 Community edition. GNOME

• GNOME 2.6

Menus The simplified menu system has been enhanced to avoid the "All Applications" entry. Networking hostname changes and X sessions hostname changes triggered by network scripts will no longer break X sessions. This is implemented in the s2u package. default route Default routes are handled by device now to allow easy plugging/unplugging of network cards. To have priority between your devices, use the METRIC variable in your ifcfg-* files. Are there instructions on how to do this somewhere?, what are the allowed values of metric? internet service The internet service has been removed in favor of the normal network service. The installer or drakconnect will take care of the transition. Net Applet There is a new net applet that displays the network status in the notification area of the panel.

System Udev Udev is now the default device manager. Xorg xorg is now t

http://www.mandrakesoft.com/security/advisories?na me=MDKSA-2004:088

He wasn't just asking for people to spout the names of various free recording tools. He was specifically asking if any make a good replacement for cdrecord-ProDVD. Which, I think, is a perfectly good Ask Slashdot question.

Anyway, it appears that SuSE and Mandrake have patched versions of cdrtools which are able to write to DVD without restriction. I don't have personal experience with this tool, so perhaps someone else who regularly runs Linux can verify.

http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/torrent/Mandrakelinux-1 0.1beta1.torrent hop on!

Another example is the Mandrake security center... it has several "uneditable" settings. For example I need the /proc tree to be world-readable.. impossible to change without either a) lowering security level as a whole or b) edit the "default settings" config file in some hard-to-find location.

This is a file permissions issue, please use drakperm to have your own settings on /proc or any other file/directory. There is no need to edit the default settings config (if you do want to edit it yourself, use /etc/security/msec/perm.local).

So, it seems your example is bad - care to provide another one? BTW, you can't edit all settings in Windows either, that's why there's a registry editor ...

And, instead of "writing it myself", you can always file bug reports for the development and stable releases (bugs really do get addressed).

I also helped a customer past a BSAA audit threat (got the notice mid-afternoon, got inspected mid the following morning) by counting their holo stickers and hastily Linuxifying some of their generic workstations to make up the difference, and slapping the OpenOffice.org suite (and Mozilla for good measure) on all of the machines.

Highlights of the visit were the BSAA dudes (local agents, I think, rather than BSAA proper) trying hard not to ask why nobody was using MS-Office (they eventually broke down and asked, I told them it was because it helped to avoid licence hassles like this one - IRL everyone was ostentatiously using OOo and Mozilla not MSO and MSIE because they'd been told to for that day :-) and the allegedly technical dude shoving a diagnostic CD into the reception machine, which was at the time running Mandrake Linux (I think 9.2) and XPDE and - after a few minutes - asking where "My Computer" was so he could run the nice diagnostics.

IIRC, we'd renamed the XPDE equivalent "Not Bill's Computer". Said dude's look of disbelief upon being appraised of the truth was worth framing; it took the Mandrake Control Centre to half-convince him. I don't think he was ever quite sure.

As I recall, the Mandrake 10.0 versions (both community and release) will try and "fix" the MBR and partition table if it sees a Windows XP install on the same drive as the Mandrake install. This results in a broken Windows install - this issue was minimized on the dev lists and wasn't fixed in the release version.

Blew away the MBR and almost had to reinstall until I found the "dd" trick that allows you to rewrite it.

In any case, I fixed it by partitioning manually and loading from the NTLDR in Windows.

See here for a description of the same problem with FC2, here for a description of how to make a dual-boot system with problem work. Lastly, see here for the skinny from Mandrake themselves.

Of course, one should always have backups of any and all valuable data, but it's still a pain to bring a system back from the undead.

Mandrake as well:
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/security/advisories?na me=MDKSA-2004:079

No, Linux works alright.

Mandrake is publicly traded, just not in the major US markets.

...add this to one or more of the new computers?

Besides webmin, the CUPS web interface and some other nice GUIs for generic, cross-distro sysadmin, I would pick the big commercial three, Fedora, Suse and Mandrake and showcase their admin tools. They have gotten pretty friendly these days (not so sure about Fedora though), and you can pretty much configure everything from the same "control center" or whatever the name. I think it is important to show people how easy and graphical GNU/Linux has gotten. I still hear people telling me "ah, Linux, yes, it is like DOS, you type everything in a console right ?"

Mandrake had that bug.
And SuSe also had that bug.
If you mind not spreading fud and educating yourself have a look at This Page Which tells you how to not only recover the problem, but avoid it all together.
This crap is really getting old, stop trying to place blame only on Fedora dev's when every distro with 2.6 kernel has this problem okay?

But, yum was *included* in the ditribution (or contribs, which is close enough) before RH hijecked the Fedora project and adopted yum.

And, Mandrake adopted apt quite early on as well.

So, no, I don't think I am wrong, since in January 2003 we had them all in contribs (ie part of the distro).

But, yum was *included* in the ditribution (or contribs, which is close enough) before RH hijecked the Fedora project and adopted yum.

And, Mandrake adopted apt quite early on as well.

So, no, I don't think I am wrong, since in January 2003 we had them all in contribs (ie part of the distro).

With the cost of upgrades, the continued security holes, the perceived instability, the required activation, and the neutering of XP Home... I really don't see myself or others upgrading from Win98 or Win2K without being forced to.

How's that going to happen? Microsoft is going to have to discontinue support for those operating systems.

And, I suspect that's their longer term plan. By cutting support, when the next window of bit-rot or software bloat forces a user to consider their options, I think Microsoft is banking on intimidating them into a newer version of the OS, no matter the cost.

It was precisely the anticipation of this world wide event that made me switch to using Apple's OS X (based on FreeBSD!) and start finding non-Microsoft solutions via Linux.

I've found a new mouth piece as well. When I went to evangelize alternate solutions to friends and family, I got the standard "but you're a geek" roll of the eyes. I was, however, able to convert my wife of alternatives to Microsoft with the use of applications such as Mozilla's Firefox as a browser replacement to get rid of pop-ups/adware and Thunderbird to stop her from getting infected with viruses.

Upon learning that there are alternative solutions with better features that let her not have to deal with everyday annoyances, she was an easy sell on Linux, and now uses Putty and SSHing -- something I never thought I'd see!

She's the one who gets creditability marks with her friends. They know she's an artist and not a computer geek. If she's raving about it, they want to try it, because obviously it's not above their level.

Linux, however, is going to have to compete hard with Microsoft. It isn't Linux's free price tag or outstanding stabilily that's holding it back. It's complexity.

The learning curve is too great for the non-technical user to setup and immediately start using it. Microsoft scores big when it comes to easy install for a basic system, and they actually do automatic updates quite well from a simplicity standpoint.

What many geeks don't get is simple computer users are willing to give up power and features for ease of use. If someone put out a basic distribution that auto-detected hardware, did an easy install, and set up the basic environment with nothing but the standard Office tools -- much like a dumbed down version of Mandrake or BeOS or the free OpenBeOS version.

Microsoft sees that "we don't get it" and aren't catering a special distribution to "grandma", and with that fact they leverage Windows into homes, knowing that once someone invests in learning something, they usually don't switch without good cause (frustration, cost, or inapplicability to task).

Unfortunately mandrake has chosen to rename their core system packages and libraries in such a fashion that a redhat rpm won't recognize them as dependencies and vice versa.

While we may have renamed them to have saner library handling, there are provides in the packages to keep them compatible with the broken RH names. If you find one where this is not the case, feel free to submit a bug report.

I won't bother with the rest of your FUD.

But what really matters is the quantity and quality of packages.

With Debian, we have apt, more packages than any other distro, and a more thorough and sane policy.


With Mandrake, we have urpmi, apt, yum, policies, more tools to automatically assist in generating quality packages, more tools to check packages for adhering to policies, and we're rapidly catching up.

Plus, we have a working GUI installer ;-).

Do some reasearch and find out for yourself

But what really matters is the quantity and quality of packages.

With Debian, we have apt, more packages than any other distro, and a more thorough and sane policy.


With Mandrake, we have urpmi, apt, yum, policies, more tools to automatically assist in generating quality packages, more tools to check packages for adhering to policies, and we're rapidly catching up.

Plus, we have a working GUI installer ;-).

Do some reasearch and find out for yourself

But what really matters is the quantity and quality of packages.

With Debian, we have apt, more packages than any other distro, and a more thorough and sane policy.


With Mandrake, we have urpmi, apt, yum, policies, more tools to automatically assist in generating quality packages, more tools to check packages for adhering to policies, and we're rapidly catching up.

Plus, we have a working GUI installer ;-).

Do some reasearch and find out for yourself

But what really matters is the quantity and quality of packages.

With Debian, we have apt, more packages than any other distro, and a more thorough and sane policy.


With Mandrake, we have urpmi, apt, yum, policies, more tools to automatically assist in generating quality packages, more tools to check packages for adhering to policies, and we're rapidly catching up.

Plus, we have a working GUI installer ;-).

Do some reasearch and find out for yourself

But what really matters is the quantity and quality of packages.

With Debian, we have apt, more packages than any other distro, and a more thorough and sane policy.


With Mandrake, we have urpmi, apt, yum, policies, more tools to automatically assist in generating quality packages, more tools to check packages for adhering to policies, and we're rapidly catching up.

Plus, we have a working GUI installer ;-).

Do some reasearch and find out for yourself

Are any of the tools actually easy to use, useful to have, and if so, where can I download them?

How is any normal person supposed to cope with a distribution that doesn't even bootload all the time?

That's just it, normal people aren't supposed to cope with the distribution at all. I don't know how so many could miss it, but if you even just skim through the obvious pre-install sections of fedora.redhat.com you'll see plenty that makes it clear that Fedora is not meant for everyone. It's meant for people who like working or playing with bleeding-edge components. If you want to work or play with a distribution that doesn't ever bite you and you wound up on fedora.redhat.com, you made a wrong turn somewhere. Try redhat.com, debian.org, slackware.org, suse.com, mandrakesoft.com or any of a number of other sites for which I'll probably get blasted for having failed to include them here. When you land at one go to their download section or on-line store and look for the phrase 'latest stable release'. What you'll find there is meant for everyone and will, generally, work right out of the box

Oh ho. Not if you are using say NTFS.

Wrong

'NTFS partition resizing without data loss'

It's been around since at least 9.1. Maybe you should poke around before you spout incorrect information.

Even if I ban the use of IE, how do I get firefox to render html email in Outlook?

you can't program sh*t on a windows install without buying separate software.

• TECHNICAL - things that are difficult-to-impossible for MS-Windows without "special equipment". Stuff like Xnest and User Mode Linux, which are boons for testing end-user and kiosk style applications, or the so-called Backstreet Ruby console project, which allows multiple independent users on one piece of hardware (e.g. two users on a multihead Radeon card). Stuff like "Terminal Services" and DAVfs being intrinsic to the system.
  
• POLITICAL - things like the absence of spyware, a licence agreement which says "if you break it you own both pieces" rather than one which says "your computer is now My Computer", being invented everywhere rather than in [insert name of favourite foreign imperialist infidel country here] - if The Boss drives a Citroën, start with "Where does it come from? France, Finland, Australia, [blah blah long list of places blah]. Oh, and did I mention France?" You can update piecemeal, or more or less at your own speed; since you have all of the pieces, a sizeable organisation could easily afford to settle on a distro and maintain it themselves ad infinitum by updating versions or patching at their discretion.
  
• FINANCIAL - Pretty dang obvious. Pay per user, per cpu, per port, or just for the support you need? Hmmm... let me think, this is a toughie...
  
• ANYTHING BUT MICROSOFT - sad but true. Probably 10% of conversions have this as their primary justification.
  
• CUSTOMISABLE - dislike a feature? Don't just disable it (only to have a user figure out a bypass later), get out your handy-dandy software saw and lop that horrid thing right off!

He shouldn't. That's up to the people who package and/or sell the OS. Using "Linux" to refer to a UNIX-style system built with the Linux kernel, GNU tools, etc. has caught on. It may not be "proper", but it's certainly not illegal. In other words: who cares?

Sounds like what you're looking for is Mandrake 10.0 PowerPack Edition. The JDK and JRE just work(tm) right out of the box. For some of us, getting work done trumps having an all-GPL distro.

A1) http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/range
Pretty simple and standard linkage really.

A2) Its free if you dload it ! What else do you need to know ? Or just join the damn club !

A3) Where do you have to _promise_ anything ?

Before downloading our products, we ask for your support by joining the Mandrakelinux Users Club.(my bold)

You came, you saw, you left, bereft ! Shame.

Read more at the press release here.

1. Download a ButTorrent client. I'd recommend Azureus
2. Open this URL (as listed on the download link in the post)

This bug was in Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community snapshot, but was resolved for the official release. See this comment

Why people like to rag on fedora 2 for this bug, i have no clue. This bug exists in Mandrake 10, Suse 9.1, and i'm sure any other 2.6 / grub distribution. See this story.

Fedora is the free RedHat TESTING branch. There is NO stable and free RedHat anymore. Get that?

Go ahead and cite a source for that ... you can't. You are absolutely dead wrong - the RedHat testing branch is Rawhide. Fedora is its own distro with its own release schedule. Does technology that ends up in RHEL start in Fedora? Sure, the same way that technology start starts in SuSE linux ends up in Suse Enterprise linux.

Fedora says they schedule releases 2-3 times a year. That is a joke for any system that actually gets used in the real world. The current versioning is nice timing for your argument, but 3 months from now it'll be a new release with new bugs and new holes. 3 months from now SuSE and Mandrake will be that much more secure and stable, and a year or two from now you might want to think about updating.

As I have already stated, RedHat doesn't oficially support Fedora. However, you can get updates for about a year and half if you want to continue running an older Fedora release. Mandrake seems to be supported for about the same amount of time. I can't find product lifetimes for SuSE, but I suspect you'll find that their commercial release is 2 years or less, while the enterprise version will give you longer (~5 years, like RedHat) lifetime.

...you're a keen RedHat fanboy from way back... <snip the rest of the ad-homenim attacks>

I won't dignify this with a response. Suffice it to say that I actually run a couple of distributions for work on a day-to-day basis. Unlike yourself, I don't go around spreading FUD and half-truths about any of them though.

It is now that I have the official Torrent that uses torrent.mandrakesoft.com as the tracker.

This is the link for the official Torrent, but think about joining the Club if you use Mandrake.

Yes.

See bugzilla bug.

To make the problem apparent, you must partition whilst using kernel 2.6. Not upgrade an existing system to 2.6 after having already partitioned.

Also, the bug only appears on particular drive geometries.

But you can fix it with sfdisk, writing out a new partition table with a different geometry.

See the parent posts link.

I think it still is according to this . But somehow the bug is marked as FIXED. More info here. Only a temp solution is provided :(

I think it still is according to this . But somehow the bug is marked as FIXED. More info here. Only a temp solution is provided :(

As you'll have seen from various other comments; Mandrake 10 has the same problem therefore if you're using M10 without problems then FC2 will work just as well.

Actually, the problem was only present in Mandrake 10.0 Community, it was fixed for the official release. See the bug report

Actually if you check Mandrake's bugzilla, they have the same problem. You can check it out at here. Mandrake listed the bug as resolved/fixed although it doesn't look like it actually was fixed.

Part of the reason I could not understand the bug, is that I could not
believe windows XP was still using the error prone int13 function 2
(CHS based) instead of the (available everywhere for some time) int13
function 0x42. Under linux, grub and lilo only use function 2 when
function 0x42 fails (they don't even ask the BIOS if it manages 0x42
since some BIOS don't report correctly having this functionality, cf
FORCE_LBA in grub)

The other reason is that I thought BIOS faking heads number (the
so-called LBA mode) was a choice independant of the content of the
drive. This is wrong, the BIOS tries to adapt its mode based on the
partition table [1]

So here is what happened:
- kernel 2.6 doesn't try to give the logical geometry, and gives the
physical geometry instead [2]
- diskdrake uses the physical geometry to generate the CHS information
(which is a broken duplicate of the linear sector number)
- the BIOS sees the partition table uses a different CHS geometry, and
adapt to it
- ... and Windows computes the CHS to read its stage1.5 based on the
previous geometry that it keeps in its boot sector. Alas the CHS
doesn't get the same sector and Windows's boot dies (with very bad
error detection) [3]

Code fix description: inspired by the way new fdisk and parted detects
the logical geometry based on the partition table [4]. parted code
is especially quite robust.
The fix is now included in cooker (DrakX #1.912), so:

I still would like to access the BIOS geometry, esp. for empty
partition tables. But kernel 2.6 doesn't give us this
(/sys/firmware/edd/int13_dev80/default_heads is plain wrong on a box
here)

Known workaround: forcing LBA mode in the BIOS

Agreed. Fedora is free, but it doesn't mean that it is free of responsibility.

There's even less excuse for SuSE and Mandrake since *they* also have the bug in their *commercial* products which should be held to at least as high a standard.
Mandrake Bug
SuSe Bug
Read This Page for more details.

Finally half way down the thread someone admits It's not just a Fedora issue. SuSe 9.1 also has the problem
Mandrake Bug
SuSe Bug
Read This Page If you want to find out whats responsible.

Besides, Mandrake has a 2.6 kernel and doesn't have this problem. Sounds like bad QC on the Fedora group.

Actually if you check Mandrake's bugzilla, they have the same problem. You can check it out at here. Mandrake listed the bug as resolved/fixed although it doesn't look like it actually was fixed.

But that irc log was hilarious. Just thought I'd point out that Manrdrake Club includes things like community RPM voting, so if you really think application/feature X is the best thing since sliced bread you can add it, then the other users will vote on it and finally SOMEONE (maybe Mandrake Soft, maybe community member) will put it through the paces (testing > release..possibly). Mandrake seems to be a lot of what Fedora wants to be, only it is, already. And don't forget they release ALL their software under the GPL. Thats pretty amazing for a commercial project.

i happened to come across these fantastic spyware removal sites. if you download their software you are guaranteed 100 per cent no more spyware
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Mandrake is also including it in the upcoming 10. See MandrakeLinux 10.

Try Knoppix or MandrakeMove.

They're the easiest ways to try out Linux and test if your hardware is compatible. Just download the iso, burn it, and reboot your computer. Have fun.

Don't ya think they should port it over to minux instead? For those who do not know: minux=1.44 mb version of linux. Meanwhile, distributions like Mandrake are taking up 8 cds AND 1 dvd

Torrent
Mirror 1
Mirror 2