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Mandrake 7.1 Beta Ready For Download
I've gotten the word from the Mandrake folks that the beta version of 7.1 is ready for download. You can check out the details from the source as well. The current name for it is Hydrogen.
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I was wondering if anyone would care to comment on the strong points of Mandrake... how does it compare to some of the other distros like Redhat and SUSE?
Also where are they heading with each release? More server related, or desktop?
Thanks,
Ryan
"Don't nargin your MEX files!"
I'm impressed. Reiser is a very nice journaling file system; it doesn't need more space than ext2fs and runs measurably faster. Check out ReiserFS at http://devlinux.com/projects/reiserfs/
Devolver's Homepage... more fun than a box of crackerjacks.
This really is a great distro, if you are a RedHat user and haven't tried it, check it out...
IMHO, it is all-around better than RedHat. There tend to be some surprisingly cool packages installed, such as colorgcc, and supermount support is in the kernel. The install program is neat too, allowing you to download secure crypto packages from some european sites during the install. I believe it uses fbcon instead of X windows (a bit of overkill for an install program).
The system configuration tool is also nice, and the update-finder also seems to work well.
It also came with the BlueSteel E-theme, and lets you choose enlightenment without gnome from the kdm/gdm login without any extra configuring. It is actually usable out of the box...
I am speaking from the 7.0 release, haven't tried 7.1 yet, but I plan to.
Well, windows is at 2000, so logically they are the best, right?
Version numbering has nothing to do with anything.
Mandrake, I believe, refers to the name of the foreign exchange officer second in command to General Jack D. Ripper in the film Dr. Strangelove, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. Really good movie, .
Devolver's Homepage... more fun than a box of crackerjacks.
Slackware rocks if you like BSDish systems or are a true unix die hard. I Run it on my laptop as well as my parents box.
Debian is a good full system and if your a Purist as many of the Nviidia post seem to be then its for you.
Redhat is nice for Newbies but every relase after 5.0 has been buggy as all hell.
Linux-Mandrake is simply put the Redhat that works. Plus its got a tun of other cool stuff.
I've used other distros plus *BSD's but for most people I think Mandrake or Slack is the best bet
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
The last time RedHat vs. Mandrake came up, RedHat was bashed for having some older packages that were a revision or two behind.
Simply put, unlike Mandrake, RedHat actually takes care to make sure their OS is stable. If this means using somewhat older, less cutting edge but tried-and-true stuff, than so be it.
I can't have any respect for a distro that's putting X 4.0 into any sort of release. Despite the fact that it's versioned as an actual release, the general consensus is that it's still beta quality w.r.t stability, and it definately is missing support for numerous cards, such as the I128s that are in the lab where I work on my current research project. Including X4 in a distro at this point is stupid. (Even a beta - why have your beta release held up until whenever X4 catches up to X3.3.6 in stability/card support? Who knows when that's going to happen?)
Also, on a similar note, if you have the slightest bit of flakiness with your hardware, Mandrake will die, and die badly. One of my friends was trying to set up IP Masq, and was using Mandrake. It was doing some sort of "ide optimization" crap that did only one thing - render the system unusable/unbootable. (hung during init cycle). Gave him a copy of RedHat 6.1, installed and ran like a charm.
Mandrake's got some impressive things going on. But they take too many risks for a distro that's supposedly targeting newer desktop users - they're just asking for a support nightmare.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I feel that Mandrake is a great distro. I have tried suse, redhat, slackware, and finally made the changeover to linux when I encountered Mandrake. The fact that they compile everything with pentium optimizations was what struck my curiosity and prompted me to give this distro a shot. It feels exactly like redhat, but I could do more. The installer was much better and hardware was suddenly relatively easy to manage. (I cannot say this for the ide-scsi stuff in 7.0, though. Hopefully they have some of this worked out in 7.1) Supermount liberated me from having to use the mount command to read a floppy. I mean, I absolutly love linux, but I really feel that you would have to be a serious geek with the intention of making life hard if you enjoy using the mount command to access a CD-Rom, Zip, floppy, etc - (I can see an advantage to this on a server environment, though) All I am waiting for now is DGA support for my ATI card, linux 2.4 and KDE 2.0 (oh yeah, and a verion of mozilla that actually slams IE5.01) but time will eventually provide all of that. Even though mandrake is my distribution of choice, I am still interested in trying Debian and even reading up on how to roll my own linux distro so that I can achieve a better understanding of how the library system and environment in general work. One thing is for sure: there will never be a linux distribution that will please everyone. That is the very beauty of linux (and unix in general) We cannot please EVERYONE with just one product - therefore we can create several variants to appeal to different preferences and needs. Hell, we even mold what we have to conform to what we want - Mandrake is targeted for the desktop, but I run two servers just fine with it.
You apparently don't read the Mandrake site, ever. If you did, you'd notice this:
March 24 2000 - Mandrake 7.0 for i486. It's been requested and awaited for a long time, now it's available: Linux-Mandrake 7.0 ISO image for i486 and compatibles machines can be downloaded from Tucows. You can now use your old machines again!
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/fnews.ph p3 will take you to the news page. Click on the download button on the nav bar for a list of mirrors which have the i486 ISO for download.
Also, you can get Mandrake for Sparc and Alpha too.
No sig is worth reading.
Okay, I do not think that you are understanding the situation perfectly.
Pentium optimised distros will provide performance boost on any intel or non-intel pentium-class or higher CPU, including the AMD K5, K6, K6-2, K6-3, K7, as well the the Cyrix 6x86, M-II and M-III.
Now, the only CPUs that won't benefit from pentium optimisation are lower than pentium CPUs. Those are 486es and 386es. How many people want to run a graphic-intense distro on such CPUs ? Not many. The thing is, mandrake is aimed at users with powerful machines, not at users with old junk they're looking to reuse for free.
Same with the floppy friendly nature of distros. I think that floppy friendlyness should be an afterthought. I mean, who wants to install a linux distro from floppies, and why ? It doesn't make sense, as most machines out there have got a CD-Rom drive. Those without a CD-Rom drive can either go with copying the files over the network, or taking out the HD for installation on another box.. but a floppy install should never be required, nor should it be something developers waste time on when doing a distro. It's waste of time, it's boring work..
Linux isn't just for the old machines you don't want of anymore. It's for the brand-new K7 or P-III you've got as well.
which begs the question, when will we see something from the Mandrake team named 'Lothar' (Mandrake's trusted offsider in the comic strip)?
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/demos/Presentat ion/
OK, to start this off and burn lots of karma (if I had any to burn) - I am not a serious linux user. Whoa! look at that karma burn A few weeks ago I installed Linux mandrake on my computer 'cause a friend asked me to, I put the CD in, rebooted my computer, and much to my surprise IT WORKED INSTANTLY, all I had to do was say how I wanted my hard drive partitioned (4GB Linux, 128MB Swap, 16GB FAT32 (far all my Windows games)) yes, I use windows - there goes more karma - why do I use windows? because I want to be able to break things and kill people without having to learn more stuff about computers Anyway, back to the story, I partitioned my hard drive, said yeah, ok, I'll take the recommended install, and let it do its stuff, a while later it had detected and set up all my hardware, Voodoo3, Creative Sound card, Intel Network card, etc with no intervention from me, all I had to do was stuff around with my IP address, point it to our webserver and it was working, well it was working until about half an hour ago, I brought my computer into work (mainly to pick up the LOTR quicktime thingy I downloaded at work), and turned on my computer (with a few of the microsoft worshipers looking on) to show off the beauty of linux, I am running mandrake 7.0 (I think), I got just past the colorful ascii-art penguin which comes up just before it switches to GUI - then - the screen went blank, the litle orange light came on which means no signal input, after a few seconds I figured out why, the resolution had switched to 1600 X 1200, my 19" monitor at home can handle this, a puny 15" monitor can't, Linux didn't detect that there was a different monitor which windows would detect(much to my disgust, and Bills evil Acolytes delight (who were looking on)) How do I switch resolution without access to the GUI???? mandrakes reputation is at stake(at least to 2 or 3 people)!!!!
You are not me, therefore you are not important
Umm... Then don't try installing Mandrake on anything other than an Intel machine. :) There are others. But if you *do* have a P5 and above, the optimizations are GREAT.
As for detecting CDROMs, I've installed Mandrake on dozens of machines, some even having the dreaded funky old Creative Labs CDROM connected to the sound card trick. (I have a lot of OLD hardware) And when none of that works, I always have a network card it can detect for a LAN based install.
Both of the above, plus back in the 40s and 50s there was a comic strip called "Mandrake the Magician." I tend to prefer this interpretation for two reasons:
1. Mandrake-the-distro's motif is a magic wand and top hat. Well, Mandrake-the-Magician didn't have a magic wand (he "gestured hypnotically") but he did have a top hat. It wasn't blue, though.
2. Mandrake-the-Magician had an assistant named Lothar. Mandrake-the-distribution includes a program called Lothar which bills itself as "the hardware central configuration tool." Superficially it looks a lot like Windows 98's Device Mangler; I haven't tried it to see how it works.
--
Someone you trust is one of us.
Oh, great. I started downloading mandrake 2 days ago, and now when I'm 64% done, they tell me there's a new version. Dang.
Mandrake Linux and the people who run it have real balls. They dont fsck around like a lot of companies.
:) Flame at will.
ResierFS? Pentium Optimizations.
Yes.. They do this. Good Bad? Who knows at least they have the kahunas to step up to the plate and give these products a chance on their distro. Do you see this? They are willing to push their distro to the limits
Okay... Everyone else is staying a bit more conservative right now. Not Mandrake. Give emm a little respect. Not to mention I hear Mandrake is pretty nice (office mate installed it recently) Okay.. I just wanted to say that
Jeremy
The whole point of having a multitude of Linux distros is that they are targeted to different uses/users. Linux is different things to different people, and highly configurable. Revel in that! Versatility and variety are strengths, not weaknesses.
Mandrake's distro happens to be targeted at newer x86 boxes with bootable CD-ROM drives. If that's not what you have, then Mandrake may indeed be a poor choice for you. But where does the "cheating" part come in? Who gets hurt?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
100 pages about the ins and outs of LM, a user forum, an offline edition and a news letter.
cu
tom, MUO-webslave
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--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
Xfree86 4.0 is not very stable. XFree86 4.01 should come soon with lots of bug fixes, and DualHead support for Matrox G400 (thank you Precision Insight).
Hetz (Heunique)
I use the original release every day at home, compiled & installed from source, on a Celeron 266 with a TNT2u (and 96meg of RAM), running Slackware 7 and Enlightenment 0.16.3 and it's been fine. Well, it's run fine; I had a few hoops to jump through when I installed it, of course :-)
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
This is JEFFK! I know it is. If anyone else wants to know what I'm talking about, check out:
Jeff K's website
I am virtually certain that this is the same guy.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Yeah, Supermount is built into the STANDARD kernel, but I installed the high security form of 7.0 and it seems Supermount support isn't built into that kernel. Sigh. (Is there a good reason for this? And the fact that
Mandrake doesn't seem as thoroughly tested as other distros, but I still use it on my workstation machine 'cause it's got so much cool new stuff... Of course, my server's another story.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */