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Linux Mandrake 7.1 Reviewed
webword writes: "The Duke of URL has posted a pretty good review of Mandrake 7.1. There is a useful list of pros and cons, along with performance and usaability ratings. There are some helpful screenshots too."
BeOpen submitted a link to a 7.1 review on gnulinux.com,
Sensei^ one on linuxnewbie.org,
and Quick & Flupke serendipitously pointed out the new slash-like Mandrake Forum where users can (among other things) suggest features for upcoming Mandrake releases.
The first thing I noticed is the Bogomips values reported at boot time are doubled for both machines over previous distributions, including Mandrake 7.0, Caldera 2.2 and 2.3 and RedHat 6.0 and 6.1.
My Dell box at work is no longer the strong but silent type; the sound card worked on the first boot up. With previous distibutions and also on an older Dell Gxi, it was always an annoying exercise to get sound working. I never had any trouble with the sound on the Gateway.
My main reason for installing 7.1 was to try the ReiserFS. I've set up both systems with ReiserFS on all partitions. I decided to give the ReiserFS a good test and after umounting the filesystems on a separate and still ext2 disk, I just pulled the plug and rebooted. It was the fasted reboot after a power outage that I've ever seen. Reiser took 18 seconds to do its thing on a 17 MB IDE disk, and then the system came up just perfectly.
I really like the new, improved menu system. So far, this is the best distribution I've used, and my Linux experience goes back to kernel 0.99 on Slackware.
This has undoubtably been mentioned elsewhere, but if you want to get Xfree86 4.0, you have to do the expert install.
Also, I usually make a separate /boot partition of about 20 MB, but when I tried to format it using ReiserFS, I got an error. I gave up and just made separate /, /usr, /var, and /home partitions of appropriate sizes and everthing worked fine. I made all these partitions ReiserFS. Does anyone have any suggestions about what an optimal setup might be? Could some partitions better be left ext2?
A brute force and sometimes quicker way of doing an upgrade is just to install over the old system, saving the /home directory by not formatting it and carefully saving other files you tweaked elsewhere. I planned on saving the log files in /var/log by not formatting /var. Well, the installer wouldn't let me get away with not formatting /var. Next time, I'll save my logs elsewhere.
Things I like:
/dev/hdb was too corrupt. There's nothing wrong with it! I just got a new hard drive, which is /dev/hda. I installed Win2K Pro, Win2k Adv Svr and Mandrake 6.1 a few weeks ago. Mandrake 6.1 has no problems with either hard drive. It even added entries for various partitions on /dev/hdb in to /etc/fstab. I can probably install into a partition on /dev/hda, but I would rather I didn't have to use this tool...
/dev/hda, and it wanted to save things... rather worrisome: I'm not sure what it was trying to save. I guess I was concerned that it wanted to modify the partition table, but it didn't say. I don't want the partition table changed.
1) They show where you are in the process of installing, much like one of those wizards in Power Point. It also makes it very easy to jump to another part of the install.
2) It ships with Roaring Penguin PPPoE client. Yes, I'm one of those unfortunate Sympatico HSE people who are forced to use this dreadful protocol with their DSL. It would be nice to see one of these distros coming with a kernel rather than user based PPPoE client.
Problems I had:
1) Disk tool/partitoner - it told me
I didn't change anything on
2) It took ages to install (upgrade), and the time estimate/taken was way off. It predicted that it would take about 15 mins... 3 hours later it was still saying 7 mins to go. I had a look in one of the other consoles and it seemed to be doing a lot of opening of the RPM database followed by about 15 transactions for each set of packages.
3) Selecting the Roaring Penguin stuff in one part of the install didn't automatically select the other part that I needed. Maybe this would have been detected later in the install, but I didn't get there due to it being so slow, and the thunderstorm that spiked the power.
From the review:
Mandrake has once again innovated in every sense.
Apparently a nice and stable Linux distribution is innovation. Hmmm...maybe I agree with that.
I really like the option to let Mandrake decide how the partitioning should be done - including resizing your windows partition (something like fips?). I have problems deciding how much space to allocate all the time - and I've been using linux for years. Just the other day I tried installing (Redhat) linux on my g/f machine and didn't allocate enough space for /usr for the installation to work! I said "fuck it" and went with one big honking "/" partition. I know why I shouldn't do that - but I also know it'll work for now - and it's bad enough that I had to consider partitioning in the first place. Finally someone gets it: The hardest part about linux is installing it. (which has been getting better and better really fast recently with the advent of GUI installers)
:)
I also really like GRUB. I'll have to find a URL for that - say goodbye to lilo, and hello to GRUB - It's like the dosGUI version of lilo.
Anyways, cheers to the Mandrake people.
Joseph Elwell.