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Linux Mandrake 7.1 Reviewed

Posted by timothy on from the mandrake-was-a-magician dept.

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.

1 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. A tale of two systems; Mandrake 7.1 Rocks! by Chyeburashka · · Score: 5
    I downloaded the ISO images last week and installed 7.1 on the following two systems:
    • A Dell 420 dual 733 P-III at work.
    • A Gateway 450 P-III at home.

    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.