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Mandrake 7.2 Beta (Ulysses) Released
dclatfel writes "Just wanted to let everyone know that the latest beta of
Mandrake for Intel is up - 7.2 Beta - and it's called
Ulysses. (Now where is that Golden Fleece?)" They've got notes regarding it as well - KDE 2 Beta 4, and Gnome 1.2, as well as XFree86 4.01 as the default X server.
Somebody got their mythology wrong. Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus, the protagonist of the Odyssey, who had an epic journey around the Mediterranean after the Trojan War. The Golden Fleece was the object of Jason and the Argonauts.
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I would definitely recommend Mandrake to anyone new to Linux. Sure, it isn't the most stable distribution, but compared to Windows, it's a rock. The installation is beautiful - and newbies feel comfortable with it. I've tried several distros (RedHat/Mandrake/Storm/Debian) and Mandrakes is the easiest to use by far. It's not the quickest, but it will get it up and going.
.debs - you just can't go wrong. No downloading RPMs to find you need *another* rpm. Debian's package management is definitely the easiest to master for the newbie.
My beef with it is the update system. It's confusing - and they often include things that can crump a system - like the kernel updates (rpms) that could munge a ReiserFS system. These kinds of things are not good - especially when the end user is a novice and expects these updates to work. Of course, updating a kernel by an rpm isn't the wisest thing to do, but newbies don't necessarilly know that.
What I would *love* to see a distro do is use Mandrake's installer with Debian's package management. I just installed Debian - and while the install wasn't terribly complicated - there were several annoyances that a newbie wouldn't be able to overcome - things like pnp configuration (automagic under mandrake) - X configuration (not as slick as Mandrakes - and I've had to modify some config files by hand) - and sound configuration. These are all relatively small obsticals for someone familiar with linux, but they are show-killers for newbies.
But - apt-get. Oh man, what a program! This is the killer app of Debian. Something isn't working? You see the error message - packageX is missing. Please install before running ProgramY. With apt-get and the
Hopefully, someone will mix the LM installer with the Debian package management - and _THAT_ will be the killer distro...
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
I recently tried out 2.4.0-test7 with the patch for Reiserfs 3.6.14, and it seemed to work fine.
I'll download the iso for 7.2 tomorrow and see what is there. In the meantime, if anybody knows what is really in 7.2 beta 1, please let us know. Like, which kernel 2.4.0-testX, is it really? And, which version of Reiserfs is supplied? For some benchmarks, test5 seems to be a temporary high water mark.
Isn't the whole idea of a distro to be a tailor made version of linux. If you want to run Linux on a i486 as a router then don't use Mandrake. Considering that the majority of people running Linux are running it on i686's, Mandrake has made a decision to capitilize on that. Distributions of Linux don't have to be flexible becuase there are 80 zillion of them. Just pick the right one for your needs.
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.