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Mandrake 7.2 Download Available
The first thing I found myself wondering when I logged in as root was, "Where's my CD supermount icon?" It wasn't there in root. Only users see it. Yes, you can do the usual command line mount/unmount, but isn't the point of Mandrake to be as close to 100% pointy-clicky adminable as possible?
A new Linux user trying to install (say) StarOffice on Mandrake 7.2 from a CD is going to be doing a fair amount of needless head-scratching. It was frustrating to pop in a StarOffice CD as a user and try to install it, only to get a "KPACKAGE has to run as ROOT" error message, then to log in as root and not find an obvious, E-Z method of reading files from a CD. Whether this is the fault of KDE or Mandrake I do not know, but it is a needless bit of hassle.
Another thing that threw me and my friend Joe (who owns Amnet Computer and helped me with the test) was that not only was RealPlayer not included, let alone pre-installed as a Netscape plugin as it was on the previous Mandrake releases we have gotten used to using, but that no PDF reader was preset as a plugin. Mandrake has spoiled us in previous releases, we freely admit, but we wish they would keep us spoiled. It is not hard to install Netscape plugins, but we're busy people so the less time we take setting up a new system the happier we are.
CUPS, the new Common Unix Printing System, was dirt-simple to set up for the Epson Stylus Inkjets both Joe and I own -- as local printers. We were not able to get our printers running through our networks with CUPS. The GUI configuration tool looked simple, but apparently wasn't. Perhaps smarter people can get it to configure network printers, but someone used to Windows probably will probably give up on network printing with CUPS fairly rapidly.
KOffice has been well-described (and rightfully praised) elsewhere; it is a beautiful piece of work. All the Windows people who claim they can't switch to Linux because they need PowerPoint have just lost that excuse. I was able to make a nice-looking slide show in KPresenter after only a few moments of trial and error. Other KOffice components are just as slick, and the new KDE desktop is a thing of beauty, in my personal opinion far more attractive than the default Windows desktop.
The Mandrake 7.2 install itself was flawless; when we followed the defaults (which means about all you have to do is select a keyboard language, then click "yes" several times) and selected "all packages" we didn't have much more to do besides watch The Simpsons. We tested both a low-end desktop computer Joe had just assembled and my Sager (essentially generic) laptop, and had no problems with either of them. Even the laptop's sound and video autodetected correctly and started right up. The only grumble Joe had (in part because he likes to grumble) was that it's about time for Mandrake to start providing support for Winmodems whenever possible; the low-cost motherboard in the desktop we used for our test had a Winmodem built in, and Joe said it was one for which Linux support is now available.
All in all, this was about as fine and easy a newbie-level Linux install as you can get. Yes, we all know Mandrake's partition scheme is not as cool as the preferred Debian one, or even Red Hat's, but Mandrake isn't aimed at old Unix/Linux heads, and its default partitions seem to do the job just fine.
If you download and install Mandrake 7.2, I would appreciate it if you would either post your experience below or email me to let me know how it goes. A Mandrake developer is supposed to be at my house Wednesday to help figure out some problems we had installing and configuring the retail sale version of Mandrake 7.2 they sent me -- a level of service most users can't expect from any software vendor. But dealing with the "boxed set" (and the reason Mandrake is giving me this level of personal attention) is another story for another day, one I hope to have for you either late this week or early next week.
Why, oh why do you announce product releases before they've been mirrored? It just means that the main site gets clogged, and nobody can get it. It took *days* to get Redhat 7 off a mirror, quite possibly because you announced it before the mirrors updated, and /.ers clogged the main site.
So, next time you announce a release, could you please wait until the mirrors update? Thanks.
"It sure was strange to see something on Usenet about me that didn't involve Klingon gang rape." -- Wil Wheaton
From what I've seen in respective README files, all those Winmodem drivers are pretty much in alpha/beta and some (like the LT one) are *known* to be unstable. Maybe not conducive to the seamless, no-hair-tearing experience Mandrake attempts to provide?
Here's a workaround in case they don't have that fixed by the time the CD offically goes to press:
The easy way:
As root, go the your user's desktop directory (for example, mine is in
The hard way:
* In root, right click anywhere on the desktop, select New -> Filesystem Device
* In the text box where it says Device.kdelink, change that to Cd-Rom.kdelink, and click OK
* Select the Device tab
* Under Device type
* be sure to check Read Only, and to select the permissions tab and make sure that the User, Group, and Others can read from it, but only the user can write to it.
Click OK, and you're done.
I fully agree. When you're dealing with the average computer user (newbies, people with little computer experance, and poeple who just want to use thier computers), things that an expert user might consider "little things" do matter alot, espcially useabulty issues. What many power users so easily fail to realize is that not everyone has the same experance level and level of expertise that they have. While the instructions that I just gave may seem easy to most people here, try following them from a newbie's perspective.
Oh, one more thing:
One trick I started using whin I got tired of logging into root to install an RPM was to open a filemanager in superuser mode (on my system (man 7.1, KDE), [main menu icon] -> Applications -> File Tools -> Filemanager (Mode Super User)), and then click on the RPM to install it for there. I haven't tried it, but you may be able to accoumplish the same thing by setting Kpackage as SUID root.
This trick works, but what I'd like to see is Kpackage (or whatever interface to RPM you use) ask you for your the root password when it's about to do someting that requires root access, or, even better, ACLs fully implimented in Linux.
So to me it makes perfect sense that you didn't get RealPlayer or Adobe Acrobat. Ohh and BTW as far as I know the only Netscape Plugin for PDF is the actual Adobe program.
There has recently been some discussion on the Mandrake cooker mailing list (I'd link to it but apparently the mail archive doesn't have it up yet), about the fact that Wal*Mart is selling a version of 7.2 that is labeled as 7.2 but is actually a prerelease version with many bugs. I strongly recommend that everyone hold off buying boxed copies until Mandrake has let us know that this issue has been resolved. At this time no one from Mandrake has actually responded to this issue!
"Why this hassle about configuring systems in an X environment?"
Very simple, it is easy. Editing config files by hand is only an option if you know how to do it. Learning how to do it is time consuming, and will in many cases not deliver you significantly more performance. Example: I want to share a directory over the network with a windows user. I can either learn how to configure samba using the config file (prepare for some HOWTO browsing) or open linux conf, add a new share, click OK.
What is efficient for you depends on the context you are in. In my case the last option is to be preferred because I really don't want to be bothered with all the details of SAMBA configuration.
So if you are like me (which you obviously are not), you'll love mandrake because it does all the boring configuring for you. After installation you are presented with a system with correct display settings, a working sound card, a working network card, automatically mounting floppies and cdroms and convenient tools to administer your system.
Jilles
I'm currently updating my own MandrakeUser.Org for the new stuff in 7.2. Soon, there will be an article by Till on using CUPS.
Official documentation for 7.2 will be available online, of course.
The newsgroup is alt.os.linux.mandrake
Mailing lists (English, French, Italian, German). Most of them are archived at mail-archive.com (links on the same page).
Good luck ;-)
tom, MandrakeUser.Org
--
--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
Everytime a story about a distribution is posted, invariably the same comments about the superiority of debian's apt-get package management scheme are trundled out. has no-one here ever heard of, or even used the excellent urpmi utility that is included in recent Mandrake releases?
it acts in a very similar way to apt-get...you provide it with a list of package sources (file, FTP, NFS etc etc), which it then uses to build an index and a list of dependencies. installing new packages is a one command affair...dependencies are automatically managed and installed if necessary. urpmi can also be configured to allow non-superuser installation of RPMs from a specified list of 'safe' packages
urpmi has saved me loads of time when installing RPMs...why do people continually overlook this tool when comparing distributions and continue blather on about apt-get (and the fucking dreadful dselect)?
I have installed and run betas 1 and 3 of 7.2, and have had a great deal of difficulty trying to get my printer to work with cups. The problems is the 710 series printers implemented something called printing performance architecture. The folks at sourceforge were nice enough to build some filters (the pnm2ppa project) to work with printtool. Now that Mandrake has ditched printtool and replaced it with cups none of my old tricks worked. I know that I am not the brightest light in the harbor when it comes to linux, so maybe I was doing something wrong. I did however get it to work via the Print Don't Queue (PDQ) project that is also hosted at sourceforge and the pnm2ppa project has a filter for PDQ. It is a little clunky but at least it is a working fix until I can resolve the issue with cups. I have not yet had the chance to download the new distro yet, so I am not sure if this problems has been resolved yet.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
Under the expert install you have the option of six security levels; paranoid, high, medium, low, poor, and my personal favorite "welcome to crackers". Can anyone tell me if the kept this in the final version?
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
Icon? Logged in as root?
Do those two imply that people not only actually log in as root (which you shouldn't, you should use "su" or "su -" if you need the environment), but even run a whole X session as root?
Even if root permissions is neccessary for installing packages or mounting CDs, wouldn't it be better to put that one admin user in group "admin" or "wheel" and make kpackage suid?
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