Mandrake 7.2 Download Available

Yes, Mandrake 7.2 is ready for download. It hasn't been officially announced or spread to all the usual mirrors yet, but word crept out yesterday on mandrakeforum.com. Be patient if you can't get through at first; you know how these things go; and keep an eye on the official Mandrake site for further news. This release is nice advance over Mandrake 7.1 or 7.0, worth downloading and installing (if you're a Mandrake user) for KDE 2 and KDE Office alone, both of which are incorporated into it. I got a small head start and played with 7.2 a bit last night, and found both some neat stuff and a few small but interesting usability gaps.

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.

Comments

*PLEASE* wait for the mirrors!

[jbayes]

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.

Winmodems

[lpontiac]

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.

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?

Workaround for CDRom Icon

[__aahyzr9271]

The first thing I found myself wondering when I loged 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?

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 /home/scott/Desktop), and copy the Cd-Rom file to root's desktop (located in /root/Desktop , or you could just drag 'n drop it anywhere on root's desktop (if you do, don't forget to right click and select copy first)). If that doesn't work, you'll have to do it the hard way...

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 /dev/cdrom, under Mount Point type /mnt/cdrom, and under filesystem type supermount
* 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.

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.

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.

Some helpful links ...

[belbo]

The Demo and Tutorial Center will have some graphical demos (duh ...) of LM 7.2 as soon as it will be announced officially.

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

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