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Mandrake 8.1 Beta1 (Raklet) Released
keegnotrub writes: "Mandrake just dumped 8.1 Beta on their servers. Along with updated software (KDE 2.2, kernel 2.4.8, etc) they have reworked their control center to include many new features." Word to the wise: there are some reactions to this beta -- as well as a list of known bugs and fixes -- at mandrakeforum.com. What I'd like to know is if a Wacom Intuos USB tablet will work out-of-the-box on 8.1, since I just bought a refurbed one ;)
Why are they using devfs? I'm not sure who was smoking crack on that one, but it's junk. It's never really worked, and it doesn't work with half of the drivers currently out there, so forget about it if you want to use things like ReiserFS or nVidia cards. Furthermore, you can't decide to not use it in the install, and switching back to dev afterwards is a major PITA.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
ARGH!!!...if you check out the Mandrake site they have a link of their homepage showing how 8.1 is alot like windows XP. Is it a good thing that a Microsoft OS and a Linux OS have so much in common?
while you might not like it mandrake is really good for those unfortunate souls who want to move from windows over to linux. dont worry though. there are always other alternatives for those of us who dont particularly like the microsoft look.
:). the point: there are alot of alternatives. if you dont like this one, dont use it.
see most people coming from windows are not ready for 'linux from scratch'. not everyone can be as elite as you and i
-- john
Best of all, Mandrake truly does have a great setup procedure. For example, name one other distro in which you can easily setup ReiserFS, JFS, ext3, and ext2 filesystems during the installation. And afterwards, you have such tools as the Software Update utility, which is a decent way to keep up with security updates. And don't forget the custom user, printer, and other management utilities.
I know many people call Mandrake a newbie distro, but who said that having an easy to use distro is a bad thing? Plus, even though it's "easy to use", I can still setup and configure it however I want. Mandrake seems to be getting better and better, and I wouldn't be suprised to see it take over as the Desktop distro for both newbies and experts alike.
If you believe in freedom, you are better off going the debian route, since that way you are ensured that your distro is 100% Open Source, whereas with mandrake, it is all 'free software', but some of it may be released under the highly restrictive BSD license which RMS has criticised in the past, since it allows huge corporations such as Microsoft to profit at the expense of open source developers.
They note all the improvements of 8.1beta1 over 8.0, but none of it seems particularly compelling. The latest versions of X, Y, and Z are de riguer at this point, and can be added to your existing install painlessly anyway. The improvements to their management tools are incremental (yes, I know it's a . release). I'll probably grab it when it's final just to see the new mgmt tools but my system (running Krud) has the latest Gnome/Evolution/Gimp/Gphoto/etc etc etc already so it's going to go on the guinea pig box basically to see if I should install it on my wife's computer.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
anyone know how i could get hold of the supermount patch they use? the official supermount patch broke with 2.4.4 and hasnt worked since - im using 2.4.9.
stuff
it seems like mandrake would like the reputation of being the most up to date distro. The release coincides with the release of KDE 2.2 very nicely. Some may not care for mandrake, but people on the linux for the desktop front should see this as good support for windows users looking to jump ship.
New Mandrake releases are like nose-candy for newbies. I've been hooked for a while now. I love Slack, and Debian is where its at. But I still love to get my hands on the latest ML releases just to see what new things they put in the distro. But it makes ya lazy, everything(generally) works right out of the box.(Some might consider that a feature;) Mandrake Forum seems to be turning into a little community. Kudos particularly to Deno for that site. There's lots of nuggets to ferret out of that site if you have problems.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
My solution to these problems was to wipe and reinstall. Most settings were stored in my home dir which I did not wipe and the rest of the programs were upgraded as a side effect. My RiserFS partitions were uneffected and when I was finished the strage problems I had went away.
I enjoy my Mandrake dist. but I'd caution those who are looking to "upgrade" via their installer.
from the article... now it is your turn to make it become Good and Wonderful Release(TM), namely Mandrake Linux 8.1(Raklet). :P
spelling taco
first real post ??
use Signature::Witty;
Mandrake is into making polished linux distro's for Newbie users.
Mandrake releases buggy beta versions on their website.
Newbie uses download beta version and have major problems, and get mad at mandrake.
Bad descision guys.
I'm glad to see a new version of MDK so soon. I've a lot of problems since going to 8.0 from 7.2
I lost full video card support, couldn't update the kernel without killing the machine, and worse than all... my favorite xscreensavers wouldn't work.
I'm looking forward to this huge download, mostly because I would like to see the new 'Control Center'. Every other distro I've used never had a tool that worked so well.
I hope the software update is 100% working though...
Get your Unix fortune now!
They seem to always include the latest releases in there releases I seem to have more problems with mandrake then other disros but it's fun being on the bleeding edge
http://Lenny.com
Good thing I got it before the mirrors where /.'d. With the 'few' problems with the Beta, you might be better off with Cooker....
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
Why hasn't Mandrake yet provided KDE versions of the Drake tools? Am I the only one who strongly feels the need for this? As a paying customer I feel it frustrating that I am not being heard. Mandrake, are you listening? Please port those tools to KDE and give your users a choice!
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Once the few bugs get worked out - The whole Mandrake 8.1 sytem is really a Windows desktop replacement. I'm really excited to wipe out a secratary's Windows computer, replace it with Mandrake and watch what happens. My hunch is, after explaining to her that the Start button is now a "K" - and MS.Word is now called KWord, then she will turn to me and say "OK." And proceed to work as if nothing has happened. After a few hours , I bet she'll say :
"Wow, this new version of Windows sure has a lot of cool card games, Thanks!"
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I suspect MandrakeForum is using the Mandrake PostgreSQL RPMs. They're built with a (default) 32 connection limit.
/home/www/mandrakeforum.com/html/mainfile.php on line 24
Warning: Too many connections in
Unable to select database
- James
For the vast majority of secratary-produced documents, tabs and tab stops are easier to use and easier to teach. I don't want them spending hours noodling with table setting and grid lines. I want them to get the damn document out the door.
If one needs documents of a lenghty nature - MS Word is not the answer. LaTeX is. You can have the secrataries enter the text, and have professionals do the layout.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
http://rugby.about.com/library/weekly/aa033101.htm
Never seen so many -1s, especially now that I haven't seen TollTroll around for awhile.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
um. First, if RMS (Richard Stallman) heard you saying Debian "adheres to his definition of open source", you'd be in for the argument of your life. RMS has nothing to do with open source, he will tell you so if you ask him about open source, instead letting you know that he crafted the definition of "free software" and it applies to all GNU software. Debian, which could be called the "FSF-sponsored Linux distribution", uses exclusively free software. A program could qualify as "open source", but not as "free software", in which case it won't be in Debian (well, it might be found under the non-free section).
Second, who told you Red Hat is based on Mandrake? its completely the other way around, and actually, Mandrake has been the target of many comments stating how they are just a Red Hat ripoff adding nothing except a lot of cutting-edge but unproven software.
Finally, the BSD license might not be of RMS's liking, but it's a free software license (at least the version without the advertising clause), and altough it's not recommended by free software advocates, because it gives up some of the GPL's protection against appropriation of your work, it's certainly more free (freer?) than a lot of licenses that are OSI-approved, but which won't qualify as free under the FSF's definition.
Perhaps you were thinking ESR (Eric Raymond) when you wrote RMS (Richard Stallman)??
They're still using the evil gcc 2.96, and not only that, the users in MandrakeForums want it that way. I am just not their market anymore, I guess. I see gcc 3.0 out with 3.01 coming, and my first thought is: "great, they can break free of Red Hat's crappy decision!" But the Mandrake users appear to want Red Hat compatibility even to the point of following Red Hat's bad ideas. Oh well. I was holding out for 8.1. I guess it's time to find alternatives.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
In a recent discussion about another distro, someone posted a link to a great chart which showed the release numbers of all the major apps included in each distro. Can someone please post that link?
http://planetmirror.com/pub/mandrake/iso/i586/8.1/
btw, it's "Raklet" not "Rakel", from the filename.
cheers,
-jason
I installed Mandrake 8.0, and I was amazed. Everything worked, and the install was easier than any version of Windows.
Sometimes bad hardware, or bad connections, can cause a difficult or impossible install. An adapter card that is not making good contact, for example, can confuse the install system. Bad contacts are cured by pulling the card or cable connector out a tiny amount, and pushing it back.
A spike in the power, if you are not using a battery backup, can put junk in memory. In this case, re-booting the machine and starting the install over fixes the problem.
Bush's education improvements were
I'm really a newbie. I'm not newest of the new, I can compile and have my own kernels/etc, but I still feel I have alot to learn before I can pull myself out of the newbie catagory, maybe low middle user or whatever...
I have used mandrake since 7.0, bought the power pack and upgraded since all the way to 8.0 every increment. Mandrake allways gave me a feeling of bloat and being unfinished. The install was nice, but all the setup and configure tools afterward seemed half done. They would work some of the time but not allways and not ever flawlessly. I allways ended up going and configuring everything manually. It also filled up my HD with programs that weren't documented or linked to anywhere. Just wasting space, not letting me know they were there or what they could do for me.
Also has anyone tried compiling a new kernel on a mandrake machine? It's a pain. They include all these extras in the kernel that if you give the system a new one it craps it's pants. I applaud their efforts in making a newbie distro, but I love my Slackware. The install is slightly less user friendly, but it is easy, quick and best of all it works. The system runs perfectly and it has just the software that I want and use, no crap . I have recompiled many kernels on it, mostly recompiles because I have forgotten something or another, and never have had any problems. It's also the little things, like having fortune run in the login script. It's just a slick and wonderful distro.As soon as anyone gets their feet wet with Mandrake I highly recomend using Slackware. The best distro.
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
try Progeny it is better.
The install is as good and is more stable.
And the over all system is stable.
And nothing beats apt-get.
Elephant: a mouse built to government specs
If you're not sure what the heck I'm talking about, here's a recent article in Linux.com that goes into some gory detail.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Since version 7.1 I had problems with app stability and core dumps and starting with mandrake 7.2 it became unbearable on my system. With 7.2 I had no modem, sound card, nic, and even cd-rom support on my system. I use standard parts like USR hardware based modem, creative labs awe32 sound card, netgrear nic, and a teac cd-rw. It was awefull. I even downloaded a later iso image of 7.2 hoping the bugs were fixed and still no luck.
I think your nuts to put that thing on a server! Hell even NT 4.0 sp1 would probably be more stable then any mandrake release after 7.1 and I am sadly serious too. Sure the linux kernel is stable but mandrake uses very alpha and bleeding edge apps and daemons.
An example is kde 2.0. It had alot of problems with the first release. If I recall mandrake finished their release of 7.1 or 7.2(don't remember which) just 3 days later with kde 2.0 included!
THen kde 2.1 came out and all the other distro's thought it was finally stable enough. Better but still buggy. Then kde 2.1.1 and then it was good. My point is that a distro with bleeding edge software and lots of bugs gives linux a bad name. Especially for those sick of windows and seeking alternatives.
Joe consumer: If kde crashes more then w2k, then why should I switch? Remember that ordinary users think if x crashes then linux crashes because they are use to thinking that the gui is the os. My cousin tried mandrake and switched to w2k sadly. Why? kde 2.0 and a few other apps kept crashing or were buggy and core dumped were generated left and right. Core dumps are everywhere and even NT can be fine for a week or two before it goes down or a bug here and there shows up. But thats not the case with mandrake.
I use to love mandrake alot. When I was a newbie I wanted the gui componets because I did not know the command line that well. After learning it I do not want to go back. I think most newbies would not trade stability for extra eye candies and nifty cool bleeding edge features and apps. I personally prefer debian or slackware because they are the most stable and use the most mature apps but I can't get good corporate support. Redhat has good support but a few of their apps are alpha like gvim. I might give mandrake a try just to "goof" with it. But I will not bet my job on using it in a server or any critical workstation.
Bleeding edge is not necessarily a good thing in a server/workstation oriented OS like linux/unix. Especially to corporate america curious about linux and checking its reliability and stability.
http://saveie6.com/
I would like to copy the comment I've just posted to Mandrake Forum:
/etc/pam.d/sshd file which required the system-auth file. The result: I can no longer ssh to any of the upgraded boxes. At the same time there wasn't any upgrade for PAM available at the time, and the 7.2 rpm used a diffrent version of RPM so them were incompatibles, so I had to create /etc/pam.d/system-auth by copying it from newer boxes.
---
I didn't test this release, and I think I wouldn't even try mdk 8.1. I'm too tired from problems with Mandrake. Specially with upgrades, I've trashed my computer twice: upgrading 7.1 to 7.2, and later upgrading 7.2 to 8.0. Both times I ended with MANY problems, for example, with the upgrade to 8.0 you folks decided to change packages names, and didn't have any precaution with that. So, before the libs for some package came included in the "main" rpm and the development stuff came in the "devel" rpm. Now, the libs came in the "lib" package, so yada.rpm won't install because it required yada-lib.rpm and my computer didn't have that package before. So the system kept yada-old.rpm which won't run with new glibc and that.. So I had to install/upgrade about 200 rpms by hand.
Also, I had infinite problems with ReiserFS because you included it when it was WAY too beta in 7.1, and then never checked if the filesystems created under 7.1 would run with a kernel upgrade. Well, it would not. I had to spend many days in the reiserfs developers list to find out how to fix the problem. And I did the big mistake of installing mdk 7.1 with reiserfs on many of my servers at work.
For ending this long rant, I would comment that in 7.1 pam had a structure which didn't used the "pam_stack.so service=system-auth" trick. And when you upgraded SSH for a security problem, you sent the 7.1 upgrade with a
Mandrake folks: you made a beautiful and easy to use distribution, but you aren't paying any attention to reliability, nor upgradability.
I suspect many people now will have problems with XFS and ext3 as I had with ReiserFS.
PD: AND PLEASE: document in the package itself when it has non standard patches. I mean, specially, kernel. But also on others, for example CVS: nowhere it says that it has a shell script wrapper to pserver!!!!!!!!!!!!
yadda yadda
Additionally, GCC 3.1 will not be binary compatible with GCC 3.0 (for C++ anyhow), so it's not a bad idea to wait. Sadly, I can see Red Hat releasing a new major release (8? it's up to 8 already?) with GCC 3.0 as the compiler, a couple of months before GCC 3.1 is released, purely to keep their continual upgrade cycle going. We'd then have to wait for ANOTHER release cycle for a compiler with (please please please god) precompiled headers and a stable ABI.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Sorry about the bad example, it wasn't my intent to argue for absolute freedom but rather just refute the previous poster's assertion that the GPL is more free than the BSD using the logic that the GPL is the freedom not to get fucked by what he considers an abusive company.
Absolute freedom could exist in theory, it's just not practical for society.
I have learned over the years that quality components make ALL the difference in the Wintel hardware world.
This is EXACTLY correct, and very important. Often cheaper components are being sold cheaply because they are somehow incompatible.
Save yourself grief. Buy the best hardware. Buy Intel motherboards with Intel processors, for example. The easy install with Mandrake 8.0 (two comments above) was with an Iwill motherboard and a Pentium 200 processor. At the time the system was bought, these were conservative choices for hardware.
I own a small computer dealership, and could have chosen any hardware on which to test Mandrake, but I wanted to see if the reports were correct. Is Linux fast on less powerful machines? It is.
The big hardware manufacturers want new software to be slow, because that causes customers to buy more expensive machines. Linux doesn't have this conflict of interest. It runs fast everywhere.
Good-quality hardware helps you avoid problems caused by a BIOS or OS programmer not coding for your particular hardware.
Once a friend bought a sound card for $12 from Fry's, back when sound cards were expensive. After several hours, we decided we would never be able to get it to work. That was the most expensive sound card I've ever touched.
Bush's education improvements were
In fact, the official Microslops rubberstamped translation is "Jusqu'où irez vous?" (How far will you go?)
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
My opinion is that Mdk 8.0 is very configurable and i afraid that newbies as well as experts can feel comfortable in diferents ways with this distro.
Are there any American distros other than RedHat available? With the stability and reliability problems I've had with their 7.x series, I found myself forced over to Mandrake. Not only have all the commercial products worked fine under Mandrake 7.2 and 8.0 (DB/2 7.2, Websphere AAS, JBuilder 4, Sybase 11.9.2), they perform better.
RedHat is still stuck in the "lowest common denominator" mentality, while Mandrake only supports 586 and up. Lets face it, the only thing you'd be using a 386 or 486 series CPU for nowadays is a packet/proxy firewall or print server, and that's going to be a seriously stripped build, not a full system. The performance difference between a 386 and 586 built OS is quite significant, and I'm really surprised RedHat hasn't made builds for the older CPUs a special order item instead of hampering performance on the majority of systems.
But I digress (as usual)...
"Buying American" is an interesting theory, but it just isn't reality. Linux is an international project, with huge pieces of functionality from non-American sources. Philosophically, there is no such thing as an "American" Linux, anymore than there is an "American" car. About the only complex product you can buy that might still be 100% American is a Harley, and I think even they use some parts that are sourced overseas.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Well said - I'd mod you up if I could. :)
creation science book
You havent restated my post correctly, as KWord 1.1 RC1 supports tables just fine. If you need help installing it, I'm sure your administartor will be happy to assist you. You might want to check out your local bookstore as well - they have all sort of books that can inform you on the use of your computer. Check out the books published by IDG - I'm sure they are on your level. Good luck!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
So who do you go after? The Big Money - PHBs. But in general PHBs are considerably less willing to ditch what they know in favour of some upstart OS like Linux, so you need to appeal directly to them.
Now, believe it or not, M$ have actually spent a large amount of money in the past figuring out how to make stuff user friendly - even basic things like buttons illuminated from the top and _left_ rather than top and right were decided on by focus groups. But since M$ can't really claim to have been first out of the blocks with the WIMP GUI (I imagine Apple, and Xerox would have a lot to say if they did), it's difficult for them to lay claim to a lot of the desktop elements that they developed. Which means that companies like Mandrake can rip them off.
All of which makes their OS more familiar to those PHBs with fat wallets. But while the PHBs may have fat wallets, they usually have a big padlock on them too. And if, for example, their current OS vendors decided that they were only going to rent the new version of the OS to them, the PHBs might finally start looking around for a cheaper option.
Enter Mandrake, stage right, saying "Look, we look like XP, only we're all stable and won't cost you nearly as much". It's just business. And hopefully it'll improve the market penetration in the lucrative corporate desktop sector. If you want to stay 1337 then you can always use a different window manager (IIRC, Mandrake comes with quite a few in the default install, and nothing's stopping you adding more).