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Mandrake 8.1 Released
Loke and several others wrote in with notes about Mandrake Linux 8.1. Release notes are available, or download an .iso, or just order it. Looks like it includes KDE 2.2.1, which is pretty impressive...
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Mandrake 8.1 is called "Vitamin". It comes with a bunch of new features such as MandrakeFirstTime that lets users centralize their Internet parameters and subscribe to the new MandrakeOnlineServices (personalized updates advisories, depending on your system). Also this is AFAIK the first Linux distro to offer the journalized file-systems XFS, Ext3, ReiserFS at the same time! Last but not the least it offers the beautiful KDE 2.2.1 (with antialiasing in standard) and GNOME 1.4.1. While the previous releases were very oriented to end-users, this new one offers excellent features for server use.
I've been running 8.1 RC-1 for about a week. Yep, I've had a few bugs (the graphical login makes me login TWICE before it lets me in on my ThinkPad). However, KDE 2.2.1 is sweet, running XFree86 4.x.x is a HUGE improvement, and the whole thing feels more integrated than other distros I've dealt with such as RedHat (i.e.: the software packages are more likely to "play nice" with each other). Yes, it IS easier for novices to use, but that doesn't make it any less powerful than the distros that are a pain to install, configure, and maintain. Contrary to the view of some folks, Mandrake is not producing a "beginner's version". Hats off to Mandrake for a great distro!
Life is short: void the warranty.
Dunno about he other issues, but DrakFont lets you just click the "Install windows fonts" button, and it finds and installs all fonts on your windows partition... Can't get much easier than that. I believe you can also choose a specific directory to install them from if you want.
If you don't like our menu structure, run menudrake and choose Action/Menu Style/Standard menu and you'll get KDE/GNOME original menus.
:))
And nobody forces you to use Mandrake tools
Check out cooker for ppc, it's basically 8.1 for ppc in development...
Come on people, we need more mirrors. Post em here!
Sure, it doesnt have a snazzy graphical install with all the bloat, but it is a simple to use text based menu system. Was my first distro, and still the only one i use.
Its never been a nightmare to install for me. You may just have trouble with dependancies if you install using the expert method and dont have a clue what anything needs, but then there is the newbie option and normal menu method.
Slackware isnt hard to install.
Trust me :)
They're usually in /etc/rc.d and most distros start things that aren't needed. Also, if you have a hackish bent, go to the source directory and "make xconfig" to see how the kernel was built. Are there drivers compiled in that aren't needed? Bloat can be fought!
Startup scripts that aren't used get swapped out and dont slow the system down because they stay swapped out.
The kernel should be less than 4 Megs in total, IIRC. Probably much less, even with a default kernel, especiialy if you are using modules.
But looking at swap going up - is the distribution presumably using the 2.4.x series kernel? It is 'orribly proken as far as the virtual memory subsystem is going. They are working very hard on fixing it (I subscribe to the kernel mailing list, and a good 10% or so of all mails are on the topic of WTF can we do?).
I was running a prerelease version of 2.4.10-pre12 which behaved beautifully for the 4 days I had it going before I installed the proper 2.4.10 version, which seems a bit more broken again.
So what I am saying, is hang in there - the kernel is getting better - but it may be a while. It is amazing how an identical kernel on an identical setup makes one person really happy, and is as slow as heck for another person.
But as soon as I finish my thesis, I am moving to FreeBSD, just to check it out. I suspect its VM is a lot less b0rked.
TimC.
I've been using Mandrake, loved it.
I've been using RedHat, loved it.
I am using LFS, married it.
You say something is good in this distro, something is bad in that distro. Make your lives easy and get the most out of your machines. Make your own distro! I did it and now I'm running the very latest, the very best, and only the things I want to run. Nothing more, nothing less.
May I suggest that you might have heard that BETAS are buggy (and such), not the final version. It's somehow hard to belive othervise, considering the fact thet:
1) 8.1 just came out
2) I haven't heard anything of the kind so far.
CJK support in LM 8.1 should be much better than in 8.0, but chinese was the primary target, rather than japanese.
Unfortunately I don't speak any of CJK languages, but if/when you give it a try, please drop a note on mandrakeforum.com.
thx!
We don't have enough people to do PPC port paralelly to i596 port, but 8.0/PPC has been quite a success so far, so I bet there will be 8.1/PPC in a few months...
are you running kernel 2.4.9? the linux 2.4 kernel's have been killing my swap partition, always consuming but never releasing swap even when I didnt have X running. 2.4.10 is a major improvement, I still havent gone to swap yet. my computer is a 750amd/384mb of RAM, though.
Just buy more RAM. You want features? Well they dont come 'free'. If you dont want flashy programs or utilities, stick to console. Prices are so cheap, 128mb can be bought for 20 dollars..
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
An important point here
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I've got both Mandrake 8 and slackware 8 loaded on my machine, and I've used slackware exclusively for about 2 months now.
/etc/rc.d/rc.modules file to uncomment the modules for hardware/services you need, and that the xf96config script is simply horrendous -- I had to grab settings from my Mandrake partition to get it to properly configure.
Mandrake is great for the end user or the linux user who doesn't want to delve to far into the configuration -- or learn about the standards. (This is not meant to be a disparaging comment -- this has been primarily how I've operated on linux) However, I wanted to learn a little more, and I discovered that HOWTOs and tutorials that detailed changes in initialization and configuration scripts failed me when I tried to apply them to my Mandrake box. With Slackware, however, they work perfectly. I was able to get sendmail, fetchmail, and procmail working in a matter of minutes, and printing was more consistent and easier to configure.
In addition, I have tried, and tried, and tried to compile many a program on my Mandrake box in the past year, and only about 25% of the time do I have success. With Slackware, I've had better than 75% success (with the massive exception of KDE). And compiling new kernels is much easier -- as well as adding new hardware (I had my new Olympus digital camera downloading images via USB within minutes). (My slackware kernel and init scripts take a matter of 60 seconds to boot -- compared to 2-3 minutes on my Mandrake box -- and that's even after recompiling the kernel to disable support and using DrakConf to eliminate unnecessary init scripts!)
The trade-off, of course, is that you have to take a little more time to understand what it is you're doing and why -- but once you've learned a few basics, you'll find many tasks much simpler and easier to implement.
Installing Slackware these days is fairly easy -- the menu-based installation took me a bit more time to go through the options than Mandrake's point-and-click interface, but everything I wanted -- and no more -- was installed successfully the first time. My only beef is that on first boot you have to go into the
All-in-all, I would recommend Mandrake for those who want to simply use their Linux computer (and what use is a computer if you're not using it?) and Slackware for those who want to optimize their computer and minimize resource use -- or learn SysV init scripts and standards-compliant Unix.
great I have to download a japanese version of redhat just so I can veiw kanji ?
No, the distribution is the same. The difference between the CDs is just the default intro screen before you select languages, and AFAIR also the text installer. Graphical install in Japanese works fine with the standard Red Hat Linux distribution - and if you select support for Japanese, you can view it without any problems in e.g. mozilla.
This would probably be due in large part to --enable-objprelink, a prelinker that IIRC gets rid of a lot of symbol redirections.
Also, I don't think KDE2.2.1's memory usage has been reduced much, if at all. If you like, theres an analysis of KDE memory usage on dot.kde.org.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I totally agree with this. I used to run my PII-266 laptop with 112MB of RAM and 1GB of hard drive space on a RedHat 5.1 install. I had 3 or 4 kernel source trees on there at any time (I was hacking the kernel to support some devices I had better), and I still had 100-200 MB of free space. I've built hundreds kernels 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4 on it (my .version is past the 500 mark). Many of the RPMs on it have been upgraded to more recent versions, but I /never/ swapped out, and the machine was at a login prompt in like 20 seconds from when I turned it on.
In contrast, I've been playing with Mandrake 8.1 betas on a K6-III+ 450. Trying to get a base install with KDE, and development tools is like 700MB. It takes over a couple of minutes to get booted into KDE, and launching any program takes 10-20 seconds. Konqueror doesn't ever load for some reason. The machine is virtually unusable from as destop. My question is how much functionallity have I gained when going from my snappy old system to this?
I've also got Linux Mandrake 8.0 on my desktop, a 1.4GHz w/ 768 MB of RAM and 7,200 RPM UDMA-100 drives. That machine runs a Mandrake desktop which is as responsive as my 800Mhz Windows 2000 box. I don't blame the distro though, they're really only contributing to the snafu, loading so much crap that I'll never need. Do I really need `crond`, `anacron`, /and/ `at` all running? This bloat isn't just limited to Linux though. Anyone who's used Mozilla knows that sucking up all your memory can be efficiently done in a cross-platform package too!
I guess the point is, if you have a brand-new machine you want to run at the same speed as the machine you're replacing: install newer versions of the software you're already running. If you want to see a speed increase, copy your old hard drive over and use the same old stuff.
The dependencies in the Mandrake package also need a serious going over. If you don't already the 700MB base install going, you'll be hard-pressed to install or uninstall an RPM. Things like ncurses requiring ghostscript, which requires kde-multimedia, which requires nfs, etc (not a real example).
Sweet jesus, when did this become a rant?Bry
IMO MandrakeUpdate should do the job just fine. Of corse, nobody from QA really tested this, because RC1 or betas were never considered "supported"
Btw, MandrakeUpdate is one of packages which actually got updated in the last moment, so it may be wise to update it manually before doing anything else.
From what I can see on Mandrake's website, this is a release candidate, not a final.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Mandrake as a distribution. I like that they are quite a bit less conservative in their distributions than RedHat or Slackware tend to be.
Mandrake 8.1 looks like a great step forward though, especially with their single-user install options.
As far as an end user is concerned, the differences in the package management systems on Mandrake and RH are insignificant. But do they check dependencies well? Sort of. As with any dependency checking system (including apt), rpm is sensitive to the way package creators assign names & version numbers. If you only install packages from the vendor of your distribution, everything usually works fine (but not always). Dependency problems are more likely to appear when installing packages from 3rd parties.
Again, since the package management systems are basically the same, there is no difference in this regard. The best thing you can do is install everything you compile from source in one tree, and keep that separate from everything that the package manager maintains.
They both have a number of different pre-configured selections, and they both allow you to select individual packages with dependency checking, so there's no difference in that regard.
When it comes to the number of total packages, the comparison depends on which version of Red Hat you get and whether you are comparing what is in the box or what is available for download. The standard boxed version of Red Hat is somewhat bare bones, with only one CD of software, while Mandrake gives you two CDs full of stuff. On the other hand, the Deluxe version of Red Hat comes with quite a bit more stuff than Mandrake. If you get the standard version, you can always download the extra stuff you need from Red Hat, but their servers are perpetually slow. Obviously, if you're going to burn ISOs instead, it doesn't matter much what's in the box.
It's certainly possible, but you won't find too many packages available that way. Besides, both Mandrake and RH have update tools that do the same thing.
Here's my opinion on the choice:
If you're installing this on a machine at home as a desktop OS, Mandrake is a better choice. It has more polished KDE & GNOME desktops out of the box, better admin tools, and is kept more up to date. The primary advantage of Red Hat is that there is a greater selection of available software.
On the other hand, if you're going to be using this as a server or in a production environment, Red Hat is probably a better choice. They have better tech support, they offer software bundles that are tailored & preconfigured for various server uses, and RH is better supported by commercial software vendors.
I'd be running Debian now if it had recognized by ethernet card (RealTek 8139).
I'm posting this from a machine running woody with a RealTek 8139. Works just fine. This message will be routed by another box running potato with a RealTek 8139. Works just fine. The drivers for that network card have been part of the kernel since at least 2.2, and Debian includes them by default, so I can't imagine what you're talking about.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
ive always wondered about this and thought about doing a port to qt. Then i discovered that the config programs themselves use perl modules quite a bit. Since there are no qt bindings for perl they are stuck with gtk
Until nVidia offers them, you can get them via MUO.
tom (mandrakesoft)
--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
I keep seeing complaints like:
"Mandrake is too bloated and I'm a linux expert so I should know."
Actually if you're a Linux expert, especially a lazy Linux expert then Mandrake is quite nice. It ships with a lot of nice stuff and it's highly configurable at inatall and after. The kernal is very modular. The install is very tweekable. In fact Mandrake 8.1 is the only distro that I have been able to get to work correctly with ReiserFS as root on an ATA100 drive along side another ATA66 along side a SCSI software raid along side a SCSI CD writer and an IDE CDROM. All that with pmfirewall and freeswan working fine INSTALLED AS AN UPGRADE. Yes I had to tweek a few things but they were fairly minor.
Considering that I got to choose what I wanted to install, what services I wanted to run at boot, what runlevel I wanted to start at and what window manager I wanted to use (each preconfigured with menus for my installed components) Mandrake 8.1 is a dream. Plus Mandrake ships with some nice config tools and MandrakeUpdate so that I can easily update over the net. I admit that I edit config files by hand on occasion. This is not MacOS by any means. I also use webmin for some tasks and tweeks. That aside I think Mandrake 8.1 is a very friendly but powerful distro. It's not just for the desktop and never really was.
If you don't have the patience to roll your own distro (the only true way to escape Linux lib dependancy hell) and you don't have time for something like Rock Linux then I think that Mandrake should be considered along with Debian as the Lazy Linux Expert Distro TM.
Oh, and BTW, those complaining about Mandrake not running well on Pentium 120s with 64 MB of RAM... Why bother leaving the Linux 2.0 or 2.2 world at all? You don't see Win95 users complaining that they can't run WinXP - OK maybe you do. Anyway these people fall in that category and should actually use one of the many mini distros that are perfect for such a machine.
I just don't like the BS RH appears to be pulling with there RPMs. *VERY* few FTP sites are carrying there update RPMs. I think its on purpose, to get you to use the RH network.
This is plain not true. We don't control our mirrors any more than any other distribution does.
Everyone (yourself included) is free to mirror our packages, but we don't force anyone to do it.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
I've had a lot of bad experiences with Mandrake 8.0 (as with most other Linux distros I've tried). Well, some good experiences too, but the bad ones are more annoying. Most problems are with the package tool that tries to imitate APT's functionality, but fails miserably.
For example, you type "urpmi kdebase" (or something like that), then it suggests about 50 additional packages, as it should, and starts downloading them. After downloading for half an hour, it tries to install them, but runs into RPM dependency problems or file conflicts. Installation fails. Ok, you resolve the conflicts manually, and try to "urpmi kdebase" again. It removes all the packages from local "cache" and downloads them all again for half an hour. Aaaaagh.
The software manager GUI totally sucks. It can perform operations for half an hour, but doesn't display a progress meter of any kind (just a "busy" indicator that flashes sometimes even when the program is not busy). The only way to get some status output is to run it from command line and watch the output of wget that the software manager uses internally... If the transfer gets stuck, you won't know about it. All operations take an eternity, and usually end up in conflicts, especially with the Cooker RPM repository. It's really frustrating.
It has dozens of other small problems. Most of them are just annoying, some are really confusing, some are just broken. For example, it uses the framebuffer console driver by default. Well, when I type "startx", it gets jammed, and only *reset* helps.
When I installed 8.0, I had to re-install it three times, I think. Once because in the last installation phase, it tested X, and it was ok, but when the test exited, my screen went blank. *sigh* I also noticed - too late - that installing the 2nd CD later with the software manager simply doesn't work. Takes eternity, produces conflicts, and all installation operations all slow as hell. I found it much much easier to re-install everything again than to struggle with the software manager.
Most other issues were mostly GUI-related useability problems. Many things are just confusing, not simple enough, or don't work as smoothly as they should.
Not that other Linux distros are much nicer. RedHat still misses ReiserFS, getting updates (such as KDE) takes quite long, and it's up2date sucks even more than Mandrake's urpmi. Debian might be nice, but its installation is hell. The APT-system seems to work much better than other package systems, but using it is everything but easy (and I'm not really a computer newbie). I'd rather do something productive than use days just learning how to use a package system. Corel Linux's installation was great, but it didn't have updates, and couldn't really be upgraded with Debian packages safely. SuSE...well, miscellaneous problems, but not terribly bad, about equal to Mandrake. The control center program...what was it again...oh, the "YAST2" (can't you just call it "control center"???) was rather bad - sluggish, couldn't configure my SB AWE32 sound card in any way, etc, etc.
Yeah, I reported some of the Mandrake 8.0 problems, but not all (writing even a few reports takes quite many hours).