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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
Come on people, we need more mirrors. Post em here!
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...
An important point here
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
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.
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.
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).