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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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My father-in-law lives in Japan and is very interested in breaking free of M$. The one thing that is really slowing him down is easy, out-of-the box Japanese support. That is to say, he wants to be able to create word processor files in Japanese--he's American, so he understands English just fine, but getting KWord or Star Office to understand Japanese text has not been easy for him.
He also has an ATI Radeon, which the beta version of 8.1 didn't seem to catch.
:Peter
1. Do they check dependencies well?
/usr/local), both can co-exist. I guess they'd be equal here.
Well, no, not really. Mandrake is known for being 1st to market with new apps and new versions, sometimes there are problems with dependency checking. Generally, though, someone will send in a fix sooner or later.
2. Sometimes I like to compile from source, which distro is that more likely to break things or cause trouble on?
I've been compiling certain things from scratch without breaking the system (evolution, for example) on both RedHat and Mandrake. If you're careful (install into
3. Which one installs more stuff in total, RH or Mandrake?
Mandrake was started because RedHat didn't ship some useful apps. So, I think Mandrake wins here. Mandrake is also usually the 1st with any new app and the 1st with major (or even minor) upgrades.
Is it at all possible to use apt-get on RH, Mandrake easily? I know its been done but is it more trouble than its worth?
I know it's possible, but I've never tried it. Mandrake has a very nice tool, urpmi, which is very similar.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
Call me a hacker, but not having the standard BSD unix tools by default really annoys me to no end ( ftp, telnet, and many others were not installed without individual package selection ).
Personally I think Mandrake are to be gratulated for leaving these out. ftp and telnet are... well, not very good. There are far far better alternatives available.
ncftp is far more powerful than plain BSD ftp, even having command and file completion a la bash.
ssh is the way to go, and the more that people are discouraged from using telnet, the better. This alone (I think) merits removal of telnet from the standard install.
netcat is far more flexible and powerful than telnet.
Blind adherance to the notion that 'if it was in BSD 4.2 or SysV then we must have it in Linux too' is one of the things that holds Linux back. There are very often better tools and better ways of doing things today than were available 10, 15, 20 years ago. As Linux users and developers we should be evaluating what still works the best and what is better replaced by more modern tools and ideas. Whilst you can keep the old tools around for compatibility, sometimes it's better just to remove them in order to migrate people to the new tools, and to reduce the amount of cruft. I think ftp and telnet are perfect candidates for this.
Personally I can't wait until filesystem ACLs become part of mainstream Linux, then I can do away with the less-than-great traditional UNIX permissions scheme. :)
Only read if you completely understand the following rule.
I AM NOT TRYING TO START A FLAME WAR!!!
All will admit (ALL!) that Mandrake is the best of the lot. But for some reason I find Debian to be cleaner and quicker. But out of the box, Debian has no journaling fs support or support for my ATA100 card. Can this be done in Debian? Of coure. I don't think anything can not be done in Debian. But if I have to spend two days doing it.... then it just aint worth it. Hopefully SID release will resolve some of these issues, so for now....Mandrake it is.
It's alway this way. Mandrake has excellent hardware support, but it's loaded. Debian is clean...but less out of the box hardware support.
Such is the troubles of a geek.
Kudos to the two best OS Dist available.
Mandrake and Debian!!!
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com