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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.
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
I'm not a lazy user, but Mandrake is the first Linux distro that I have been able to use without calling a friend every 5 minutes to figure something out. I first installed 7.2, then 8.0, and I have been able to use it for most things. Now that I am getting familiar with it, I am starting to learn to compile my own apps, and set up some not-so standard hardware, like my scanner and sound card. I started as a newbie, but I am learning more and more about it all the time.
Mandrake is a great distro for beginners, but they don't hide everything, so that if you want to learn stuff more in depth, you can.
Lazy? No. Lack of knowledge because I have used Windows for so long? Yes. Learning more everyday about Linux, but I was still able to get the basic system up and running without help. Now instead of editing a stupid text file for 10 hours with no luck, I can go-back and figure that stuff out on my own time, instead of ripping my hair out.
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.
I've heard from the Mandrake support lists that 8.1 is really buggy and has been bothering a lot of people. I'm hoping they got those bugs worked out and stable before releasing it. I'm currently using 8.0 and love it, but am weary of upgrading to 8.1 from all the problems that I've heard about. More than likely I'll just upgrade all the stuff manually. It's nice to see KDE 2.2.1 in there though. How much more memory does it use now though :)
I have no signature
Even if Mandrake is very much desktop-oriented, this should not necessairly mean requiring a monster. I'm using a K6/2 350Mhz and the CPU power is fine. Not blazing fast, but ok. On the contrary, the 64Megs of RAM are way too little. I don't use GNOME/KDE (I prefer plain WindowMaker), but at the moment the situation is:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 62240 60456 1784 1056 1124 15232
-/+ buffers/cache: 44100 18140
Swap: 66524 27508 39016
27M of swap is not the end of the world, except that I'm using old recycled disks, with a throughput of 3-5 Mb/sec. And with this disks, you can FEEL the system swapping.
What suprises me is that I'm running the same stuff I was using with the old releases, but nevertheless RAM usage is going up!!
Even if RAM is cheap, I don't see any reason to go the Microsoft way. Featurithis is not a need.....
Please keep this in mind, all you software developers...better many small utils which do stuff than one big monster....
PS: I can't consider Mandrake a server distro, there's too much bleeding edge stuff. This is nice for the desktop, but stability is affected. I'd stick to Debian for a server.
In the release notes, we read:
MandrakeSoft is proud to announce Mandrake Linux 8.1 as the newest alternative to Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
Wow. It's hard to find two operating systems as different as MacOS (pre-X, like the versions that videographers would use) and Linux. Pushing Mandrake as a "alternative to Microsoft Windows" or "Macinstosh" may be a little premature at this stage.
I think it would be more accurate to call Mandrake an alternative to RedHat, Debian, SuSE, etc. But not MacOS or Windows. Not until I can install fonts by simply copying them into a directory. Not until my TV-out works on my Matrox g450. Not until my wife can open up the PowerPoint files that her professor has on the class web site.
When we jump the gun like this, and people (I'm talking people like my parents, not my fellow engineering students) try installing it themselves (as an alternative), people in general will get a bad taste in their mouths when they perceive that they have less functionality from their computers than they had before.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
I just installed RC-1 a week ago. Is there a list of the changes between RC-1 and the final? It doesnt appear to me to have any significant ones.. If this i true I'll burn the 8.1 final images, but won't bother re-installing.
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!
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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!
oh please no...
i think any version of linux becoming defacto standard (like red hat), would be a disaster. choices and competition are good. they all have their place, none have their place being the standard, not even my favorite (no i don't want a flamewar, i'm not saying which one it is).
add to that my personal opinion that mandrake is far to windows like and does way to many things without asking...
-------
"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
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 :)
Could Slashdot please quit doing this. Those of that read this site generally know where to go to get downloads of linux distros. All you are doing is killing the site.
Most of the commercial ones are "kitchen sink" distros that install and turn on everything to save the average user, who probably wouldn't know "make xconfig" or "/etc/rc.d" if we hit him over the head with them, the hassle of looking for them. A newbie distro such as Mandrake is especially prone to this. Debian and Slackware are (or were, I run SuSe but am having hassles w/rpm, may go back to slack or deb) less prone to this. At least with Linux and *bsd we get choices.
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www.easylinux.com Based in Germany, I demo'd their product at LW '01 in NYC. Pretty spiffy KDE-centric distro, fairly easy tools. Just released version 2.4. Not sure how their versioning works (ie, does the 2.4 indicate a 2.4 kernel included? Dunno).
But don't take my word for it, dig Evil3d's review.
Hope this helps.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
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.
When Mandrake started, I saw it as a reaction to RedHat which was declining in quality. RedHat was missing some pretty crucial stuff, like KDE, It was Mandrake's aim to provide a RedHat++ or something. Sort of like Linus wanting to make Minix++ originally.
Since then, RedHat went really downhill and Mandrake really took on an identity of it's own. This is the power of open source, even if it kinda sucks for RedHat.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
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...
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
GODDAMMIT! I downloaded the isos for 8.0 last night and installed it this morning. At the end of this install, the pc boots, I login, test the network connection by trying to go to slashdot. Set the gateway, get to /. and see THIS as the first story. Just wonder-fucking-ful. Oh well.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
my first experiance with linux was slackware in '96 I was a major hassle just to get a base system installed never mind the GUI and I learned alot from that experiance but it was extremly time consuming and frustrating sense then I have installed a hell of a lot of distros and versions Mandrake has gotten to the point that casual users who don't have a clue what they are doing can acually install it and USE it yes they might not have a clue about anything thats happening under the GUI but thats mandrakes goal just like your average winows user doesn't have a clue
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
8.0 wasn't the greatest, but I've been running 8.1-rc1 for close to a week now, and I was quite impressed at the improvement. I also had install problems with 8.0, but the betas for 8.1 and the rc1 were much better. I've been a linux user since the SLS days, and have been running mostly Slackware and a little bit of Mandrake on the side... The machine I have 8.1-rc1 on is a 500MHz K6-2 with 128MB and a (blazing fast) 4MB S3-ViRGe/DX (ouch)... X runs well, swap isn't used, and the standard network tools are installed from clicking on the "Network Client" selection in the dummy version install.
It may not be everyone's favorite, but it is gaining quickly in my mind.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
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 ?
thats where I think many distros fall down I want english as well as japanese and German
just being able to veiw japanease chars is a pain let alone printing them
anyone know an easy way to veiw CJK in a email+ browser ?
regards
john jones
Does anyone have any information on how to upgrade a :-)
Mandrake box w/o toasting the existing
configuration? Forgive me, I'm a FreeBSD user who
is accustomed to 'make world'.
Chris
yeeaahhhh... but so he is developing in java, perl, python, php, etc on linux to be ultimately executed on windows? I guess I just don't understand why someone would do that.
>A bit narrow-minded aren't we
not that I noticed. I thought it was a legit question (I didn't flame)
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.
Check out AbiWord.
One thing that I have never understood about Mandrake is why all the graphical setup tools are written using GTK+ rather than Qt?
It's plain that Mandrakesoft have tried very hard to make them look the same as the KDE Control Center, using a very similar theme to the KDE default highcolor style, and with KDE as the default desktop, I don't understand the choice of GTK+ at all.
Using Qt would make it far easier to integrate these setup tools into the KDE Control Center and provide a completely consistent look and feel across the whole desktop. Perhaps more importantly, it would reduce bloat. GTK+ is not a small library, and having to load it in addition to the Qt that KDE uses increases total memory usage quite considerably. If the setup tool used Qt, then they would use the same shared copy of Qt as KDE.
Both SuSE and Caldera (both of which also ship KDE as the default desktop) have Qt-based graphical setup and configuration tools, and they integrate seamlessly into the KDE Control Center, giving users a single place to look for all their configuration settings. Why is Mandrake different? From an engineering (and consistency) point of view, the choice of GTK+ just doesn't seem logical to me.
The upgrade treadmill they have people on is rather striking, they service they offer is compiling all your software for you and selling it every few months. Are they really adding anything new that can't be gotten anywhere else? no. Do some people like it that way? yes. Essentially they're just adding new software updating versions etc and saying "here's our latest greatest distro" which is fine, but people need to recognize it for what it is. Every couple months is a "new distro!" no it's not a new distro, it's the same stuff that was in the last just updated.
Where is in your opinion that fine difference between SuSe and Mandrake distro, which makes Mandrake (and not SuSe) distro "bloated", "kitchen sink", and "newbie"?
Mind you, I'm not saying that SuSe is any of these, I just fail to see this great difference in before mentioned categories.
If you said things as "mandrake leaves you too much choice" (as in tons of different GUIs, or printer quieing systems to choose from), or "Mandrake evolves too much between releases", I could understand it, but I really don't understand why SuSe would be any less "kitchen sink" than Mandrake.
The point is, if you pay attention to what you're using, it can be blazingly fast on really old machines. (I'd avoid StarOffice and its ilk, though...)
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
It's just the one I'm using now. But I'm looking at debian and slackware. The latest gnome and kde won't install on my suse, rpm barfs and dies when I try, so I'm looking at apt-get and the old standby of tarballs. Ah, if I had but worlds enough, and time, to build gnome, kde, and new kernels, from source.
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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.
not having the standard BSD unix tools by default really annoys me to no end ( ftp, telnet, and many others were not installed
That's because ftp and telnet have no security and shouldn't be used. Particularly when openssh and scp work so well.
Perhaps instead of running the bleeding edge on your p200, you should go with something more appropriate. I've been running Mandrake 7.0 (with upgraded kernel, apache, ssh, etc.) on my p233 for over 20 months now, and I've got 5 minutes of unintentional downtime.
As far as using rpms... Use the source Luke, I've never run into problems when going this route. rpms have only caused massive confusion for me when I've tried to install (most notably on redhat systems).
- passion
I applaud them for leaving them out. They're terribly insecure. People should use ssh instead.
He was talking about the clients, not the servers. While I agree with your comment about insecurity you don't have security problems with the clients. I also happen to use ftp and telnet all the time. This does not make things any less secure (and I should point out that I am a security freak, choosing ssh over those almost 100% of the time).
An example: I was just using the ftp client to log into various anonymous ftp servers that I know of to see if they have the Mandrake 8.1 iso images before using wget to grab them.
I also use telnet all the time to debug http and smtp problems. When there's a problem with my e-mail, for example, (pop3 + fetchmail + postfix + procmail + pine) and it's not something obvious (like the net connection is down) then I'll check the mail server like so:
$ telnet mail_server 110
USER my_user
USER my_pass
LIST
....
RETR
....
QUIT
So if those tools are not present on any unix box that I'm using then there's a problem.
--
Garett
I'm not a lazy user, but Mandrake is the first Linux distro that I have been able to use without calling a friend every 5 minutes to figure something out.
Amen to that. It also seems to have newer versions of the kernel and apps, nice centralized configuration utilities.... this is moving in the right direction to be a good desktop OS that doesn't require a CS degree to use, let alone administrate - and it generally just modifies those same sacred text files you can still edit by hand with (editor removed for flame-prevention). I know there are guys on here that have used Linux for YEARS, but don't knock Mandrake - it's a great way for people to learn Linux.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
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.
Did I miss something? Since when does someone have a right to complain when the run below the minimum system requirements recommended by the company that creates the product?
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.
Losing ftp and telnet is an inconvenience of course, but security often has such trade offs. I don't really miss telnet, ssh is just as easy, but I do miss ftp. I suppose you could always keep the ftp client for use on anonymous servers only and use scp for anything that requires a secret id, password.
Check out AbiWord.
I've never had any of the problems you mentioned.
However, I'm not nearly as experienced as you, since I have only been using Linux since '97. Perhaps if I had more experience I would have trouble with:
If you did individual package selection, how could you miss telnet and ftp? I've installed several Mandrake/Redhat boxes and never missed the BSD tools. Even things like sed/awk have always made it. Perhaps you need to pay more attention during the install?
I would say that you screwed up the installation by not selecting the tools and options you wanted.
Or maybe Mandrake has created the first sentient graphical install, and it just decided that it didnt like you.
Well, that's maybe because Mandrake isn't too proud to copy good stuff from Debian. In fact we do have some developers who are quite fond of Debian ;-).
...
If you look at urpmi or the 'alternatives' system, these are implementations of ideas first appearing on Debian. Gael Duval once described the Mandrake distribution as 'a sort of commercial Debian'.
Mandrake's always been compared to Red Hat, because that's where it stems from. Maybe it's time people also take into account the strong influence Debian has on Mandrake
tom, mandrakesoft
--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
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. :)
Well I dick taken this reply with we a voice and left me tell you, it's grape! Now I kin speak things at have the speed I can type them.
m00.
but so he is developing in java, perl, python, php, etc on linux to be ultimately executed on windows? I guess I just don't understand why someone would do that.
Because the tools are better on Linux?
Seriously, if you're not developing GUI apps then Linux is generally a much nicer development environment than Windows. You don't need (or probably even want) fancy GUI design and debugging tools, you probably want a powerful, flexible command line interface, a good, fast text editor, and all the handy little command-line tools that are standard issue on a *nix.
Windows is somewhat lacking in all of those. You could install Cygwin and get 90% of it in Windows, but why not just boot up Linux and get 100% of it, and without all the niggly compatibility problems that Cygwin introduces?
Linux is also more forgiving if your programming skills aren't up to scratch - it's easy to set user resource limits so your buggy program in development can't eat all memory/disk space/process or thread handles/socket handles (and yes, you don't have to be root to set them), and I've yet to see a program in Linux that doesn't die if you kill -9 it (assuming you have the permissions to kill it), whereas unkillable processes are something I see all too often on Win2k :(
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
This is a quirk of Mandrake that has also caused me grief. You have to remember that "resize" in the context "Resize Windows Partition", is French for "Delete a fucking huge randomly selected chunk of, then render yourself unable to find it ever again".
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Ok, you try and get the average person to recompile the kernel to get the latest versions and fixes. You try and get them to install one of three different journalling filesystems. You try and get them to do an install of the latest version of XFree86.
If you can manage to do these, then Mandrake's possibly not a distribution for you. Mandrake's for people that can't do these sorts of things and wants to be free of MS and for people that can that don't want to bother with doing it. To call it an upgrade mill is silly- you DON'T have to buy the distribution if you don't want to (you CAN upgrade it and the whole thing is available via download as the baseline is GPLed in the first place...) It's just easier and in many cases cheaper for someone to purchase the thing off the shelf.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
There is absolutly no reason that a given distro should work across every machine manufactured in the last ten years. In any case, you are missing the point of Mandrake. They are putting a lot of work into stuff that you don't want or need. So why use it at all? You remind me of the theatre owner in Korea that found "The Sound of Music" was too long for 3 showings each evening. so he cut all the songs out of his print.
Probably Debian or a roll your own would suit you better. Linux is not becoming like Microsoft. Just like Linus is not becoming like Bill Gates. The fact that you can choose Mandrake or Debian kind of makes that point.
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."
That's because ftp and telnet have no security and shouldn't be used. Particularly when openssh [openssh.org] and scp work so well.
Wrong. MD4/5 one-time-passwords put security into both Telnet and FTP. Granted, the transfers are done in the clear, but to claim that there is "no security" is just a gross over-generalization.
I agree that openssh and scp are good technologies, but most people don't have working clients installed on their machines.
Telnet and ftp still serve secure purposes.
ftp is useful in scripting shell scripts. If you're d/l'ing files via anonymous ftp in a script do you need the features of ncftp, nah. I suppose wget or similar would work there tho. However, FreeBSD ftp has been improved to where it has most of the ncftp features, so it would make a better, smaller base system choice
telnet is useful for things like cisco routers and such that haven't had ssh support until recently (and for scripting queries to said routers), but especially for not telnetting but connecting to ports (telnet host port). Telnet has been immensely helpful in connecting to pop3, smtp, http, and issuing the commands manually to see the exact output when you're trying to debug a server.
And so did anyone compiling the cvs. It's not difficult. But once in awhile it can bite you. The CVS is easier to recover from (just keep the last good version in a different directory, and if the latest gives any problems, switch the shell variables.).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Just curious tho - I'm assuming anything developed like this would be without any kind of windows gui, no? Forgive my ignorance, but what kind of applications would be good candidates for this development model?
The most common type of app like that would have to be web-based applications, which makes sense given the list of languages given (Java, Perl, Python, PHP) - Java servlets, Python/Perl CGI scripts and PHP pages are all pretty much completely cross-platform if they're written sensibly - i.e., they'll run just about identically under Windows/IIS as they would under Linux/Apache... and of course, Apache is also available for Windows. All the web app has to do is spit out HTML and it's up to the web browser to turn that into a GUI.
Of course, in an ideal world you'd develop on Linux and then run the app on Linux/Apache, but not every business is that enlightened. But just because it ends up running on IIS doesn't mean you have to develop the app in Windows :)
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
As you apparently don't recall, Ximian support for Mandrake is always about one version behind. Generally speaking, they add support for the current version of Mandrake about the time Mandrake releases Beta 1 of the next version.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
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).
Since Qt costs money for proprietary products, and GTK+ can be used at no cost even for proprietary products (LGPL vs. GPL), this could be a compelling argument if Mandrakes tools are closed.
If not, I'm lost, since it makes no sense in choosing a desktop based on one toolkit, and your tools based on another.
I have 256 megs of ram and it runs smooth as hell, much faster than Windows 2000.
>>>>
What's your config? I'm running a 300Mhz/256MB machine and Mandrake 8.0-RC1 runs a lot slower than Win2K. Unless you're comparing either GNOME or KDE-2 to Win2K, its really not a fair comparison. Its more comparable to NT-3.51!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Mandrake 8.1 is by far the best linux distro, ever. This is what a linux distro outta be... complete and up to date. I'm still downloading the ISO right now, but hope to have it burnt and installing on my machines early this evening. If you haven't done so already, do yourself a favor and download this. Even the Red Hat purists will agree that Mandrake 8.1 is about as sweet as linux gets. This is the OS that both your workstation and server will want to run.
Mandrake, you've done a hellofa job. Thank you for what can only be described as on schweet package of software.
I run WindowMaker with fspanel on my Thunderbird 1.2GHz, and the system just flies. What's interesting is that you can run the same configuration on a P120 and it's still very usable. I can't say the same for GNOME or KDE.
In other words, Linux-based systems aren't really bloated, unless you want that spiffy new eye-candy-filled desktop environment.
Telnet? Are you nuts?? SSH with PublicKey authentication.
Deltic, as defined by every dictionary I can find, is either of the definitions above, and nothing to do with the way people spell.
Its a serious question, albeit offtopic. It is NOT flamebait.