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Mandrake Releases 8.2 Beta
joestar writes: "As seen at Mandrake's website, Mandrake Linux 8.2 Beta seems to be available for download at different places. The new features include the ability to install a Mandrake as small as 65Mb on the HD, and encrypted file-system support. I guess it's the good time to report all bugs we don't want to see in the final version. Very promising release, worth a look at!"
You killed my ISO download. You bastards!
Why didn't they just wait until April for KDE 3.0 to come out? Or are they going to release Mandrake 8.3beta at that time?
No todo lo que es oro brilla
Mandrake has always been good to me on the install, (it autodetected my weirdo soundblaster board, that RH would have nothing to do with).
:)
My mother actually read the handbook that came along with Mandrake 8.1, when i came home one day she asked me for an account. All i can say is that Mandrake definately has quality, i can't wait to see 8.2 in the stores
can't fight against the youth.
"I guess it's the good time to report all bugs we don't want to see in the final version.
No, it's time for you to report all the bugs that shouldn't be in my final version. Now get back to work testing my future software.
------
Today's Top Deals
option 1 is the best...
the site appears to be well on it's way to a slashdotting.
Here's the important info.
The look and feel of 'Mandrake Control Center' has been reworked with 'better ergonomy' in mind. If you do not like it, or do not find it clear, or such - say it now.
Several new features are available during the installation:
The ability to download and install updates after the packages installation.
Minimal installation mode, which installs nothing but the basic system. This installation mode leaves you with a functional linux installation taking only 65 MB on your HD.
Encrypted filesystem support.
In addition , there is a new rescue mode, with a help menu to automatically mount your old system, rewrite lilo and more.
New tools have been addded to the 'drakxtools' family:
Drakbackup helps you keep your data safe, and restore them if something goes wrong.
Scannerdrake helps you configure the scanner.
rfbdrake lets you easily perform a remote control of an X session. Helping your friends get started with linux has never been easier.
New file sharing function makes it simple to export local files.
Obviously, these new tools need a lot of testing. In particular, scannerdrake has only been on the little number of scanners we got in the lab...
Other tools have been reworked (bugfixes, ergonomy, additional functionality):
Diskdrake got support for encripted and network file systems
urpmi and its graphical interface, rpmdrake got a face lift: New 'synthesis file', is almost 100 times smaller than hdlist, which makes urpmi.update -a (reloading the urpmi/rpmdrake database) a pleasurable experience - even with a slow modem connection! Rpmdrake will also work faster, and handle 'exceptional' situations better than in ML 8.1.
MandrakeOnline got now the updates warning feature, i.e. it will warn you whenever you have to upgrade some package.
Finally, 'msec', is more powerfull than ever. Use with care: in paranoid mode, msec will let you happily secure your box from yourself now (been there, done that).
Of course you will also find all the newest versions of famous packages:
kernel 2.4.17, celebrating the comeback of kernel-secure, and a more robust supermount.
XFree86 4.2, with support for many video cards only supported in 3.3.6 version until now.
glibc 2.2.4
Window Maker 0.8
apache 1.3.22
evolution 1.01
kde 2.2.2
galeon 1.0
mozilla 0.9.7
Before we could react, the beast managed to mirror itself on a multitude of public FTP servers, which makes any attempts to capture it futile. All we can do at the moment is to keep an up-to-date list of public FTP servers on which the first beta has been sighted so far on the "downloads" page of the Mandrake Linux site.
I don't know if they just made the whole "accidental release" story up or not, but either way their attitude is pretty funny about this. Apparently they didn't mean for people to get their hands on it, but now that it's out there they are helping everyone download it, giving out the specs, and encouraging bug reports. Sounds like a good development team.
~ now you know
So what are the real advantages of Mandrake? I'm currently running Red Hat. I have a friend who is religious about SuSe because it confoms more to the old-school Unix configuration scheme. What makes Mandrake popular?
Nope, 4 options. You forgot the 'I predict these posts' post. That about wraps it up for possible posts.
I guess this counts as a crapflood - my previous post as AC must have counted as a troll.
Honestly, I want an intelligent discussion (see posting history). But if this is the subject material then hell, what's a boy to do but troll?
Does Mandrake still have the neato-keen "Linux By The Pound" feature in the installer? Where, instead of selecting packages, you choose the total number of MB to install via a slider.
"I'm feeling saucy. I'll try 456MB of Linux today."
"Oh, I better take it easy. Only 95MB of Linux for me."
It just struck me as really funny for some reason.
Minimal installation? Ooooh...n33t. I never thought of putting Mandrake on my firewall before now.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Well. Have you, like I, had an ex-girlfriend who got all her personal files check out (and copied I'm sure) by "friends" who did that when she was in the bathroom/cooking/on the phone etc
That's why you have them. I archive lots of stuff that really are personal - I don't want others to be able to lay their hands on them. I have my computer on 24/7 and I want to be able to have friends stay there if they need to - even use my Internet connection - and still have my personal data safe.
Encrypted filesystems are great, all that's needed is to make them simpler to use - what's the point in having them if you mount them at boot and leave them open thereafter?
it's in my head
Obviously, these new tools need a lot of testing. In particular, scannerdrake has only been on the little number of scanners we got in the lab...
Of course you will also find all the newest versions of famous packages:
The two rules for success are:
1) Never tell them everything you know.
Although it may have been posted on the website for the first time, the Cooker 8.2 beta ISO's have been available for a couple of weeks now on a few mirrors. In the future, just scroll down on the download page. Luckily, the psu mirrow is only a few blocks away from my house :)
* rfbdrake lets you easily perform a remote control of an X session. Helping your friends get started with linux has never been easier.
The fact that it really looks like XP frightens me. The fact that it notes that you can help your friends setup Linux from remotely also frightens me.
While this may not come as a default setting (as it best not) what happens if someone who is not all that saavy (isn't that what Mandrake is designed for?) turns it on and next thing you know we have some large security issues.
I like the fact that it has the option to install it minimally only taking up 65mb but you would lose all the fancy dancy shit wouldn't you? Isn't that what Mandrake is? All the bells and whistles?
It comes w/2.4.17, XFree 4.2 (which is very nice), and some other excellent utils.
Sounds nice.
When is RedHat 7.3 expected? After KDE3 in April?
[sacrasm]After all, it's not RedHat, or Debian, or Slackware (one of the good distros). [/sarcasm]
All kidding aside, this article is also good for a good "my distro is better than yours" flamewar, a nice discussion about how Mandrake has come along way and how the 8.2beta shows it, how a 65mb install really is a good thing. C'mon, if it didn't mean anything to you, why post?
And as for not allowing any comments on an announcement, how else would you see other people's (often insightful) reactions to the announcement?
-- Dan
Who would have thought that *Mandrake* would be the distribution to slim down to such an impressive size? Up to now I've run Slackware on small boxes because it was the only thing I could fit into 60 or 120 megabytes. But I'll consider switching to Mandrake - it should be possible to get a system with X and ssh in under a hundred megabytes.
:-(.
All I need to do is recompile the whole distribution without Pentium opcodes
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Why do I say 2.96 is buggy? Even when disabling strict aliasing optimisation (-fno-strict-aliasing), it produces broken code for quakeforge even though code compiled using gcc 3.0 (with -fstrict-aliasing) does work properly.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
With the loop-aes kernel version-independant module, it's not hard to add encrypted loopback to any Linux.
The only PITA is that you have to compile a kernel without loopback built in the kernel or compiled as a module, but you don't have to patch the kernel or anything.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
If anyone from Mandrake is reading these, I do have a humble, not-so-top-priority-but-would-be-cool, request. One thing I have enjoyed about the Windows 2000 setup is that it makes setting up a streaming media server super easy. This is one area that, although I have done so on a Linux box, would benefit greatly from an automatic install during the system install/upgrade. Again, just something that I believe would help make a distro more popular and would make my life a lot easier.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Who better than Mandrake?
Mandrake has lost their position as "Newbie Linux of Choice".
While I use Mandrake and have purchased every standard version that they ever released, I really feel that Mandrake is being left behind in the useability department by the likes of SuSE and many of the upcoming newbiew friendly distros like Redmond Linux. The real nit that I have with Mandrake is total lack of cohesion between the Drake Applications. Many of these applications really pioneered new functionality for the linux desktop, but they haven't grown together like applications from KDE, Gnome, Ximian, etc. They all function/look/act differently.
Why hasn't someone inside of Mandrake taken pieces from the KDE and Gnome design standards and attempted to apply some uniformity between the applications that Mandrakes designs? It simply boggles the mind that tools like RPMDrake can be so poorly designed.
And what about ICONS!!!! The Mandrake icons and the menu system itself are both totally unprofessional. Can Mandrake afford to pay an icon designer who knows how to make icons in more than two shades of blue?
So what do we attribute the stagnification of Mandrake to? Is Mandrake's development model too open? No one within Mandrake has the guts or the brains to stand up and say: "No, we shouldn't be designed 20 applications that all look and function differently. There is a reason why KDE and Gnome came into existence." Then again, perhaps it is just the bureacratic chaos and momentum that surrounds Mandrake.
Mandrake 8.0 was the very first distro that I got to install cleanly right off the bat and allowed me to connect to my DSL immediately. I tried other distros, like Red Hat 6.2 and Mandrake 7.0, but I had serious problems.
:)
8.0 was the PERFECT distro for a newbie like myself. It spared me the pain of having to configure my DSL and allowed me to immediately post questions and get responses from Linux help sites, like LinuxNewbie to get the answers I needed to my important questions. Although they are exlusive to Mandrake, I was quite impressed with the GUI tools, which, although I should really use the command-line equivalents, were of great help to me just starting out.
8.1 seemed even better than 8.0, but I later found out that it wouldn't automount my CD-ROM or floppy, and I couldn't use my CD-Writer at all. I tried all kinds of tricks, but nothing seemed to resolve the problem. Reluctantly, I switched back to 8.0, which I'm still using.
Now I'm debating whether to try out 8.2, or go for a more "pure" Linux distro, like Slackware. I feel as though I've hit a dead end as far as learning Linux goes. I have an old PC on hand, which will really help me to experiment.
I think even if I decide to switch to Slackware, I want to try Mandrake 8.2, for purely sentimental reasons
This space left intentionally blank.
Unlike 99% of the other operating systems out there, Mandrake 8.2 actually included updates as part of the install process. When Joe User goes to install 8.2 six months from now after X number of holes have been found, it'll automatically bring the system up to the current patch level _before_ bringing the entire system online.
i have talked to people who had wonderful esperiences with mandrake, but i am not one of them. they do not answer their phone. it takes them a month to send you something you order online. they do not respond to email.
and my favorite part is that all of their manuals assume that x will run with the default install settings. all of the trouble shooting tips involve clicking a button on the desktop. so that's all pretty useless when all you have is a command prompt. i was lucky that when i tried to install 8.1, i was not afraid to do a lot of tweaking to the xf86config and hardware settings. then mandrake would attempt to "fix" my changes. so now there is no more mandrake for me. (switched to SuSE - their install is also super easy)
you probably shouldn't have read this.
I love MAnsdrake. I've been using their distro for a few yeas now but I installed the lastest Freq (dated 12-24-01) and have only one problem:
:-(
checking whether make sets ${MAKE}... (cached) yes
checking for c++... c++
checking whether the C++ compiler (c++ -O2 ) works... no
configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C++ compiler cannot create executables.
[root@set kvirc]#
All compiler libraries, devel packages, etc. are installed. I hope this is fixed in this beta.
P.S. On this same machine it compiled perfectly fine until I installed this release...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Don't whine: I'm the author of the story and I'm not sure my Karma gets boosted for that :->
SuSE uses ALSA as the default sound system.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
With todays update systems like urpmi and apt, is there any point to having distro version numbers anymore? I have urpmi pointed at cooker, and basically my current distro is something in-between 8.1 and 8.2-beta. Getting rid of version numbers might make things simpler for the user as well.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I think most distros will install in a small footprint if you're careful and know what you're installing. I haven't tried Mandrake in a while so I can't comment there, but it's pretty easy to shoe-horn a RedHat 7.x release into about 80 megs.
/usr/share/doc will also save a surprising amount of disk space. With a bit of tweaking, it should be no problem to get *any* distro to run (and be useful!) in ~50 megs. Of course that depends on what your definition of "useful" is...
Obviously that's with no X, but that still includes apache + mysql + some other useful things. Manually tearing out
It's only software!
LVM and Software RAID are beautiful. Unfortunately, the benefit of LVM is completely lost on a great deal of the community. The strategy seems to no longer be to partition nicely, but rather, put all your space in / and don't worry about it. These are the people Mandrake is catering to, and it doesn't seem like it is worth their effort to support a type of configuration that has no benefit to their target users...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The problem with this is that esd is started only when GNOME/KDE start.
Not true. ESD is the Enlightenment sound daemon, therefore it only starts when Enlightenment does. Running esd under arts (kde's sound server) is as easy as typing artsdsp esd -trust. Pretty easy actually.
You obviously didn't try very hard to fix it. All you had to do was boot from the install cd, choose rescue, fsck your partitions, and get back to work. You can thank ext2 for that crap, Reiserfs doesn't have these problems.
MandrakeForum has much of the same info (and hasn't been hammered yet).
First beta of Mandrake Linux 8.2 escaped!
And how I am supposed to report bug for this 8.2 beta 1?
So how do people go about installing a new version of their favorite distribution? I typically ditch the standard "upgrade" route and choose "install" instead. Too many bad experiences with the former. Has this changed in recent Mandrake / RedHat / Suse releases?
/home on a partition and don't reformat it and most users are ready to go. System stuff is a bit more difficult for me -- keeping track of stuff I've compiled, changes to files in /etc, making sure similar services are installed on the new machine. I've been somewhat careless and haven't kept track of every single change I've done. What do most people do?
On the up, upgrading a unix box is much easier than windows. Just keep
Mandrake 8.1 was extreamly easy to install. When my laptop arrived, I set my father up an account on it. I also left the install CD in the drive with that drive set to boot. My father, wanting to see what linux was all about, turned my computer on and ended up reinstalling the entire thing not knowing what he was doing.
Now that's an easy install!
I agree that syncronizing KDE 3.x with Mandy 8.2 would either delay the release of 8.2 or doom Mandy with a timely release but a less-than-perfect KDE. However, Mandrake releases a point-version every year and KDE releases a point-version much more frequently and can be upgraded within the distro easily. If 8.2 comes with a less-than-perfect KDE 3.x, chances are that it would be easier to upgrade KDE shortly afterwards with the 3.x base already installed than hoping KDE 2.2.2 can upgrade seamlessly (which it very well may).
It's a choice between patience or pleasure, and both have their virtues.
As for your way of upgrading...it doesn't make sense. "It's called downloading stuff, compiling it yourself...". If you're going to go to that extent, why bother with Mandrake? Just go to www.linuxfromscratch.com and forget about Mandrake.
Your second option simply doesn't make sense at all: buy a cheap CD...okay, and then...? How does that solve the fact that Mandrake doesn't make it easy to upgrade from point-releases? In fact, how do either of your choices make it easier?
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
I may come back to Mandrake with this release. Left for Debian unstable and have enjoyed it immensely, but wouldn't mind going back on occasion (not to mention recommending it to newbie friends) if they had a sturdier release. 8.1 was such a mess quality-wise I had to leave 'em.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Mandrake finally figured out how to put linux on the Desktop of just about every home machine in the world. They have created a new tool called MasturDrake.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
One of our kernel hackers spends a lot of time working on supermount. I'm not avare of anyone else working on it, but I may be wrong.
Other distros (AFAIK) aren't interested, because there is no point in putting supermount on a server.
On the contrary, it's not only unnessesary, but even dangerous. On the desktop, enabling the supermount is cool (when it works), but you know how much interest RH and co. have in desktop...
Install whatever you feel like installing, and when the machine comes up again log-in as root, and type 'urpmi openssh-clients openssh-server'
So.. other than XFree86 4.2, I've been using everything 'new' included in MDK 8.2 for about 1-2 months now. (using Debian testing/unstable). On the other hand, I'd have to give the Mandrake people a thumbs up for the increasingly rich-featured installer. Allowing newbies to set up crypto filesystems with no effort is a great idea.
If you are going to do this, you had better be VERY sure that the upgrades won't break something. One of the problems with auto-updaters that I have experienced with unfortunate frequency was that the updates weren't checked anywhere nearly as carefully as the main distribution. So frequently the system would be working fine, until it was updated. And then ... something (varied) would break. Fortunately the "something" has usually been the automatic updater, but I can remember a time or two when it was the file system, or the internet connection.
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
XFS works fine, I've used it at home since 8.1 beta 2. Same with ext3, with additional bonus that /boot partition can be ext3, and that ext2 can be transferred into ext3 on the fly (diskdrake knows how to do it...).
Don't know about Reiser, I got annoyed by it last year, and decided to skip it completely this time.
JFS was included in 8.1, but we discouradged the use because of some problems we've seen during the beta testing. Should be fine in 8.2 though.
Yes, indeed. They must be kernel patch-happy over at Mandrake because they do in fact have XFS available as of Mandrake 8.1. I'm using it on my computers now. Works great, as far as I can tell.
Before I switched to Mandrake 8.1, I was using RedHat 7.1 with the XFS install program from SGI. The thing I like about Mandrake is that XFS is already included. My XFS partition moved over to the new installation with no trouble.
Plus, they compile Samba with XFS support - so you can manipulate the ACLs from NT/2000/XP machines. (To do that with Red Hat, I had to recompile. No big deal, but I like having it taken care of.)
The fact that people have prejuduíces against mandrake distro does not mean that we have to do things the way their prejudices tell them we should...
drakxtools aren't bound to any GUI, and can be run on a terminal just as well as under X. X interface uses GTK+ because that's convenient for developers.
Eer.. What are you talking about?
I've installed 8.0 with LVM way back, to see what's that about. Haven't tested in 8.1, but It would REALLY surprise me if it weren't there.
Ever heard of 'troubleshooting' articles at mandrakeForum?
You're right about the name, but wrong about it having nothing to do with Enlightenment. Enlightenment uses it as the default sound server, on Mandrake at least.
There have been many jfs's to choose from starting with 7.2. 7.2 included Reiser (journaling), 8/8.1 included Reiser, Ext3, SGI's JFS, etc. Guess you should've hit mandrakeuser or mandrakeforum before you assumed it was missing. That or hit expert during the install and chosen your partition types...
The error:
the entry to update is missing
(one of K)
Means you need to specify a source.
You can use urpmi.update -a. Which will update all sources.
Or choose urpmi.update K. That source seems to be your only one so that should do just the same as -a.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
I'm almost absolutely positive that the 8.1 install recognized my LVM volume groups and did the appropriate things with them.
- Have a picture
DrakX can do LVM or raid installs for you.
It is not offered as an obvious option, but if you know LVM, you should be able to set it up.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 come with 3 compilers; 2.91 (egcs), 2.96 (default), and 3.0.3. /etc/alternatives you can choose whichever you want.
The ppc version comes with 2.95 instead of 2.96.
Through
Btw, please read up on gcc2.96.
That should teach you complaining about 2.96.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Will it include the 2313 nVidia drivers?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Things that spring to mind:
:-)
* tech support - it makes life a lot easier if a user quotes a distro number, which can then instantly correlate to a list of known problems. This can cut out a number of problems before resorting to finding out upgraded package versions etc.
* keeping mirrors up to date - it would be a real pain if you downloaded 600MB of Mandrake and found it was so old that the update had to download approximately the same amount again
* marketing - selling new versions keeps Mandrake in business. Windows98 didn't launch with the marketing slogan "Pick up a 2nd hand Win95 and do a Windows Update"
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Actually I trust Mandrake more then the source becasue I trust Mandrake...if you know what I mean. I don't know the guys who did a program originally but have dealt with Mandrake more regularly then the developers. Also, a Kernel is a kernel. Sure, I can compile my own but why? Only reason I see for doing that is a very specific reason. Say to get a certain feature not available in RPM form yet. To fix a rather heinous securty issue until a RPM has been available.....things like that. One other reason is if you were devloping for a embeded device where memory use is an issue. I have found thru experience that RPM can be a friend and an enemy. If you start compiling tarballs and installing over your existing binaries, good luck removing anything! People think Windows is bad...Linux proggies put crap ALL over the file system. I find on a RPM based system it is WAY to easy to fark things up by NOT using RPM. RPM's ain't all that hard to build from source especially if a spec file is in the tarball or it's a source RPM. AT least this way your RPM db does not get hosed too bad and if you install something and it breaks something else, you can easily back it out. For that matter, I like the way Debian lets you do kernels as well through deb's. If you grab the source deb you can build a kernel real easy.
Gorkman
Supermount is nice for cdroms and whatnot, but using it on writeable media is bad. When I used it with floppys it wouldn't finish writing for a while, and if you remove it without syncing things get fucked. I guess this is why macs do software eject for floppies.
People who can't spend the few minutes needed to read the comments in smbd.conf, should NOT be able to simply share something. This is how systems get owned.
Yes, it is nice. But making it a little 'harder' helps insure that somebody actually understands what they are doing before they do it.
Try www.linuxiso.org if you are looking to leech an ISO of the 8.2beta and finding the official mirror sites a bit packed for your taste. I'm only getting 46KB/sec, but at least you can connect, unlike the ftp mirror sites.
Right here. "Configure-make-make install" friendly, too.
Are there any other patches available that just work on CD-ROM's mounting them when inserted and umounting them when ejected? I've played with autofs, but it's not the best for this purpose.
David
that qoute... where is it from? Some old techno song, right? Can you tell me which one, cause I would love to hear it again.
-Kraft
Live and let live
8.0 was (and is) a great release. I still use it, patched with KDE 2.2.2 and various other upgrades principally because I couldn't get 8.1 to install on my laptop either by CD or by HTTP install. I never found a solution for this at Mandrake and it's not like my laptop is anything strange (Acer Travelmate 524). I had no problem with older, sometimes weirder desktop machines.
My one worry for 8.2 is that it's going to get more commercially oriented. 8.1 was the first release by Mandrake as a listed company and the website has subtly changed in the past few months to encourage donations or buy something in return for code or services. No different from many other companies in the same situation these days but it feels like Mandrake are trying to enforce it more than others, quite possibly to the detriment of the quality of the product.
*modifies his /etc/fstab*
I know that will work for fat, but what if for some reason I'm using an ext2 floppy?
No. "supermount" is AFAIK the only such patch.
Second-best is "autofs", but you have seen its shortcommings.
Note I did not say it was impossible to keep a nice filesystem when compiling software and the like, just that it's hard. Tools like apt, RPM and deb's make it easier to install, decide it's crap, then uninstall it. At worst after uninstalling a deb you may have files you created with the package and config files left over. Just rm em. I also did not mean you should not use RPM when doing an embedded system either. I meant that it makes more sense to actually compile a kernel instead of accepting a Red Hat or Mandrake kernel RPM because when your designing an embedded device, it does not make sense to waste space by including things you'd only use on the desktop like parallel port support or support for a usb scanner. Now if you were the compilee, then you could use RPM to package it, if you want. I guess what I am really saying here is that I do not understand what the big deal is to compile your own kernel when standard kernels work too (unless the standard kernel doesn't work then I understand completely! ;)). I mean it's not like memory and hard drives are REAL expensive anymore (I know...I hate bloat too....but binary rpm kernel packages ain't that huge).
Gorkman
Three caveats: you *must* run the screen at full blast (2000x1600 OTTOMH) or you get a ripping effect about 1/3 of the way across it and an unstable system; the ``standby'' which should happen when you close the lid simply results in catatonia (machine still on, black screen, no response); you have to download and install the modem code yourself, since it's non-free.
You get about 3 hours of battery life on ``boring'' games like NetHack, PySol or JezzBall, but only about 90 minutes of 3D+noisy games like TuxKart, TuxRacer and Chromium.
Oh, and Windows XP reacts really badly when you run out of batteries while resizing its partition. (-: 1,$cLinuxZZ :-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Not to start a distro-Jihad, but if I dropped Mandrake, it would be for Debian. Mandrake takes a lot of the hard work out of installing a system (many of the defaults are useful, you can tweak stuff en bloc, and a novice will generally have more success with installing Mandrake 8.1 than Windows 2000), but doesn't (nobody does, AFAICT) take as much care with dependencies as Debian, and makes some assumptions (such as: performance is top priority) which don't sit well with older hardware.
Usually, I can wear the disadvantages with little pain, but if I can have my ease-of-installation cake and eat it (better dependencies, 486 CPUs) as well, fabulous, let's do it.
I have yet to see someone make a clear case for Slackware, other than ``the packaging system is really simple at heart'' or ``I'm used to it.''
For the record, I started with Slackware, soon switched to RedHat, and picked up Mandrake as a default/favourite when 6.0 was released.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I think someone (a user) either has done or will do this. Follow the bouncing links to the Mandrake Cooker list archives and see if I'm right.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
By your own reasoning, Windows is much better than Linux. Since this is evidently not the case, I suggest you try replacing your reasoning with something that works, and rebooting.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
On user request (ie, they listened to and obeyed their users), Mandrake put a Donate link on their front page. On request from corporate partners and other corporate-image-sensitive businesses, they moved the link one level off the front page lest they tarnish their, er, professional look.
To most of the whingers: (1) if you don't even *ask* them to fix stuff, why do you complain when it doesn't get fixed? (2) if you want something fixed, why not pitch in and fix it yourself or at least make constructive suggestions instead of ``it's broken, Mandrake fscked up''? Do you have a *right* to have stuff fixed for free? Would Microsoft fix the same bug in their stuff if only one user (you) asked? (3) a very few of you did actually post useful bug reports and got trampled or triaged in the rush; I've had both bugs fixed and bugs not fixed, them's the breaks, welcome to Real Life, try again this time in case it works.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The biggest flurry of discussion was about two months ago. You can apparently grab a normal CD plus a source RPM (SRPM) set from the same version and do the entire rebuild yourself, there was some discussion about the arcana needed to glue all of the needed utilities together.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If Linux, or any other OS and or OS component stays terribly comlpex, it stands a lower chance of moving forward in usage.
There are a few notable exceptions, like Apache. Although, I can hazard to guess that most of those setups of Apache are with default settings and thus may have many features active that the web page being served is not taking advantage of.
Many people like componitized GUI configuration tools that explain how hings function. Many of these tools have a hierarchical and logical layout that can often explain how the components interact with one another with visual cues as well as with words.
While I am able to understand both, I have to say that I much prefer to see the visual cues. There are many people out there that only understand the visual cues.
While they probably shouldn't be administrators, that is not for you and I to say. Well, unless of course you are the certifying authority for every single administrator on the planet.
Besides, since when does making something easier to setup exclude security? If you are concerned about it being unsecure, then simply find out how it is insecure and help make it secure. Like or not, that is the future of Linux.
There are two things you can do about it. You can sit on the sideline grumbling about how GUI tools are so insecure (While spending 8 hours manually configuring systems, while a GUI/CLI-Oriented Admin sets the whole thing up in about 2 Hours.) The other thing you can do is help test those GUI tools, help insure that they are secure and limit the possibility of making systems insecure.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?