Slashdot Mirror
Mandrake 8.2 Available
Jester998 writes "Linux Mandrake 8.2 is out! Check out the official
annoucement
or head off to your closest mirror to grab the ISO images.
The release is bound to be amazing, with the return of kernel-secure, a 65MB minimum install, hotplug device support, encrypted filesystems and more!"
A portrait of the Mandrake user from a collection of Linux User Caricatures:
This chap (baby) is the new distro on the market(compared to the others anyway). He is always seen as a new lunix user hence the baby look, and the distro is regarded as one best for beginners to learn who might be migrating from windows to linux.
I have to say I'm really impressed by how MandrakeSoft, a small and rather fragile company, is keeping on going its own way. They prefer doing more efforts in building and improving a dream OS everyday, keeping the right open source software way, and they try to avoid laying offs by requesting financial contributions of its users (see the Mandrake Club announcement). I don't know what this company is going to become in the next ten years but really, Mandrake Linux and MandrakeSoft are more exciting product and company than Red Hat or SuSE!
uhm.... the release announcement mentions the inclusion of Star Office 6.0 in the "power pack" edition, but a glance at http://www.sun.com/staroffice seems to indicate that this hasn't even been released yet? I wonder if this means Sun will be doing the final release soon?
The Free desktop that Just Works
When are we going to get a nice little "cached" (ala Google) link under a story that takes us to a version cached locally on slashdot's servers. Items in the cache could easily expire after only a day(or even a couple hours). Salshdot's readers would appreciate this as would the poor IT people in charge of the oft-slashdotted servers...
I am very impressed with the tools that they are inlcuding in this release. The best is the ability to RIGHT-CLICK on a folder and then LEFT-CLICK on SHARE!!!
That is the greatest feature to add to Linux. The medium sized computer manufacturer that I work for is very interested in being able to use Linux in their Server products. Since most of their technical staff and clients have no interest in learning how to configure Samba, this will be a great help.
Now, all they will have to do is have me or a few of the other techs, go by the machines, or SSH into them to update them on occasion.
Mandrake is truly bringing Linux to the masses.
With this one feature, the market share and thus the potential number of commercial products for Linux can and hopefully will increase dramatically.
--
.sig seperator
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
So what's a big problem with Slashdotted ISO releases??? To quote MC Hammer: Hammer time. Those poor distros get nailed so hard that you can't get to an ISO at a reasonable speed for a week. And companies like Mandrake really need all the support they can get. It's great product and I'm sure they have to pay for massive bandwidth with ISO releases (even with all the mirrors from edu sites and the like). Looks like we need a p2p distribution system a la fasttrack network that allows multiple downloads from multiple hosts so that we can waterfall these ISO's. I just hope someday it will be implemented (and more importantly: used by the masses).
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
I would tend to agree, based on my own experiences. Of course, perhaps he's running something "exotic" (or extremely old/new). I have an HP DJ932c and installing it to LM 8.1 was easier than in Win 98 SE, the OS it was created for!
Of course, it's just as easy now that I'm running Win 2k pro, but I was mucho impressed running LM 8.1 on my PII 400/128MB PC100 RAM/16.6GB HD system, and the only reason I haven't installed it on my new box is because I knew that 8.2 was imminent and it would save me the hassle of installing 2x. My plans are to run a tri-boot Win 2k pro/XP pro/LM 8.2 on my Soyo Dragon+/Athalon 1700+/256MB DDR RAM/WD 120GB HD w/8MB cache system (only running XP because my telephone tech support job requires me to be familiar with it).
Mandrake rocks. Wish there could be some Mandrake-centric books though. (EVERYTHING is Red Hat!!!)
Chris
So I foolishly bought a new laptop, figuring that all modern laptops were well supported by all modern Linux distros ... foolish, like I said ;)
:) [yes, I know there are Win32 versions of GIMP, Xchat, etc, but I don't feel like downloading them over dialup in a motel ;)]
:) If yes, I hope it's been successful!
Glad to see that the i830M chipset listed as supported under XFree 4.2, BUT -- mandrake's hardware list only lists it as supported under "video." Does this mean that the integrated video on my Satellite 1005-S157 (ridiculously cheap, I saw one online for just under $700, I paid $800 with a discount) will work, but not the sound? 3D acceleration doesn't matter, but sound really would be nice.
Right now, after trying all the options I could to get it to work as an i810 chipset and failing (try googling for XF86 and i830M -- lots of hard-luck cases, a few successes.) Looks like I now have a Windows XP laptop, and Win XP may be more stable than any Windows I've used yet (none very much, so not a big comparison), but ugly and annoying. I hope that 8.2 will go on nicely. No "pirated" software on here, but I would rather have a nice pretty (and *working*) Mandrake or other Linux on this machine, so I could the software I want running free in its native habitat
Anyone with one of these laptops who's tested it with Mdk8.2?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
IMHO of course. Actually Mandrake is great. There's no such thing as the "best" distro, whatever works for you. I think SuSE is getting limited acknowledgment 'cause you can't download the ISO's. It is free to copy and you can install via ftp if you'd like. SuSE's YOU (Yast Online Update) and Yast package manager seem far easier to newbie's than Mandrake's equivalent. (haven't tried urpmi, which looks good). You can get SuSE Pro version for $49 bucks including the full DVD and 8 CD's if you buy the "update" version (full without manuals). Some may still prefer Mandrake, but really TRY SuSE. It'll surprise you. I know quite a few Windows "power user" discussion boards where people try Mandrake (as of 8.1) and come back swearing off linux for good. These are the same people that change winXP themes twice a day. SuSE is just easier to get going in 3D gaming (if you've got nvidia at least), make online system updates (as easy as windows updating) and 8.0 comes with KDE3. I've been running KDE3 beta 2 on my 7.3 PC since its release and I'm amazed at how quick and stable it is. If SuSE actually tries to start requiring licenses (mentioned online somewhere today) than I'll be bailing the distro pretty quickly though. Until then I've found my linux distro.
But, but..
Linux was designed from the beginning, and still is, to be run on lousy hardware. I'm about to set up a Pentium 60MHz firewall/router/log-in-terminal, and I've seen people running that on 386's. By speaking like you, we only get bloatier, bigger and slower software, because "hey, I've got the hardware for it!" But have you ever tried running DOS with Windows 3.11 on a Athlon 1200? Blazingly fast! People knew how to work in Windows 3.11 as well, they just didn't have that kindergarden-look of WinXP. Keep the software small and fast, and the computers will run faster! Linux should run (and does) on Pentium 200s. It even runs fast, if you set it up correctly or use a small, fast distro (think Blackbox, few services - boots in 10 seconds). My favourite server distro in that matter is Trustix - small, fast and it works.
MHO, anyway..
OpenOffice version numbering does not follow this pattern (current OpenOffice version is build 641C).
And StarOffice 6.0 is about to be officially launched (this week or the next). So I think it is really SO 6.0.
ls -l red* && more mandrake-release
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Mar 16 15:36 redhat-release -> mandrake-release
Mandrake Linux release 8.2 (Bluebird) for i586
Or you could DL is the ISOs and donate to Mandrake directly, through a credit card, like what I did today (not to trump myself up... but it's good to give support to the industry).
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
(Warning! this is a shameless self advertisement ;p)
;p)
Mandrake 8.2 is the first stable distro to include Frozen-Bubble, a full-featured game with colorful animated penguin eyecandy, 50 levels of 1p game, hours and hours of 2p game, 3 professional quality 20-channels musics, 15 stereo sound effects, and 7 unique graphical transition effects (erhm, this game has been sponsored by MandrakeSoft).
(my own private conclusion: you need this game
(thanks to contribs of many other people, hopefully the game is available for previous releases of Mandrake, for Debian, Red Hat and a few other distros)
gc - main programmer of Frozen-Bubble
I would guess that Linux is running in APM instead of ACPI mode, and that usually is less optimal for newer laptops.
I've been holding off grabbing any of the release
:/
candiates hoping the zlib, OpenSSH and other
recent security fixes would be incorporated.
I can't find mention of these updates for 8.2 on
the Mandrake announcement site, or forums.
Anyone know if zlib and the gang have been fixed?
My query about this on the Mdk forums was
immediately marked as "-1: Offtopic" suggesting
to me the fixes are not there.
SIGLOST && SIGUNUSED && SIGQUIT
What happened to the download edition that you can buy? That one only cost me about 30 bucks in the store. Now I see that their lowest cost edition cost 60. Are they that low on cash?