Mandrake 9.0 (Dolphin) Is Available [updated]

joestar writes "What else to say? I've tested the RCs and they were great... There are two very interesting links: the Press Release, and a very nice presentation. From the presentation: 'Affirming its leading position in the Linux desktop arena, Mandrake Linux 9.0 introduces many newly redesigned graphical desktops and configuration utilities. The famous "Mandrake touch" is evident throughout the many clean, attractive and friendly desktops to make everyday tasks easier for all users of a Mandrake system.' And apparently it's already LSB-1.2 certified!" Update: 09/25 23:57 GMT by T : Apropos new releases, an anonymous reader writes "Parts of Red Hat's next OS have been unofficially leaked, as news.com reports here. The official release date is scheduled for next Monday, 9/30/02." Update: 09/26 00:29 GMT by T : Gaël Duval points to less-swamped links to the press release and to the Presentation & Features page. Thanks, Gaël.

Comments

no thanks...

[edrugtrader]

i hear the red hat desktop is going to kick ass... i'll wait.

Re:no thanks...

[Sciamachy]

I hear it's going to suck ass - Bernhard Rosenkraenzer has just quit RH because he reckons they're trying to make KDE crippleware in RH8.

But is it any faster?

[night_flyer]

not to troll, but is it?

Mandrake 8.2 (running KDE) is dog slow on my 333p2,128RAM and 16 meg video card. Windows 98 was much faster.

Re:But is it any faster?

[jonman_d]

Try using something like WindowMaker or Blackbox/Fluxbox. I'd expect KDE to lag like hell, with those specs.

Not to troll, but KDE is bloat. It's not intended for systems such as yours.

Re:But is it any faster?

[joib]

MDK 9 uses KDE 3, which is supposed to be slightly faster than KDE 2.2.2 which is used in MDK 8.2. Also it uses gcc 3.2, which also is supposed to produce faster code than older gcc versions. So probably it will be faster. Noticably faster? Go figure.. If you want a noticable improvement in speed, change to a lightweight wm instead of heavy desktop environments like kde or gnome.

Re:But is it any faster?

[(startx)]

kde 3.0.3 runs great under Gentoo on my p266, 64MB RAM laptop. Not to troll, but Mandrake is bloat. KDE works just fine.

Re:But is it any faster?

[Coplan]

I'm not throwing darts. But when you make a statement like that (a rather bold one, mind you), you should use specifics. If nothing else, someone might have advice.

If by "slow", you mean file accessing and what-not, I'd be willing to bet that Windows 98 is far slower at file access than any linux distribution, even the crapiest. WinXP, NT or 2000? It's a close call, I'd have to see the data.

But if by "slow" you mean the FPS on your graphic applications, well then, you have a valid point. If you're fortunate enough to have an NVIDIA based video card, you'll want to jump on over to the NVIDIA website and check either the Linux Display Drivers or the IA64 Drivers, whichever applies.

Re:But is it any faster?

[geekd]

Mandrake/KDE has had this for a long time.

KDE Control Center -> Peripherals -> Mouse -> Advanced -> Pointer Acceleration (nice slider)

Re:But is it any faster?

[mickwd]

Well if you use KDE, try Control Center -> Peripherals -> Mouse -> Advanced.

Re:But is it any faster?

[marick]

Also, Mandrake 8.2 ships with KDE 2.2.2, which is much slower than 3.0.3

IMHO, of course...

Re:But is it any faster?

[SCHecklerX]

Mandrake is snappy on my 64MB libretto (P233). The thing is, you just have to customize a bit. Remove all the cruft, and use a lighter window manager (I use windowmaker). I do this no matter what distro I use anyway. That's the whole point of linux...being able to run what you want, only what you want, and how you want to run it. Right?

Another thing I did was to remove many of the scripts in /etc/profile.d along with disabling medusa from running every time X starts. The scripts in profile.d by default run jobs that index all kinds of stuff that I really don't need indexed.

The only thing I haven't figured out is what causes modprobe to be called on the first console login/logoff. Not much of an issue, as I never really log off, but put the system into hibernation mode.

Here's my process list:

PID TTY TIME CMD
1 ? 00:00:07 init
2 ? 00:00:10 keventd
3 ? 00:00:06 kapmd
4 ? 00:00:01 ksoftirqd_CPU0
5 ? 00:01:22 kswapd
6 ? 00:00:24 bdflush
7 ? 00:01:08 kupdated
8 ? 00:00:00 mdrecoveryd
11 ? 00:00:00 kreiserfsd
64 ? 00:00:01 devfsd
516 ? 00:00:11 cardmgr
739 ? 00:00:05 syslogd
748 ? 00:00:01 klogd
798 ? 00:00:00 atd
873 ? 00:00:05 esd
973 ? 00:00:00 crond
998 ? 00:00:47 xfs
1052 tty1 00:00:00 login
1053 tty2 00:00:00 mingetty
1054 tty3 00:00:00 mingetty
1055 tty4 00:00:00 mingetty
1058 tty5 00:00:00 mingetty
1059 tty6 00:00:00 mingetty
1315 vc/1 00:00:00 bash
2082 ? 00:00:29 sshd
15441 ? 00:00:00 xinetd
25484 vc/1 00:00:00 startx
25496 vc/1 00:00:00 xinit
25497 ? 00:21:17 X
25503 vc/1 00:00:00 sh
25504 vc/1 00:00:40 wmaker
25507 vc/1 00:00:02 wmcms
25508 vc/1 00:00:00 wmCalClock
25509 vc/1 00:18:20 wmtop
25510 vc/1 00:00:09 wmifs
25511 vc/1 00:00:05 wmwave
25512 vc/1 00:00:01 wmtuxtime
27676 ? 00:00:00 dhcpcd
28096 vc/1 00:00:00 run-mozilla.sh
28101 vc/1 00:04:38 mozilla-bin
28103 vc/1 00:00:00 mozilla-bin
28104 vc/1 00:00:00 mozilla-bin
28105 vc/1 00:00:00 mozilla-bin
28107 vc/1 00:00:01 mozilla-bin
28115 vc/1 00:00:00 mozilla-bin
28162 vc/1 00:00:00 aterm
28163 pts/0 00:00:00 bash
28184 pts/0 00:00:00 ps

Re:But is it any faster?

[SCHecklerX]

What's wrong with 'xset m speed threshold?'

Re:But is it any faster?

[billstewart]

KDE may be bloated, but GNOME was also bloated, and for both of them, the default window manages were big, fancy, overdecorated before applying skins, etc., bloatware, or (put more nicely) taking maximum advantage of Moore's law in RAM and CPU speeds to provide a feature-rich environment. But as other posters have said, if you want a lean mean windowmanager, there are plenty of them to go install.

Re:But is it any faster?

[leviramsey]

Sawfish (the default wm in GNOME 1.x and some distros' GNOME 2.x) is actually a very light wm. GNOME is bloated because of the panel and Nautilus.

Re:But is it any faster?

[EvilAlien]

GNOME + Metacity is zippy as hell. Mandrake is zippy. I'd rather gnaw my own leg off than use KDE, but that is because I was attacked by a KDE as a child. I'm getting over it, the therapy is helping...

Re:But is it any faster?

[vadim_t]

Maybe it uses devfs? devfsd will try to modprobe everything you try to access in /dev. If you're feeling really curious, you could replace modprobe with a wrapper shell script and write the output of pstree to a file from it.

Re:But is it any faster?

[jonman_d]

I _believe_ that is probably because Gentoo ownz. ;) Compiling from source definitly helps speed it up, while the precompiled binaries used in Mandrake don't have that advantage. (I say this because when I use the precompiled binaries for KDE (used, I should say, since this was at least 2 months ago), my system was slow as hell...I compiled from source, and I got an amazing improvement.)

Re:But is it any faster?

[leviramsey]

Maybe it uses devfs? devfsd will try to modprobe everything you try to access in /dev. If you're feeling really curious, you could replace modprobe with a wrapper shell script and write the output of pstree to a file from it.

Yeah, Mandrake uses devfs, which is something that more distros should definitely do. It's only been in the kernel for a couple of years.

As for supermount... well... I won't go there...

Re:But is it any faster?

[__aahlyu4518]

If mdk 8.2 (running KDE) is dog slow on your 333p2 128RAM and 16 meg videocard,.... then your box is f*cked up. Have been running same config at home and it was running just fine. Or maybe you have a weird interpretation of dog slow... Or maybe I have :-) And you can't compare it to win98... they're completely different OS'es... If you'd like to compare it to a MS OS, then you should use XP as a comparison. mdk 8.2 is about 6 months old. If you use a mdk distro from 1998 (was there a mdk in '98 btw?... nevermind), you'll notice that it is much faster as 8.2 as well. But just FYI. Yes... 9.0 feels faster and more responsive (running KDE).

Re:But is it any faster?

[jregel]

128MB of memory is your problem. A 333Mhz chip will be fast enough, but I'm guessing you're swapping. Memory is cheap - get another 128MB and you should see much better performance.

Re:But is it any faster?

[Yokaze]

Sorry, my experience is a different one.

I've used Gentoo (once 1.0, and recently 1.4) on my p233, 64Mb laptop. I did not find KDE 3.0.3 (more exactly Konqueror) very snappy.
Have a look at memory usage. At least in my case, with KDE, RAM was maxed out, and starting a program leaded to swapping.

>but Mandrake is bloat

How can Mandrake be bloat? Granted, it is equipped with more gimmicks, themes and the like than Gentoo and requires you to install MySQL and Postgresql, which is a waste of diskspace, but you don't have to use them.
Of course, this is a kind of "bloat", but not the kind, which is performance degrading.

Memory usage of KDE under Gentoo and Mandrake is roughly the same. Depending on the grade and type of optimisation the code-size may vary. But the data-size and heap-size should be the same.
And at least in my experience, that is where performance is lost on such a system.

Lastly, Mandrake already optimises for Pentiums, so when you gain a great deal of performance on your P266, you should wonder wether it's rather your perception than hard evidence.

BTW, switching to Fluxbox did give me a great deal of a snappier system. Under MDK and under Gentoo.

Re:But is it any faster?

[tempest303]

no, no, and no.

First, Sawfish is a heavy, nasty bitch of a WM. Metacity, the GNOME 2 WM is MUCH faster - this is all on my 400mhz K6-III at work - Metacity was *very noticably* faster and more responsive.

Second, Gnome's panel is no more bloated than KDE's, and for that matter, it's only using like 10MB on my system at work. Not trim, no, but for all the stuff its holding and all the stuff it does, I'd hardly call it "bloat".

Finally, Nautilus 2 is so NOT bloated. Have you even tried GNOME 2? Nautilus 2 is damn fast, even on moderate hardware.

Re:But is it any faster?

[tempest303]

Ha. Don't quote Amiga to me, son. I used to USE one. For 7 years. And you know what I think about Amiga OS and Amiga hardware after using Linux for 4 years?

AMIGA FUCKING SUCKED.

I'll take "inefficiency" anyday over featureless, unstable crap, thanks.

Re:But is it any faster?

[ShavenYak]

and requires you to install MySQL and Postgresql, which is a waste of diskspace

A basic install of Mandrake doesn't require either MySQL or Postgres. The catch is, if you install libqt3-devel (needed to build KDE stuff, obviously) there's a dependency on postresql-devel and libmysql10-devel. Which means that if you check 'Development' in the install, you're gonna get both DBMSs.

Still, your point holds true - it wastes disk space, but as long as you don't run them, it shouldn't make your system slow.

Re:But is it any faster?

[ShavenYak]

Saying Gnome is faster than KDE is like saying a snail is faster than a slug.

Shouldn't a slug be faster since it doesn't have to tote a shell around? Oh, I get it. You're getting a quick jab in on Gnome while you're pointing out the silliness of comparing it to KDE on low-end machines. Clever, if that was your intent.

Re:But is it any faster?

[tomhudson]

You could always forego X and have 12 consoles

90% of what you want to do can be handled by these commands:

1. mc
2. lynx
3. ls
4. mv
5. cp
6. cat
7. vi
8. man
9. telnet
10. ftp

Even a 386 will run fast in this config, and you'll learn something

I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[Karma Sink]

Since I'm running low on CD-Rs, and I wanted to install Mandrake tonight, can anyone tell me what changes there have been between rc3 and the final release?

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[rnd()]

Sort of a basic question, but how does one "sync"? Can this be done using the Mandrakeupdate tool?

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[leviramsey]

Mandrake Update is designed for deployment of security updates after release.

These instructions are for the commandline... I've not used the new GUI front-ends to urpmi.

1) Find a mirror that has Cooker... many mandrake mirrors do.. if your mirror has a directory named "mandrake-devel", you're in business.

2) Find where that mirror keeps its RPMs... in most cases it will be in path-to/mandrake-devel/cooker/i586/Mandrake/RPMS. Also find where the file "base/hdlist.cz" is, relative to the RPMS directory. In most cases, this will be ../base/hdlist.cz

As root, issue this command (assuming that your mirror is an ftp mirror):

# urpmi.addmedia Cooker ftp://$PATH_TO_RPMS with ../base/hdlist.cz

At this point, you can auto-install any packages which have changed by issuing:

# urpmi --media Cooker --auto-select

You can also use rpmdrake to do the upgrade (rpmdrake is "Configure | Packaging | Install Software" in the Mandrake menu system).

Please note that, due to some changes in package names and improvements made to urpmi between 8.2 and 9.0 betas, it is questionable whether Mandrake 8.2 can be upgraded to 9.0 in this manner.

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[packeteer]

Ok p[ersonally i use mandrake a lot and rc2 has been fun to plauy with so i waited for 9.0 before i dled again. But i have one question. Can you explain cooker to me. I know what makes it the sme as the rest but how is it different? I find some of the info on cooker to be obscure so can you please explain it or link to a good beginner explanation of cooker?
-thanks

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[rnd()]

THANKS!! That is very useful info!

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[elliott666]

Here's how to update to the latest cooker graphically.

first open up the 'mandrake control center' (under the 'configuration' menu)

click on 'software management' on the left

click on 'software sources manager'

click on the 'add...' button

for the 'type of source', choose 'FTP server'

type in a name (like cooker)

for the URL, you can point it to
'ftp://sunsite.uio.no/pub/unix/Linux/Mandrake/Ma nd rake-devel/cooker/i586/Mandrake/RPMS'

for the 'Relative path to synthesis/hdlist' enter
'../base/hdlist.cz'

click Ok and wait a minute while it downloads the hdlist

click on 'save and quit'

now once you're back in the control center, click on 'Install Software'

Next to All packages there's a scroll box, choose 'by update availability'

expand the upgradable branch and select the packages you want to update, or click on the checkbox next to upgradable to select them all. once you've selected what you want click on install and wait until it's done.

quit out of the software packages installation (which should read software package installation, but try arguing that one on the cooker list and see how far it gets you!)

that should be it.

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[packeteer]

Well here is the distro watch page on the diff between all mandrake (no rc sorry). So if you are thinking of going from 8.x to 9.0 here is the info.

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[leviramsey]

Can you explain cooker to me. I know what makes it the sme as the rest but how is it different? I find some of the info on cooker to be obscure so can you please explain it or link to a good beginner explanation of cooker?

Basically Cooker is Mandrake's development/testing branch, somewhat like Debian Sarge (or Woody before Woody went stable). When a Mandrake developer finishes packaging something, they upload it to Mandrake's internal cooker mirror and then it propagates through the publically accessible mirrors. For this reason, the packages in Cooker change constantly, though there will be the occasional burst (such as when gcc was upgraded to 3.1 and then to 3.2 or when perl was upgraded to 5.8 and then to a thread-enabled perl) when a lot of packages get upgraded.

When Mandrake makes a release (beta or final), they basically just take a snapshot of what Cooker is on a given day (generally a few days before the release is announced), do a bit more testing on that frozen Cooker and then declare it to be a stable release.

For the few weeks before a final release, Mandrake will freeze Cooker, which essentially means that only bugfixes will be accepted.

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[leviramsey]

Minor error in the above post...

# urpmi.addmedia Cooker ftp://$PATH_TO_RPMS with ../base/hdlist.cz

Before executing this, you should make sure that urpmi's package db is sane (adding media should do this, but it doesn't always do it properly).

# urpmi.update Cooker

Also, after syncing to Cooker to bootstrap your way into 9.0, you have a choice: you can either run Cooker full time after this (Cooker is fairly stable... things aren't constantly breaking) or you can choose to essentially treat it as a 9.0. If you choose the former, you don't have to do anything. If you choose the latter, you should remove Cooker as a source for packages (otherwise security updates could get hairy). To do this, just issue the following at a shell:

# urpmi.removemedia Cooker

Also, I can't stress this enough, but this trick will only work until Cooker development starts up again and new packages get uploaded. Also, if you downloaded RC3, there's probably no need to download 9.0 final... the only changes seem to be in the installer; no packages have changed.

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[rnd()]

fantastic! thanks!

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[leviramsey]

Jesus Christ... I think my brain is fried...

Minor error in the above correction:

You should run urpmi.update after running urpmi.addmedia

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[uchian]

Please note that, due to some changes in package names and improvements made to urpmi between 8.2 and 9.0 betas, it is questionable whether Mandrake 8.2 can be upgraded to 9.0 in this manner.

The most notable change is from using GCC 2.9x to using GCC 3.2, which for C++ programs are completely binary incompatable.

If you are doing a urpmi.updae/urpmi --autoselect, be prepared for perhaps > gig of "updates" to your system.

On the plus side, as somebody who ahs followed cooker, I don't believe that you will have any significant problems updating other than the aformentioned size of the update.

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[ShavenYak]

Actually, you get the current hdlist when you run urpmi.addmedia, so you shouldn't have to run urpmi.update after it.

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[packeteer]

Thanks for the info, but i have one more question. Does this make cooker at least semi-stable? Like i know its probably not totally tested to be bug free but is at least not hacked apps and drivers?

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[leviramsey]

Thanks for the info, but i have one more question. Does this make cooker at least semi-stable? Like i know its probably not totally tested to be bug free but is at least not hacked apps and drivers?

Cooker is quite stable... in the past six months, I can think of only one occasion where I hosed anything important (an issue with X Font Server). In that case, the Cooker mailing list was able to provide a workaround (commenting out a line in XF86Config-4) before fixed packages made it my way.

Would I use it on a workstation? Yeah, I do. Would I use it on a mission-critical server? No way.

If you're going to run Cooker, at least subscribe to the Mandrake changelog list, so you know what's been uploaded.

For the most part, Cooker does not have alpha-level software (as tagged by the upstream maintainers). We run a stable kernel and all that goodness (some apps do use patches from CVS).

Re:I just downloaded and burned 9.0rc3...

[packeteer]

This sounds like something i would like to be a part of. I appreciate you helping me and i assume becuase you use "we" when talking about cooker you are involved. Your going on my friends list and i think ill try it out on some of my workstatons boxes. Thanks a lot.

Proper name

[The Z Master]

That should be Mandrake GNU/Linux 9.

There goes my bandwidth

[Zemran]

It sounds great and I will definately give it a try. I think that by the time I have a real opinion this tread will be history though :)

Looks great!

[joestar]

The presentation at:
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/9.0/presentat ion/
is *very* impressive... They really have the best features for end-users, in particular what they call the "dynamic desktop"...!

Perfect timing

[Vicegrip]

Makes me pleased that I joined their club in support of their distribution. I expect to be wiping my Redhat installation soon, cancelling my rhn subscription and making the jump.

The new control panel looks awesome; I've been looking forward to being able to try out gcc 3.2 on a distro compiled for it.

Good job guys.

Re:Perfect timing

[Vicegrip]

Hardly. I was ready to wait-and-see through all the comments over the last two weeks about what was happening to KDE in Redhat. I felt Bero would ensure whatever came out of Redhat was good. It was mostly because Bero worked for Redhat (and because rhn works pretty well) that I switched to them a year ago.

This post is perfect timing for me because the announcement came on Slashdot exactly at the time I was mulling over what I was going to do regarding my computer's OS.

Re:Perfect timing

[HiThere]

Red Hat has earned the community reaction through their impoliteness. I'm sure that their configuration changes are perfectly legal, but it is still quite impolite.

I'm also contemplating a switch. (No big thing. I switch frequently. But apropos.)

Re:Perfect timing

[HiThere]

There are many changes that one can make. It is impolite to make changes that the author disapproves of. One of these was the replacing of the small menu icon at the lower left of the screen, which was a K placed on top of a gear wheel, and it now the red hat man in a hat logo. There were others.

Re:Linux Standars Base

[Dave_bsr]

I imagine it is certifiable, but they didn't go to the trouble to do so because it's not anything anyone is going to pay for. The two are virtually identical, +/- a few non-free packages - the core is essentially the same, so download follows standard. It just wasn't certified because that takes time and it's a free version.

Version inflation?

[madenosine]

I'm suprised nobody else seems to be annoyed with the version inflation of both red hat and mandrake.

.0 releases are starting to loose their meaning...mandrake even passed AOL for gods sake!

Pretty soon, they will have to start using random letters, like "PX" or "EM"

Re:Version inflation?

[mz001b]

They break binary compatiblity, because of the new version of gcc (the older Redhat and Mandrake versions used gcc 2.9x). Breaking binary compatiblity is a very good reason to start over with a new major number.

Re:Version inflation?

[Clue4All]

They have NEVER lost their meaning. A .0 release represent a major version jump that breaks compatability. In 8.0 it was glibc 2.2, in 9.0 it's GCC 3.2. These releases are binarily incompatible. Perhaps people should learn what a version jump is supposed to mean before they start spewing from their ass^H^H^Hmouth on Slashdot.

Re:Version inflation?

[Arandir]

Mandrake started at version 6

Actually it started with version 5.3. And if 0.0 to 5.3 isn't version inflation, I don't know what is...

Re:Version inflation?

[nzhavok]

Mandrake started at version 6

No you're wrong, mandrake actually had a version 5. I think 5.1 was the first one to hit FTP servers.

see this google groups link

Feel free to go look up the answer to your own question, I'm not going to do your research

Well we could hardly expect you to do that when you haven't done your own now could we...

Re:Version inflation?

[nzhavok]

Actually it started with version 5.3

No actually, mandrake actually had a version 5. I think 5.1 was the first one to hit FTP servers.

see this google groups link

This was my first linux distro and IIRC I had to download 90% of the files from local redhat mirrors (in new zealand) and grab the last few files from overseas.

Community is what counts for me, not new features

[LM741N]

I recently bought a new laptop to I had plenty of room to try out Mandrake and Suse. Both seem to be excellent software distributions, with just a few faults. So I subscribed to the mailing lists. I found them to be a total turn-off. I am not certain why, but I just don't get the sense of community that I get from the FreeBSD people. So now I'm back to running just FreeBSD. Maybe I will give Linux another try. Am I the only one who has these feelings?

Red Hat, Mandrake

[Bobb Sledd]

With Bero no longer working on KDE, I suggest that Mandrake may become more in the spotlight, especially if they see an opportunity to make emphasized advancements.

Red Hat will have to work a bit harder now or slip behind. Either way, both of these two recent events have interesting dynamics that could fuel competition between perhaps all distros.

Actually

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to pacify both RMS and the feminists, we should call this release GNU/Myndrake.

Re:Actually

[brain159]

but "drake" is a MALE term - surely GNU/Mynduck, no?

Re:Actually

[sconeu]

But "Person" has "son" in it.

Therefore it should be GNU/Peroffspringaquaticavian/Linux

gcc3.2

[Screaming Lunatic]

It looks like all the big distros have got gcc3.2 packaged. Which would be one of the big reasons at this point in time to pick up one of the newer distros. I've been burned by gcc2.9x a bunch of times. Personally, I'm waiting for the next version of Gentoo for my next distro (Currently running RedHat7.3). RPM has just become a bother.

So it comes down to either wait 8 hours for it to compile (portage), or wait 8 hours to figure out the dependencies (rpm), or wait 8 months for someone to package it (deb).

Re:gcc3.2

[(startx)]

try slackware-current (aka 9.0 beta). it's got gcc-3.2 standard, and has for a couple months.

Re:gcc3.2

[leviramsey]

So it comes down to either wait 8 hours for it to compile (portage), or wait 8 hours to figure out the dependencies (rpm), or wait 8 months for someone to package it (deb).

Or:

Download Mandrake and use urpmi or it's graphical front-end, the redesigned rpmdrake, to automatically figure out dependencies. There's even talk of hacking urpmi to support automatic compilation of source on a per-package basis (so you can compile X but not other packages).

Re:gcc3.2

[jhines]

Yeah?

I tried installing RC3, and it wouldn't install a single program, always giving me a library dependancy problem.

Yeah, gcc was the program I wanted to install, but nothing else (games) worked either.

I don't understand how I can download what seems like everything in the world on the cd images, and not get a set that works.

Differences

[phorm]

Aside from general personal preference, can anyone outline the functional differences between the various linux-based systems?
For me, it seems that on any system, once everything is up and running, then I'm good to go. When it comes to desktops, etc, there seems to be a large area of contention.

Currently I'm running RedHat. The GUI installation was nice. Driver detection was good. Most things I configure I have no problems with. Trying Debian recently was like jumping in a cold shower. I suppose I'm spoiled with GUI and quick-and-easy tools, but besides these what is the core difference?

Oh, and in addition, in terminal mode I will currently say that the RedHat VIM (default VI editor) is the nicest editor out of all I've seen from RedHat, Debian, Unix and FreeBSD - as I've tried all of these through terminals into various systems I have access to.

Can perhaps somebody post a page outlining a list of core/important differences between distros?

In another note: the presentation page has been slashdotted already, since it's probably running on Mandrake configured by the Mandrake people, perhaps I'll take this as a cue to stick with RedHat...

Anyone with a GUI is spoiled - phorm

Re:Differences

[Apostata]

Check this out. I wrote it for linux.ca (when their site is renovated, it'll hopefully get posted there). It'll give a general overview of the major distros: http://members.rogers.com/m-cahill/so_linux-rev3.h tml

More information about Mandrake 9.0 (full PR)

[joestar]

As their server seems slashdotted, here is the full PR from LWN.NET:

__________

Altadena, CA; Paris, France - September 25th, 2002 - MandrakeSoft today
announced the release of Mandrake Linux 9.0 (Dolphin), a new-generation Linux
operating system for servers and desktop workstations. Mandrake Linux 9.0
combines all the power & stability of Linux with many new and unique features
plus the famous "Mandrake touch" which has a long tradition of excellence and
leadership on the desktop.

It includes the latest versions of the premiere Free Software packages,
including the newest stable releases of Linux Kernel 2.4.19, KDE 3.0.3, GNOME
2.0.1, OpenOffice 1.0.1, Mozilla 1.1, GCC 3.2, CUPS 1.1 -- over 2000
packages in all.

The Mandrake Linux 9.0 Download Edition is immediately available as a free
download from many Internet locations. Mandrake Linux retail packs (Standard
9.0: $30 USD/30 EUR, PowerPack 9.0: $69 USD/65 EUR, and ProSuite 9.0: $199 USD
- 166 EUR) - all including support plans -- are now available for pre-order at
MandrakeStore http://www.mandrakestore.com. Availability of the retail packs
is planned for mid/end October.

The Mandrake Linux 9.0 ProSuite Edition has been Linux Standard Base (LSB 1.2)
certified on Sept 25th, 2002.

* A major step toward global IT solutions *

Mandrake Linux 9.0 is the result of over four years of work to offer the most
powerful Linux operating system and world-class applications to the public.
With the growing power of PC hardware and widespread adoption of Internet
protocols, the distinction between 'server' and 'desktop' has begun to blur.
Server implementations now generally require a polished graphical desktop,
while many desktop workstations routinely include professional features such
as a firewall or a small FTP/webserver.

Mandrake Linux 9.0 answers all these needs with a unique solution to satisfy
the widest range of uses. At installation time, the system easily adapts to an
individual users' needs and expertise without requiring any difficult
configuration choices or options. As a result, individuals receive the best
set of desktop features, and corporate users benefit from the most powerful
server features.

* What's new and unique in Mandrake Linux 9.0? *

Mandrake Linux has a long tradition of excellence on the desktop: Four years
ago we were the first Linux distribution to focus on the "human factor" with
Linux. Since that time, MandrakeSoft has continually introduced solid
improvements for desktop users and has become widely imitated. As a result of
our years of experience and expertise, Mandrake Linux 9.0 offers highly
polished graphical environments and many newly redesigned graphical desktops
and configuration utilities with the highest level of features and quality.

Unique features make unique products: The Mandrake Linux desktops are dynamic.
This means, for instance, that when a new software package is installed or
removed, the corresponding icon will appear or disappear instantaneously in
the application menu. This same "dynamic" feature also applies to hardware
devices: Plug in a USB scanner or WebCam and a corresponding icon appears
automatically on the desktop.

Another unique feature in Mandrake Linux 9.0 is "supermount" which lets users
access removable media (CD-ROM, floppy, Zip, etc.) instantaneously and
transparently without using the traditional "mount/umount" commands.

Additionally, MandrakeSoft is proud to release one of the most advanced Linux
systems in regards to hardware recognition. Most of the "latest & greatest" PC
devices and protocols -- such as USB 2.0 -- are recognized and configured
automatically in Mandrake Linux 9.0. Mandrake 9.0 is the first Linux
distribution to natively support NTFS partitions and the WebDAV protocol (for
editing and managing files on remote web servers).

Last but not least, Mandrake 9.0 takes the important issue of security to a
new level. In early 2000, MandrakeSoft first introduced the concept of
"security levels" to the Linux world; in Mandrake Linux 9.0, that concept is
expanded with the integration of professional Intrusion detection tools and
utilities, encrypted communication support, encrypted filesystems, secured
authentication, and more. Even regular desktop users will appreciate the
ability to send & receive encrypted email with Mozilla, KMail and Evolution.

* Providing choice *

Each user is unique, therefore different users prefer different applications
for the same task. Following a long-standing MandrakeSoft tradition, Mandrake
Linux 9.0 doesn't impose any applications as so-called "standards", but
instead provides the widest range of choice for all. "Choice" never means that
Mandrake 9.0 is a "bloated" Linux distribution since it's extremely easy to
install and remove software packages with the greatly improved "Software
Management" utilities.

Since people have different levels of knowledge and expertise, most
Mandrake-specific tools & utilities are available with an attractive graphical
interface for point-and-click ease, yet are also fully functional from the
command line for power users.

Since Linux is truly a worldwide phenomenon, Mandrake Linux 9.0 supports
nearly 60 different languages - from Afrikaans to Welsh!

Mandrake Linux 8.2 was the first Linux distribution to become certified by the
Linux Standard Base (LSB 1.2). MandrakeSoft implements LSB compatibility in
Mandrake Linux 9.0 as an option during the installation. This important
standard ensures that Mandrake Linux will be compatible with a greater number
of leading enterprise-class applications such as Database, CRM, Accounting.
Last minute: the Mandrake Linux 9.0 ProSuite Edition has officially been Linux
Standard Base (LSB 1.2) certified on Sept 25th, 2002.

* Comprehensive support & services for all *

Mandrake Linux 9.0 is an outstanding product on its own, but a complete range
of associated services makes it an indispensable product for all occasions.
MandrakeSoft offers a comprehensive range of services:

- Support for corporate and individual use is provided through
MandrakeExpert.com and by our team of experts.
- Software update and security advisories are delivered through MandrakeOnline
- Hardware and software certification is available on demand in MandrakeSoft
testing labs.
- Consulting teams are ready to answer & assist with any Linux deployment.
- Tailor-made OEM solutions are available for PC manufacturers and system
integrators.
- High-quality Linux training is available via a network of Training Centers
located throughout the globe.

For additional information please see:

- Mandrake Linux 9.0 Pre-orders (Standard 9.0, PowerPack 9.0, ProSuite 9.0)
http://www.mandrakestore.com

- Mandrake Linux 9.0 full specifications, screenshots and package list
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/9.0/presentation/

- Mandrake Linux 9.0 Packs, description and comparatives
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/90/

- MandrakeSoft service offerings
http://www.mandrakesoft.com

Press contact:
press@mandrakesoft.Com

About MandrakeSoft

MandrakeSoft provides a trusted interface between users of information
technology and Open Source developers. The company offers its enterprise,
government and educational customers a complete range of GNU/Linux and
OpenSource software and related services, plus user-friendly and highly
competitive information technologies. Additionally, MandrakeSoft offers
technologists committed to Open Source software and courseware a trusted
channel to offer their services.

MandrakeSoft has technologists in over 20 countries, and is traded on Paris
Euronext Marche Libre (Euroclear code: 4477.PA; Reuters code: MAKE.PA) and the
US OTC market (stock symbol MDKFF). "Born on the Internet" in late 1998,
MandrakeSoft has established headquarters in the U.S.A., Montreal and France.
Please visit the website: http://www.mandrakesoft.com for more information.

Re:More information about Mandrake 9.0 (full PR)

[Rick the Red]

Mandrake Linux 9.0 is the result of over four years of work to offer the most
powerful Linux operating system and world-class applications to the public.

Gee, has it been four years since 8.2? It seems like it was just six months. Time flies!

Mandrake and Free Software

[leviramsey]

From the presentation:

Since Netscape and the last few remaining proprietary applications have been removed, Mandrake Linux 9.0 is a "100% Free Software" product. This means that everyone is granted the right to access the sources, modify and redistribute the software. This also means that Mandrake Linux 9.0 can be deployed on as many machines as desired.

Woo hoo!

Re:Mandrake and Free Software

[deno]

kiddy stuff. Developers removed it from the distro because it's not free software/open source, and marketing folks obviously haven't understood the value of the package, so it's not on commercial CDs either.

Rather stupid situation, but not such a catastrophy as some folks would like to present it: There is pine on PLF, and I'll sure as hell get a GPG signed package on MandrakeClub (i have to use email quite a lot, and i happen to do it with pine). Suppose the marketing folks will learn from this, and pine will be on commercial CDs next time...

Mandrake 9 DVD

[robson]

I pre-ordered the Mandrake 9 DVD release about a month ago. It looks like it'll ship by the end of October.

Having run (GNU/)Linux for just about 4 months, I'm still very new to it, and I'm proud to support Mandrake financially for providing a distro that's making my transition easier. If you download Mandrake 9, and end up using it, consider buying the next boxed version. Good developers deserve our support.
(I'm not affiliated with Mandrake in any way other than as a user.)

Re:Mandrake 9 DVD

[leviramsey]

that's all good and well, but Mandrake have gone on record saying that they don't make decent cash from the boxed versions, and would rather people downloaded and then joined their club. Still, the DVD will save all those swaps...

They actually make the most money if you buy a DVD from their store, especially if you buy the ProSuite with every new version (twice a year, iow).

Re:Mandrake 9 DVD

[Galvatron]

Yeah, "horror" is just about right. After, I think it was 8.1, over a month went by after the release with no dvd shipped. Emails to customer support went unanswered. The forums were filling up with people complaining about not having received anything. Finally, Mandrake made a public post to the effect that they weren't ready for the demand, and Sept. 11th delayed shipping. Eventually, I did get my DVD, but yeah, it was pretty screwed up.

Oh, and in case it wasn't clear from the above, no, your number is useless, it doesn't track, and it's impossible to get a hold of anyone in sales anyway, so you can't use your number with them, either.

Re:Mandrake 9 DVD

[deno]

Send me an email (denis at mandrake), and we'll clear that up in no time. DVD of course can't ship yet, but if they said that cap will ship first then it should have been at your place long time ago.

Re:Mandrake 9 DVD

[deno]

Oh, yes, your experience from the time we just opened up the store, and then bumped in the middle of post Sept. 11 chaos, which made shipping next to impossible (followed by an avalanche of emails which paralised the services dep.) is really VERY relevant to what's going on today.

Kind of reminds me of the "Mandrake? that's this RH ripof with KDE, no?", and "Linux? Oh, that's VERY difficult thing. I tried it five years ago, and ..." type of stories..

Re:Mandrake 9 DVD

[Galvatron]

Listen, being swamped is one thing. Waiting a month before giving us any kind of explanation is another thing entirely though. It would not have been hard to set things up so that the customer support center automatically sent back a form letter explaining what was going on.

It's not the delay I (or many others) minded so much as the complete and utter silence. Also, this is not a story from 3+ years ago. This is a story from exactly one year, as in 12 months, ago.

Re:This is sad...

[mickwd]

"It's very sad that such an influential news website as /. is lowering itself to promoting incremental upgrades of individual distributions".

No, it isn't. It's interesting techie news, and news that will interest a lot of people here. Let's watch and see how many comments get posted to this article, to find out whether I'm right.

"The focus should be on the overall effort of the Linux development community".

Then why don't we talk about the excellent community that exists around Mandrake (more so than some other distros), and let's discuss whether this has helped make Mandrake 9.0 a superb release or not.

"I understand how important Mandarke is.....since it is for 'n00bs'".

Not just for n00bs. I use it, I'm pretty happy with it, and I've been a Unix programmer (and system administrator) for 15 years, and a Linux user for many of those years. If Mandrake can stop the occasional QA howlers, it'll be even better. But they've really made an effort with 9.0 - let's find out whether they've succeeded.

"...the focus should still be on the overall development of the kernel".

Why ? Of course it's of interest, but it's not the only thing. The kernel, on its own, is more-of-less useless - it doesn't do anything on its own. But what is does do is enable everything else to work. It is a means to an end. That end is a may be a work tool, a plaything, a communication tool, or a hobby (for some even a cause). Any of those ends, or the means to those ends, is worthy of discussion.

Re:Not to troll?

[unicron]

My verdict is you shouldn't mod someone down because you don't agree with their opinion. Make a reply explaining your side, try to make others believe you're the one in the right, but, for example, to call someone a troll because he likes Windows more than Linux is assinine, and counter-productive to everything this page is supposed to stand for.

I switched to

[geekoid]

mandrake 9.0 for moral porpoises...

Stop being so Anti-Mandrake

[The Analog Kid]

Sure, its not for the more Advanced so much as the Newbies, but atleast the Newbies have something that can get them started. We should be promoting switching to Linux not scaring them away with something complicated(not that Linux is complicated but still the command-line scares people). So stop being Anti-Mandrake and be more accepting. *Gets a garbage lid and waits for rotten fruit to be thrown*

Re:Stop being so Anti-Mandrake

[InodoroPereyra]

I agree in general terms. But first, it is not an Anti-Mandrake thing. People who disregard Mandrake as a "newbie distro" are actually anti-massive adoption of Linux. Also:

Sure, its not for the more Advanced so much as the Newbies, but atleast the Newbies have something that can get them started.

The idea that if it is good for Newbies it isn't for advanced users is just elite thinking. Maybe the experts don't what to use what newbies use to differenciate themselves ?. I would actually agree in what you say if you mean that Mandrake spends part of the effort on (very useful) GUI tools, and advanced users who don't need these tools would be better off using a distro which spends its efforts in stability and robustness. However, note that the growing popularity of Mandrake means it is being more tested, and hopefully they'll be able to alocate more resources in quality assurance.

And BTW. I see no freaking reason why editing /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcg* by hand is faster, safer or even more instructive than doing it with a GUI. I can do both, I prefer the GUI. It saves me time. The computer does not see the difference, and the text files are always there in case something goes wrong.

Re:Stop being so Anti-Mandrake

[Mr.Ned]

Just because it's easy to use doesn't mean it's only for newbies.

I've been running Gentoo for the better part of a year. I switched to gcc-3x fairly early on and have been assaulted with many problems that have only been fixed in the past couple months. My gentoo works, but it's a bit cobbled together.

I installed 9.0-rc3 the other day for a LUG meeting. I was impressed. Really impressed. Everything worked, and worked well. Little tools like DrakSync just made my life easier going between desktop and laptop. NFS and SMB were no longer minor headaches. Printing actually worked. Fonts are beautiful. I'm keeping it, at least until I get bored with not having anything to fiddle with!

Am I going to replace the server? No way. Gentoo's definitly a keeper there. But Mandrake has re-convinced me that Linux really can be a desktop.

rh null, suse pro 8.1 and now this...

[small_dick]

can someone familiar with these distros respond the the following?

Suse pro has:
1) neat firewall tool, services, user, nis/yp management tools.
2) samba and nfs are trivial on it (exports/imports).
3) Oracle, DB2 (from what I've heard, not seen) are easily installed--some kind of scripting thing makes them easy to install.
4) Possible to make a local "up2date"-style server so not all the local machines need to log into, or have accounts on, red hat network.
5) Suse pro appears to cost much less than RH pro.

If any of this is false, please correct me. I only saw it from a distance, or heard from heresay. How do the distros compare regarding these features?

Re:rh null, suse pro 8.1 and now this...

[bogie]

Redhat gives out free ISO's and Suse does not.

Redhat also has most of those features. Regarding cost, well since Suse doesn't pay for most for the people's work that they are distributing with their distro, I don't feel like paying for Suse's work either.

Re:A computer company is slashdotted.

[PhB95]

Just to say, from here (Paris) I have fast and responsive connection to them, so maybe the bottleneck isn't at theirs ...

Re:Good to switch to

[Rick the Red]

Yeah, Red Hat's not forking the code or anything, just saying they prefer their defaults to the developer's defaults; anyone is still free to tell them both to "stuff it" and customize the look and feel all they want. Try that on Windows or a Mac! (just don't try to make your KDE desktop look like Windows or a Mac, or Gates and Jobs will sue your lame ass).

does it have a WORKING JAVA?

[linuxlover]

The last I heard that no JDK is available (prepackaged atleast) for GCC 3.x. has that changed?
(Can't get to mandrake.com, seems slashdotted!)

Re:does it have a WORKING JAVA?

[EthSoma]

Yeah, Java works. I'm using RC2 right now and java 1.3.1, 1.4.0, and 1.4.1 all work without having to do anything special.

Re:does it have a WORKING JAVA?

[linuxlover]

damn, I didn't even know Jdk 1.4.1 is available!

Windows 2000 and Mandrake 9.0

[Backov]

Maybe some of you linux gods around here can help me out..

I installed Mandrake 9 RC3 last week, and here's what happenned..

Install Win2k on first partition..

Install Mandrake on second partition.. No problem, Mandrake works.

Update Win2k to SP3 - Win2k silently formats the Mandrake partitions fat32.

Scream in frustration.

REinstall Mandrake. Works fine.

Booting into Win2k is painful, Windows basically seizes up whenever you open Explorer, I assume because it's trying to access the extfs3 (?) partitions, and has no idea what they are. It doesn't format em this time, but unfortunately my Win2k setup is useless.

Relucantly format the Mandrake partitions, problem goes away.

Now - is this deliberate, or is there some workarounds I am missing?

Cheers,
Backov

Re:Windows 2000 and Mandrake 9.0

[alyandon]

Windows is definately NOT going to format a partition unless you explicitly tell it to do so. However, under 2000's disk manager my extfs3 partition shows up as a empty partition (ie: ready to format/map a drive letter to) instead of an unknown partition. Make sure you don't have any drive letters mapped to the extfs2/3/linux swap partitions.

My main system is set up very similar to yours (ie: W2K installed first, SP3 update then Mandrake) and I've never had issues with dual-booting via lilo/grub. The only major difference is that I use NTFS for most of my partitions -- except for one that is fat32 so I can transfer files between linux and Windows.

Re:Windows 2000 and Mandrake 9.0

[BranMan]

If you can't get it to work there is a product out there called SystemCommander - I'm looking to get that (but haven't yet, so I can't tell you how good it is). It claims to be able, in addition to allowing you to install as many different OSs as disk space allows, to hide partitions from any of those OSs. Might do the trick if nothing else helps.

Re:Windows 2000 and Mandrake 9.0

[Robber Baron]

You can even get rid of the FAT32 if you want because 8.2 can mount (and read) NTFS partitions. It just can't read the NTFS permissions.

Re:Windows 2000 and Mandrake 9.0

[Da Schmiz]

How did you create the partitions? If the partition type flags aren't set to 83 (Linux), then Windows might think that there's nothing on them. (Linux mount can sometimes do the right thing even though the partition flag is wrong, but it looks like Windows isn't that intelligent.) Also, Win2k (IIRC) has a tool in the drive manager that allows you to hide partitions completely... that should stop the problems you're having with Explorer...

highpoint raid controller

[smutman]

Has the problem with booting from/using highpoint raid controller cards been fixed in this release? I was very pleased with 8.2 but stopped using it because I was tired of switching the cables on my hard drives.

New Release: "Big Hairy Animal/Illusionist"

[Futurepower(R)]

The Worldwide Association of Gnus (WAG) asks that the word Gnu should not be used unless it refers to the animal Gnu. When referring to something else, WAG suggests "big hairy animal".

The Magician's Council says that Mandrake should be used only when referring to a certified magician. "Illusionist" should be used instead.

Therefore this release should be called "Big Hairy Animal/Illusionist" to keep everyone happy.

You are probably right.

[Futurepower(R)]

You are probably right. However, it wouldn't be difficult to have a U.S. server. Both Mandrake and RedHat need better marketing.

I'll be waiting on downloading it

[gatesh8r]

I figure I'll download it in about two weeks, and that just may be enough for the slashdot effect from completely knocking the living crap out of the mirrors.

Re:Community is what counts for me, not new featur

[dvdeug]

I just don't get the sense of community that I get from the FreeBSD people

Probably because Mandrake and SuSe are commerical distributions designed to serve a wider set of users than just community players. If you want community, I invite you to listen on the Debian lists, where all the development and flame wars are done in the open.

Re:A computer company is slashdotted.

[zulux]

Just to say, from here (Paris) I have fast and responsive connection to them, so maybe the bottleneck isn't at theirs ...

Wow! I diden't know Linux could run on a Minitel!

(kidding)

my favorite PC term

[commodoresloat]

PC folks used to write "s/he" to mean "she or he", but since "s/he" only accounts for males and females of animate species, the more all-encompassing abbreviation should be "s/h/it."

CR-RW vs CD-R for operating systems

[billstewart]

CD-R works on a lot more machines; unless you've upgraded all your machines, CD-R is much more portable. For a while the drives were more expensive, and slower, though they're pretty cheap by now. The ability to reuse the disk for CD-RW is theoretically nice, but CD-Rs cost ~US$0.15 on sale, or 0.25-0.50 not on sale , while the CD-RWs I bought the other day were about $1 on sale. I'd rather keep archives / backups / spares of my data around, and CD-Rs have become the new floppy disk. Also, you can't overwrite the things by accident.

Update: Oh, BTW, Red Hat!

[matthewn]

I wish I could moderate the update to this post as Offtopic.

Mirrors!

[(v)Jargon(v)]

Here is a list of the Mandrake Mirrors

Australia ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/Mandrake/iso/

Austria ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrake/iso / (Vienna)

Czech Republic ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrake/iso/ ftp://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Brno)

France ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake/iso/
(Lyon)
ftp://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/
(Nancy)

United States ftp://ftp.cs.ucr.edu/pub/mirrors/mandrake/Mandrak e/iso/
(California)
ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/Mandrake/mand rake/iso
(NY)
ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake/iso/ (Illinois)

Last modified: Wed Sep 25 12:52:31 2002

Focus of linux

[Daath]

the focus should still be on the overall development of the. kernel

The kernel development is important - but the important thing, no the mission, for distributions like mandrake is bringing linux to the desktop - this is very, very important!

If we get a lot more people interested, the quality will become better, and hey, we might even attract gifted people that could end up giving a lot to the community.

Mandrake90-cd1-inst.i586.iso is now 89% downloaded - Can't wait even though I'm happy with my SuSE 8 installation :)

mirrors from /. Mandrake site

[jayteedee]

Australia
ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/Mandrake/iso

Austria
gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrake/iso/ (Vienna)

Czech Republic
mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrake/iso/

ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Brno)

France
fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake/iso/ (Lyon)
ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Nancy)

United States
ftp.cs.ucr.edu/pub/mirrors/mandrake/Mandra ke/iso/ (California)
ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/Mandra ke/mandrake/is o (NY)
mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake/iso/ (Illinois)

All mirrors are hammered, of course!
I was able to get on in Australia, but good luck.

Java not the issue, plugin in Mozilla was ...

[buchanmilne]

The whole issue with Java is that, being built with gcc2.9x, it can't interface to C++ code compiled with gcc3.2.

So Mandrake 9.0 ships with Mozilla compiled with gcc2.96, so Java works fine. Been using the plugin on cooker quite a bit in the last few weeks (webCDwriter, which really rocks).

Re:Not to troll?

[FCAdcock]

I agree for most posta. If a Windows user posts and lists reasons why he prefers windows to linux, that isn't always a troll. If he comes out and gives reasons why linux sucks, then there is reason to mod down that post. I feel that the whole modding system on Slashdot has become a way to promote Linux and to dismiss Windows. I haven't ever seen a pro-windows post that was modded up. Slashdot keeps giving the same people mod points when it should instead give different people those points. Instead of giving 20 people 5 points each, maybe 100 people should be given 1 point each. More people= more points of view. Mod me down, I don't freaking care. I'm not a Karma Whore, I'm just a whore.

Re:Not to troll?

[leviramsey]

counter-productive to everything this page is supposed to stand for.

Q: What is this page supposed to stand for?

Re:I agree

[ChaoticLimbs]

Are you unfamiliar with the fact that GNU/Linux distributions are maturing at a rate faster than other operating systems and software? Since an operating system contains more components than say, a web browser, it has a much greater chance of reaching a major revision than a minor revision. Consider the transition from win95--win98--wimME. None of these could be truly considered Major revisions from Win95. They should, therefore, been named Win95 1.0, Win95 1.2, Win95 1.3. Some people exhausted huge amounts of money "upgrading" from Win95 to Win98 just to get USB support. Then they screwed their systems up completely by installing winME. Lets not forget there were also TWO versions of Win98 , OSR2 should have been a free patch to Win98 OSR1 but M$ got greedy. Sure, some OSs go by kernel revision, but the kernel is, of course, only one component of a complete distro, so it has less chance of becoming incompatible with previous components. Mandrake has, in my opinion, brought Linux to the masses by making it feasable for a non-CS major to actually use a computer in conjunction with Linux to do WORK. Sometimes we all have to remember that the function of a computer is to retrieve, manipulate and send data. Everyone needs to be able to use their data, and isn't quite so interested in doing things the most difficult way possible.

GeForce4 support

[JWhiton]

When I installed Mandrake 8.2, it didn't detect my GeForce4, so I had to do a bunch of wacky stuff to get it working. Does anyone know if 9.0 can detect 'em? How does it go about installing the nVidia drivers?

Re:MD5s and a correction

[gadfium]

According to the Mandrake mirror site, these are the md5sums (already posted in an earlier comment).

MD5 checksum:

f7a093af34b8cbe1abc165213fea9deb Mandrake90-cd1-inst.i586.iso
05a3ccafaacc37d6d1e2 f260fc274549 Mandrake90-cd2-ext.i586.iso
1a2fd731fb6e30d39b0b9 9f504b231b3 Mandrake90-cd3-i18n.i586.iso

Does the parent of this comment know something I don't? I see his iso names are different to mine - does he have a re-issue of the iso files?

Re:Community is what counts for me, not new featur

[JoeBuck]

If community is important to you, then Debian is the flavor you want.

List of mirrors

[woobieman29]

For those that cannot get to the /.'ed Mandrake mirrors page:

Australia

ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/Mandrake/iso/

Austria

ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrake/iso/ (Vienna)
Czech Republic

ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrake/iso/

ftp://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Brno)
France

ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake/iso/ (Lyon)

ftp://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Nancy)
United States

ftp://ftp.cs.ucr.edu/pub/mirrors/mandrake/Mandrake /iso/ (California)

ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/Mandrake/mandr ake/iso (NY)

ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake/iso/ (Illinois)

Buy the distro!

[buchanmilne]

The commercial distro ships with NVidia drivers.

There will be drivers on Mandrakeclub soon.

Otherwise, you must download and rebuild, install, and run XFdrake again.

There were some rumours that the GF4 was working with the latest XFree86 (4.2.1) packages, but haven't tested myself.

A Quick Review

[InodoroPereyra]

For what it's worth, here go my fist impressions after more than a day running it (I dowloaded the newsest rc3 ISOs yesterday, I believe they were renamed as "final" later). Here is what I liked the most:

• Supermount. This is so cool. Get floppys and CDs in and out without need for mounting/umounting. I hope the patch makes it to 2.4.* and 2.6.* . Applying the patch is NOT trivial at this point.
• RPM manager. I forgot the name, but the graphical interface to urpmi is very sweet. This is a killer (yeah, kind of apt/get I know). For instance, I forgot to install LaTeX. So I go afterwards:
  Control-Center -> Software Management ->Install Software
  Then I search for "tex", I get a list of packages, I can see descriptions of each, I select some, it tells me that I will need some more to satisfy dependeces, I say OK, it tells me what CD to put in, THATS freaking it !. Sweet.
• Control Center. Very useful, most configuration can be done consistently from there.
• Menus . Very friendly way of organizing the menus, and consistency across different desktop environments.
• Installation Easy, simple, good looking, intuitive, very, very nice. Had some problems with the ATI 128 mobility card though, luckily I had an old config file around !

In short, it is a great distro. It gives you the feeling of a consistent operating system, not just a collection of free software. But nothing is perfect. Mandrake's configuration utilities are very nice for basic, typical stuff, but they'll need some work in future releases to cover more complex situations. That's the main drawback I found. I cannot really use ONLY their tools for everything. But they are getting there.

Overall, I have the feeling that they are not as mature as RedHat, but they have many other advantages as I said before. I hope they build on 9.0 . It is already a great release, and so far my best Linux experience. If they just keep improving what they have right now (as opposed to adding new tools/functionality), the next release will be far ahead of the rest of the distros, at least to my taste and needs.

Thank you Mandrake, I am having so much fun :-)

APT for RPM.

[IpSo_]

apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade

Thats all I've used since version 7 of Mandrake, it works great!

http://distro.conectiva.com.br/projetos/42

Re:Mandrake for n00bs only - who can convince me?

[NiceGeek]

I agree...I've used RH, SUSE and even Slack and I'm sticking with Mandrake. Sometimes you just want things to work and not have to hand configure every friggin thing. That's what is great about Linux...you can choose what distro suits your needs. Too bad some elitists don't seem to see that.

Re:A computer company is slashdotted.

[JoeBuck]

They aren't slashdotted (meaning that the reason that they are slow isn't that slashdot has linked to them). Their site is overloaded because they put out a new release, and everyone is downloading it. Slashdot picked up the story from other sites, who had it first, and I'm sure that their site was overloaded before slashdot ran the story.

Mandrake NTFS read-write could repair Win XP.

[Futurepower(R)]

The press release says, "NTFS partitions are now supported (read-only)."

When they can supply NTFS read-write, Mandrake could be used to repair problems with Windows XP. (Windows XP cannot copy some of its own files, even if the files you are trying to copy are not on the partition from which the system was booted. No, I am not kidding.) See Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going. if you don't believe me. The third-party tools for read-write to NTFS are expensive, or have shortcomings.

Re:Location of ISO's Anybody ?

[SmlFreshwaterBuffalo]

These are 9.0 ISO's for i586 & higher:

• Australia
  
• ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/Mandrake/iso/
• Austria
  
• ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrake/iso/ (Vienna)
• 
  Czech Republic
  
• ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrake/iso/
• http://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Brno)
• 
  France
  
• ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake/iso/ (Lyon)
• ftp://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Nancy)
• 
  United States
  
• ftp://ftp.cs.ucr.edu/pub/mirrors/mandrake/Mandrake /iso/ (California)
• ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/Mandrake/mandr ake/iso (NY)
• ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake/iso/ (Illinois)

Dumb Question (re:Ga?l)

[Apostata]

Why is it that on the Slashdot mainpage, his name is "Ga?l", but on the story page, it's "Gaël"?

Re:Community is what counts for me, not new featur

[Arandir]

My impression was that folks were a bit snottier.

Well, the people on the BSD lists do take their list charters much more seriously. For example, the freebsd-newbies list is not for technical questions. It's in the charter and once a week a reminder is posted telling everyone not to post technical questions. If you ask a technical question on -newbies expect to be flamed.

p.s. Of course, if you post a technical question to a list populated by newbies, you should not be expecting any correct technical answers.

Re:hooray

[Anonymous Cowrad]

"This is one of the happiest days of my life.".

Step away from the computer. Go outside.

I'm pretty happy to see Mandrake 9.0, but today is nowhere near the best day of my life because of it.

Sawfish is not lightweight.

[Tord]

Sorry, but Sawfish is actually quite heavy on resources nowadays, much thanks to feature creep combined with its built in interpreter, running interpreted code in realtime.

I don't have any hard numbers here right now, but I remember seeing a comparison of memory consumption in window managers, landing Sawfish around 2-3 megs, making it one of the heaviest in the test.

Both blackbox and IceWM is much lighter.

Looks cool

[pointwood]

Since I last tried Mandrake (7.x I think), it looks like it has become a lot better. Especially the configuration tools looks much more well-arranged and usefriendly. I have found the previous versions confusing.

A question

[Salsaman]

I have MDK 8.2 on my desktop machine, which I keep pretty current from the Cooker. Is there any point in me upgrading to 9.0 ? Will I gain anything which I wouldn't otherwise get from Cooker ?

Not just for Newbies

[Thnurg]

Having used Unix since 1992, GNU/Linux since 1998, and successfully building Linux From Scratch I'm not a newbie. But Mandrake is still my distro of choice.
While on the surface it has an easy to use GUI for just about anything it is still GNU/Linux under the hood, and can still be hacked through config files if you like that sort of thing. After all, the GUI is just a front end to the config files.
The purists out there can have no quarrel with Mandrake since it is both LSB1.2 compliant and 100% free software.
The only problem I have with Mandrake is that they neglect to use the word GNU in the name, but apart from that Mandrake is easily the best general purpose distro out there for both newbies and old farts alike.

P2P Mirrors?

[redcliffe]

Has anyone got this on Gnutella or giFT or Freenet? Using these networks to distribute ISO's is a perfect thing to do emphasize how P2P can be used for more than copyright breaking. I just checked giFT and it doesn't seem to be there....

All you need to do is just confirm the MD5sum to make sure it's not been tampered with. So if you have this - please upload to a P2P network!!! :-) Thanks

Re:Not to troll?

[Zemran]

If his reasons are valid opinions I can see no reason to mod him down. I am a linux advocate but I know of many winders users with good and valid reasons to prefer winders. I will mod up anyone that gives a good debate regardless of their point of view. I cannot remember the last time I modded down. I would only do it for abuse or bad troll. I do not even mod down a good troll because if it is well written I am likely to see it as good humour but maybe off topic.

Re:Community is what counts for me, not new featur

[LM741N]

Thanks for all the replies. I will take a serious look at Debian.

Re:I installed Mandrake 8.2, but the sound and NIC

[Drachemorder]

Do any of the distros use ALSA for sound by default?

Re:What is this page supposed to stand for?

[unicron]

I have to agree with him. /. these days is about misinterpreting free speech laws. I'm surrounded by people that think any software developer and/or musician that might want to profit from their craft is evil, as are their management. It's pretty sad actually, that so many people can justify theft and copy-right violations to themselves.

Re:Correction Please

[Anonymous DWord]

Well, saying things like "Very few people realize that Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME (all closely related to each other) were designed to crash." is pretty moronic. It's kind of hard to take the rest of it seriously.

I changed the wording to...

[Futurepower(R)]

At the introduction of Windows 95, there was a big discussion of this. A computer magazine columnist persuaded Microsoft to double the allocation of resources, from 64k to 128k.

So that it will seem less bothersome, I changed the wording to "Few people realize that Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME (all closely related to each other) were designed in such a way that it was inevitable that they would crash."

You are right, the language was bad. The facts are good.

Would you care to mention something else that should be corrected?

If you visit the article again, press Reload on your browser so that you don't see the old version: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.

Can't burn leaves, so I'll burn Karma

[Keith Russell]

Would you care to mention one way in which the article is wrong?

Given the number of assertions that are unproven, anectodal, and/or cited without source, I don't think I could come up with just one.

Well, OK. I'll knock a few off...

1. Launch a Command Prompt (not "DOS Prompt", mind you), and type START /?. Note that START's default behavior is to return control to the command line immediately. Also note that this behavior is identical to START on Windows 2000.
2. A government that uses proprietary software is not an independent government, regardless of who the Evil Empire of the decade is.
3. The entire section titled "This article is support for your own investigation." It takes a lot of chutzpah for someone with an axe to grind to say "Anyone who disagrees with me just has an axe to grind."
4. Typing "hate %LARGE_CORPORATION%" into Google only proves that there's a lot of righteous indignation on the web.

Good points

[Futurepower(R)]

1. Yes, but it doesn't always work. Apparently it fails when started from an instance of the command.com command processor. The behavior is different from Windows 98 SE, where it works as advertised.

2. True.

3. Okay, I've made that section clearer by including these sentences at the beginning: "If you don't have enough technical knowledge to evaluate the thoughts presented here, do not simply believe the author of this article. Find someone with technical knowledge who can help you." The new version is live now; anyone re-visiting the article should press Reload in their browser so that they don't see the version in their browser cache instead of the one on the web.

4. You're right. That section needs to be re-written. The point is valid, however. There is an amazing depth of dislike of Microsoft.

Someone from Wales complained...

[Futurepower(R)]

Hey, you know that, but many people don't. Someone from Wales complained, so I enumerated all the countries.

Re:Where to buy Mandrake 9.0 now!

[pheph]

Most people cannot afford $90 for a distribution, and we are taking the time and effort to distribute Mandrake at a very reasonable price while donating to Mandrake, which most Linux CD retailers don't do. On the site we even suggest that you register with Mandrake Club.

Nice troll, though.