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First Mandrake 9.1 Review Out
icantblvitsnotbutter writes "With Mandrake Linux 9.1 right around the corner, it's OSNews first out of the gates with a review of this desktop-oriented distro's latest release. The review is actually pretty bland, skimming the surface to linger on some of Eugenia's pet peeves. Having used 9.1 in a production environment since beta 3, I can say that the improvements to the installation and the signature Mandrake tools are much-appreciated. Don't forget that Mandrake Club members get their own set of mirrors, as well as being eligible for extras like the voting process that selected the packages for the 9.1 release." Update: 03/25 18:29 GMT by T : anyweb also points out a review of Red Hat Linux 9 on the same site, writing "an informative article -- well I had to say that, I wrote it ;-)"
Mandrake has been the ONLY distribution that will run on my wife's IBM Netvista Flatpanel PC. The others distros wouldnt even boot up the Install screen. I tried Debian, but spent maybe 30 minutes n finding the right monitor, but no joy. Nothing else can detect that stupid monitor.
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
SuSE8.0? You're kidding, right?
I bought the Pro-Pack. Yup, I dropped $80 bucks (US) on it only to find out that when I went to update it, it totally b0rked itself. Nice. Oh, I had to DL the new RPM manually, and install that. OK, not that big a deal, I was used to RPM hell at that point. Oh, well there were 20 or so dependencies for that dependency. Err... well, 30 or so to get those dependencies of the dependencies installed cleanly. Oh, well, I still had to hack at some config files. Well, but that really wasn't enough since I still had to re-update somethings. I'd love to watch "Joe Six-Pack (tm)" do that.
I switched to Gentoo.
Perhaps SuSE 8.1 is better. I honestly don't know, and to be quite frank, I don't intend on finding out. Portage is FAR superior to YAST.
This is just my opinion.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Having myself gone through every Mandrake version since 7.0 I can appreciate this. However, I think you may find that ultimately, it would be better in the long run to plan for upgradability.
/, /usr and /var every upgrade. Put all my personal stuff in /home and /usr/local and copy every file I modify into /usr/local right after I do it. i.e. if I hack up /etc/sysconfig/... or /etc/ppp/... I copy it and save it away, I can then easily figure out what I did later and re-apply changes as required. This only applies to manual changes I make with vi, not to things that I configure with tools.
....Paul
I think that several upgrades using a tool like you mention, no matter how well designed, would still leave a bunch of OS lint lying about.
I personally format
It usually only takes a few hours post-install to get back to everything humming the way it was.
Of course, this assumes that you have enough disk space to create all these partitions in the first place...
F U NE X N M? Son: "Dad... How do you spell 'hourly'?" Dad: "0 * * * *"
Mandrake's problem has been that it does not show clear difference from Redhat. Mandrake has more packages, more enjoyable toy stuffs, and some delicate French flavor. But these are not attractive enough for users to adopt Mandrake rather than to use Redhat. It may be somewhat late but I hope Mandrake can establish itself as a *desktop* Linux distribution, differntiating it from Redhat. That's the way they can overcome their current financial unstability.
:)
However, nobody's still sure of any kinds of business model on Linux desktop distribution. Would Dell adopt Linux desktop sometime in near future? HP? Gateway? Wal-Mart?