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Review Mandrake Linux 9.1 Power Pack Edition
An anonymous reader sent us linkage to an
overview of the new Mandrake 9.1. Many screenshots, as well as compliments for the latest KDE revision. Worth a glance if you're not already running Debian.
I dunno if I would have made this review a story on slashdot... the review it self seems really thin, doesn't mention anywhere that I saw (and if I missed it, my bad) the specifics (kernel revision, glibc version). It doesn't talk much about X at all (but then it was only tested on ATI so we wouldn't know if the NVidia drivers were included).
Anyhow, in case anybody is wondering, Mandrake includes...
Kernel 2.4.21
XFree86 4.3.0
Glibc 2.3.1
GCC 3.2.2
The Kernel 2.4.21 is a neat trick. Last I checked 2.4.20 was the current stable version.
From the article:
I've seen no evidence that desktop Linux distros are more secure than Windows
Well then, here is some required reading: Why not microsoft
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
The funny thing is that Mandrake pretty much does this now. urpmi is very much like apt and now has a graphical frontend through MandrakeUpdate (as well as one for adding rpm sources etc.). It sounded to me like he was complaining about the fact it lists the dependant libraries etc. that it is going to go and fetch.
It seems that they are doing much better since their latest Mandrake 9.1 was very warmly welcomed by users. In addition, their new business model based on Club subscription is certainly the best idea a Free Software company ever had to make money with Linux! On the users' side, the Club is a great tool to get and install - with one click - all the neat stuff that isn't available for free or difficult to find (such as RealPlayer, Flash player, many hardware drivers...).
I installed Mandrake 9.1 on many different machines and it's clear that it's their best distribution so far: I had extremely few glitches, and everything installed and auto-configured very quickly. In addition, their new desktop is very slick, in particular under KDE, with anti-aliasing everywhere, new icons (created by Everaldo, the designer of the new KDE icons) and so on...
I'm warmly recommending Mandrake 9.1 to all my friend and at work, because I found it very much more stable (less bugs) than Red Hat, especially on the desktop side (I found the X Window provided with Red Hat to be particularly unstable). When compared to Debian, it's really the same Free Software world and spirit, with 2 years of advance and a great desktop by default (yes CmdrTaco!!!). And I won't annoy you with supermount and other dynamic desktop options that made my life (and some friends') Microsoft-free for two years now...
By the way (1): it seems that Mandrake is also doing well at Download.com (look in the Linux section for you dudes who aren't under Linux). Much more than Red Hat and Suse actually.
By the way (2): the MandrakeStore has deeply improved since Mandrake 9.0 and I received my Mandrake pack pre-order in time.
So basically you can use GTK or Qt and things will look consistant. If you use GTK you can use the themed stock artwork for extra consistancy, if you use Qt AFAIK you must link against KDE to get that.
9.1 comes with XFree86 4.3 so those of you with Radeon cards who want to use the vendor drivers will have to downgrade. Oh and they don't provide the 4.2 packages on the CD's...
PPP doesn't have to be difficult. Have you tried 'wvdial'? It's quite an amazing little package.
> While the author may find XP stable enough, I've gotten it to spontaneously reboot itself more times than I care to count.
I would almost gaurentee this is a hardware/driver issue of some sort, no a problem with the OS. What are you running under the hood? Lemme guess: Athlon-based system w/ ALi Magick chipset and a cloned ATI video card, overclocked to about 40% higher than the original CPU frequency ;)
All joking aside, I've seen countless installations of XP running rock solid. I have 2 XP boxes at home that run fine, and a bazillion installations at work. The only time I've noticed problems is with defective hardware or quirky drivers. Oh yeah, stick with the mainstream BIOSs with proven drivers and don't buy the absolute cheapest RAM you can find.
> oh, how I love apt-get
Under Mandrake, urpmi is you friend.
This packaging part is very true. I know many people who get software for Windows every week from some magazine CD or another, install it and the deinstall it when they don't like or are bored of it. This becomes a habit for them, particularly concerning games and utilties.
Click on Setup.exe, follow instructions, lo [reboot?]. Go to installed programs, select software and deinstall. get rid of it [reboot?]. I know that too well since I belonged to that crowd about 4 years ago.
When will it be so easy on Linux? Sure, installing an RPM in graphical mode is easy- click it and start of. GNOrpm or kpackage or Software installer would do it. When it complains for dependancies is when the trouble starts (usually lib*.so.* missing). It never mentions the package to download. So off you go to google or rpmfind.
This is especially painful if you don't have a permanent connection to the net, connecting is rare and costly, not to mention painful for the impatient. That is when urpmi or something similar is useless. That is when you are entirely dependant on some computer magazine to give off a distro (usually slack or Redhat) and linux isn't common or cheap enough to be available in any other way. Or else put DAP or flashget or some of those download accelerators to work all night only to find out you have to download a whole group of packages to support those you downloaded before. (ten 1mb packages in 10 hours. damn)
Luckily for me these days are gone and I have a permanent ethernet connect and draw all the benefits using Gentoo. But there is still a (decreasing) crowd out there in this situation. Until packages provide everything needed by the program and install the most recent libraries if required as in windows, newbies will not like the system. Perhaps there should be a super-rpm with many rpms contained inside it, and a script to decide which ones to install. It will certainly help those who don't have the benefits of broadband. Magazine CDs could easily send updates in such situations.
I paid money for Mandrake 9.1 when it came out, only to find that it crashes with my Radeon when you log out of KDE. "Oh, that's fixed in CVS" they say. Fat fucking lot of good that does us with cd's, doesn't it. I've been looking at mandrake update for weeks looking for this fix to be put out, and not a thing.
I can only think of drip at the moment.
The underlying problem is poorly specified packages (and I know some of my own fall into this category).
When building a binary rpm, RPM (the tool) will automatically detect shared libraries used by binaries and add dependencies accordingly (e.g. libasound.so.2). There's nothing to stop the package creator manually adding more informative package dependencies (e.g. Requires: alsa-lib >= 0.9.2) for the benefit of users installing their package. Red Hat are fairly good at this, and Matthias Saou of freshrpms.net fame is even better, IMHO. But a lot of third-party packagers aren't so dilligent. Adding manual dependencies also makes it easier for automatic dependency resolution tools (and this is why Debian's package management works well, rather than the technology!)
There's also nothing stopping a packager from creating an install.sh that rpm -Uvh's all the packages it needs. I seem to recall that CheckPoint do this with FireWall-1 for RH Linux.
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In this entire thread, you mention spontaneous crashing, and yet I see NO evidence that you've even bothered to troubleshoot the problem. Hve you looked at the Event Viewer? It will usually tell you exactly what is wrong.
For instance, I have two processors in this machine. XP blue-screens and reboots about once a week. Microsoft's fault? No, the message in the Event Viewer says I have two processors at different revision levels (and indeed, I do.) Since my processors aren't matched, XP crashes every once in a while. So far, it's not a big enough deal for me to go out and buy two new matched processors, but at least I know what the problem is and know that it's not Microsoft's fault.
If XP is crashing, you need to learn how to troubleshoot it. Read the Event Viewer. Check out the Microsoft knowledge base. Do ALL of this before you whine about XP not working or Microsoft making a crash-prone OS. Otherwise, you are doing yourself (and others) a disservice.