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Review Mandrake Linux 9.1 Power Pack Edition

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the insert-stupid-grunting-here dept.

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.

8 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. Seems thin... by ElGuapoGolf · · Score: 5, Informative


    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.

  2. Linux more secure? by airuck · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  3. Mandrake is doing well nowadays... by joestar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Mandrake is doing well nowadays... by joestar · · Score: 4, Informative

      The Mandrake Download Edition provides only Free Software applications, and all Mandrakesoft developments are released under the GPL. Anyway, buyers of Mandrake packs and club subscribers can access many non-Free Software applications such as Opera for instance.

    2. Re:Mandrake is doing well nowadays... by jonadab · · Score: 5, Informative

      Not exactly. They understand the value of open-source software and
      prefer it, and I have heard that they release all of the stuff they
      develop (such as the excellent harddrake and printerdrake) under
      open-source licenses, but they do include some things Debian does
      not, so their policies are apparently not 100% the same. Also, some
      of the non-download editions of Mandrake include some proprietary
      commericial software bundled; Debian as a matter of policy does not
      have any special non-download editions with value-added software
      bundles. (If this bothers you about Mandrake, you can just get the
      download edition, which has no such bundles -- though the third CD
      does have some freely-distributable software that doesn't qualify
      under everyone's definition of free, but I was under the impression
      that Debian has a non-free section as well, so that may be neither
      here nor there.)

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
  4. Re:What I would have liked to see.... by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Informative
    Well, I think they're a little less comprehensive than BlueCurve was (bluecurve is an entire rebranding of red hat linux basically), but Mandrake does ship with a unified widget theme, called Galaxy.

    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.

  5. ATI Drivers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...

  6. Re:The chilling conclusion (author's rant) by cowbutt · · Score: 4, Informative
    Can you name any examples of applications that use shared libraries, but which the libraries aren't shared?

    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.

    --