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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.
What is the legal and financial status of Mandrake now? Are they recovering?
I mostly hyperlink my point of view. http://www.afroginthevalley.com/
Yeah they should stick with the official names, and say that it is really kernel 2.4.21-rcN we're talking about here.
I've been a gentoo guy for a while now, but at my last job I decided to try one of the "end user" distros and as the other guy was running it, I chose mandrake (the 9.1 beta at that time).
I have to admit, it was very nice to not have to do anything to get things set up. Things just worked, be it the mouse, the display, the printer setup (which autoprobed the network and presented me with a list of printers and other cups servers on the network), etc. Hardware autodetection was great, and the install was the "insert cd, click, click, click, wait for 20 min, reboot" type, which the only thing I did different by default was not install kde (I like gnome, and at the time I wanted to be up as quickly as possible, without having to wait for two full desktops to load from CD.
The included tools worked very well, but they didn't seem as "integrated" as in redhat 9 (which I'm using at the place I am now). They worked great, and all had the same look, but there is definately something to be said for bluecurve and it's ability to make everything look like it works together.
I didn't get the chance to try out the windows partition resizing or ability to install in a dual boot situation.
All in all something I'd definately try again, and will (and have) recommended to friends.
i just *love* the guy's rant about packaging and downloading necessary files. sure i think you all know where this is going, but this shameless plug is no longer so shameless, especially with headline including you know what. yes, you need to go find RPMs on websites with various mirrors. yes, you need to install all the required libs, etc. i find it quite interesting that he says that mandrake comes with everything you will ever need. why is this a good thing? perhaps because getting new stuff (the largest interaction with the distribution you will have) might not be so terribly easy. i think the solution is obvious
i would sign this "The Debian Troll" but i don't think that is necessary
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
So you like your music? As I discovered with 9.0, music sounds much better in Mandrake than in Windows.
Sigh...this article is on slashdot? I'm reading this? Too bad I'm soooo damn unemployed...
Still TMG (Too Much Geek) in the interface. Prime example: Mount point information in the drive names on the desktop. This information should be hidden in an info or properties dialog. It's only needed for power users and is intimidating to the mainstream user Linux is supposedly shooting for.
My gut feeling, though, is that this info is put in the drive description on the desktop because you'll still be required to drop to the command line too much and need to have it right there at your fingertips.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Put both my girls on it...they don't know windows
or Linux...could care less!!!
They browse
They p2p
They burn and copy cd's
They Gaim with all their buddies
They xmms
They love it!!!
Does Mandrake really have the same strict freesoftware guidelines as debian?
"And I won't annoy you with supermount "
/mnt" or many other operations cause the CD-ROM lights to flash for ages until it times out. Very annoying and frustrating. I had to comment out the CD-ROM lines in /etc/fstab and set it up so I manually mount and umount. If anybody knows the solution, I'd appreciate it.
;)
They've done something wrong. This is the second version of Mandrake I've had problems with in a clean install. An "ls
"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"
I can't say I liked it. I built my own KDE 3.1.1 under Mandrake 8.1, with no attempt at optimisations. It worked great. Under Mandrake 9.1, I find it frustratingly slow with delays after every click. Oh, and they've rearranged things from the KDE defaults (I think) - the defaults are better, IMHO. Or maybe I'm just getting confused by all the other "value-added features" Mandrake put on the menus
at least theyre words, much better than the cryptic alphanumerics of Linux. Also programs with 'real' names are more memorable, im more willing to remember 'photo downloader' than phDl and its associated libs. Not every program suffers from this either, but a significant number do, and it makes it scary to a new user. Things are getting better, but not by much, check the freshmeat listing if you want an example. but if the program works, i could care less what its called.
I want 2D games back.
I dunno... it seems kind of important to me.
When you see a windows review, you know by virtue of the name which version of the "windows kernel" you're dealing with.
If you look at hardware reviews for computer systems, they *always* mention the OS + revision level (Windows 2000 + SP3).
Putting that kind of information into a "products specs" table would hurt nobody and help quite a few people.
Hmm...Redmond 'humor' bypassed you huh.
Excel = pun on "cell", as in, spreadsheet cell. Hey, plus most people buy it as part of the enigmatically named "Mircosoft Office Suite" (you thought this was a kind of office sofa?)
Where do you draw the line though? Is "Word" a bible-scholarship aid? Does "Minesweeper" actually dredge the Atlantic? Is "google" a cricketing website? Does "Slashdot" piss on full-stops?
But seriously...
Thing is, Win32 application makers generally pay for advertising to establish market share, so naming isn't such an issue for them. Indeed it helps to have a distinctive name for marketing reasons and if only so you can get a memorable and available webpage. But if you dont have this budget, as OSS developers generally don't, then a bit of intuitive naming would help IMHO.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
I use Mandrake exclusively now, having moved from Redhat when Mandrake first came along simply for the 586.rpm optimizations (which don't mean squat-all now, really). Each released version has been alternatively crappy/buggy and mostly good. 9.0 sucked, 9.1 is quite nice. I buy each version because I wish to keep them going and I am a MandrakeClub member - and a member of the mandrake expert mailing list.
From traffic/responses on the Mandrake mailing list and the email alerts from MandrakeSoft that I get, I would say that Mandrake is doing better but is not out of the hotseat yet. In order to head towards solvency and continued existence, they have had to toss developers - leaving them shorthanded in many respects. They are not recovering $$ from MandrakeClub to a great extent. They MUST obtain real sales of product to make the bulk of their money. MandrakeClub is merely supplemental income to help offset the losses. Thus, their business model is similar to Redhat's though not as well entrenched as yet. They need big ticket sales of support contracts and business server contracts to make big money as selling retail desktop packages doesn't make money for linux distros. I think MandrakeSoft is still open for new ideas to generate needed cash and are not, by any means, out of the woods yet.
They seem to have a reasonably close relationship with WineX so perhaps they can leverage that to help promote a gamer's linux for additional sales. What they really need is for the French government, ala the growing segments of the German government wrt SUSE, to start going to Mandrake for big government contracts in place of M$. Also, to my thinking, the distro that can break into the wireless networking world (802.11b and 802.11g) so that their distro works out of the box with most cards/devices will be a big winner. Wireless is just about the weakest area for linux in existence. No opensource drivers (nor any commercial binary drivers) for ANY 802.11g devices and only scattershot compatibility with 802.11b devices - and a major pain to setup wireless networking once the device is working in comparison to the Mac and Windoze.
Fix wireless with contracts to various device producers and you have a real futureproof winner.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
well... how about this:
I bought the owner of my company a Dell Inspiron 8200. Hardware-wise, it's awesome. Has the Nvidia chipset, 512M RAM, 40G, etc. It came with XP pre-installed... XP either locks, gives ambiguous errors, or loses network connection at least once a week. What's funny.. he was used to Win98, and he actually thinks XP is worse.
Sure, you could say it's a Dell problem... and you'd be right, seeing as they are the ones that installed it. But at the same time... OEM installs software on a system that's supposed to be designed for said software, and it doesn't work?
"My biggest gripe isn't so much with Mandrake as it is with Linux developers as a whole. First, can we PLEASE start naming things in a moderately descriptive way? Names like grip, alsa, chbg, gimp, mozilla, k3b. Huh? Great programs all, but do you have any idea what they do by their names?"
Oh, and I suppose 'Nero', 'Kazaa', and 'Napster' are phonetically intuitive and descriptive titles? What I found even funnier is how the author bitches about how difficult it is to install software. Rpm's aren't that bad, but apt-get is a d r e a m.
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
Part of that is Mandrake's KDE developer/packager refuses to use Mandrake bugzilla, so he never gets bug reports on the patches he's introduced and so forth.
Ironically, KDE is probably the worst wm/de to use in Mandrake...
I have been comparing these three distro's (and Lindows 3.0) on two different machines for the last few weeks. And from the experiences I have had, Mandrake 9.1 has worked the best. One of the machines (a WalMart.com/Microtel/Lindows box) would not install RedHat 9 (RedHat 8.0 would) because the VIA processor caused some test to fail. On the other machine (a Shuttle BareBones system) I had a terrible time installing SuSE (oddly enough SuSE 8.1 would install fine). Mandrake 9.1 installed on both machines without a hitch.
I could use my Epson Printer, Scanner, and digital camera on the Mandrake 9.1 without any messing around. But (after I finally got the SuSE installed) I could not get the scanner to work. I thought I would install the Kooka program but it was nowhere to be found.
However, one of the things I don't like about Mandrake is that they put 'mdk' in all of the RPM names. That has proven to be some grief in the past.
I should also note that I have tried Debian on the BareBones machine and could never get X windows to work. I also had Gentoo running on it for months and really liked Gentoo. I like both Debian and Gentoo a LOT better for keeping things up to date than RPM's. But I have had lots of trouble with them when setting up audio and video cards, scanners, cameras, printers, etc. For example (and the reason I took Gentoo off of the BareBones system) when I added a printer with Gentoo, it turned out I would have had to re-compile the kernel, figured out what modules, and so on. Admittedly I would have learned a lot more doing it that way, but sometimes (for mental health reasons) I just want to plug something in and have it work. No fuss no muss.
Anyway when (if?) I get my review done it will be at http://www.qrwsoftware.com/rants/shootout.html.
Ok, as I stated in my previous post, it is nothing but my opinion, but here it goes.
I can install debian with very few packages and then install the "services" I want running on the box easilly with apt-get. I can't do that as easy on Mandrake or Red Hat. For example, even if you don't select it, at least on X Server gets installed.
As to why I prefer Red Hat or Mandrake on a desktop (I'm not saying that Debian it's not GOOD on the desktop) You can get more recent software "out of the box" with Red Hat or Mandrake. You can add apt repositories to debian, but that is something I'd rather not do. Also, if I use apt-get to fetch KDE 3.1 or similar it can be quite slow, considering that where I live broadband is not easy to get (I just got 128Kb cable and some of my friends drool over it) Server aplications tend to be smaller than desktop apps. And if where I'm installing there's only dialup access, apt-get is not viable. Also, most people I have installed desktops for, don't want to be upgrading constantly, which kind of defeats the purpose and beuty of apt-get.
And that's it!!! If anyone has a different opinnion, I'll really like to read it.
please excuse my apathy
IMHO, tools and wizards isolate users from what is really going on within the OS. This creates problems should the tool fail or if there is a situation outside of the function of the tool. Then users who've learned to use the tool can't troubleshoot the real issue. With Slack, you're closer to the true config of the OS and troubleshooting problems are easier.
It's a double-edged sword really. My company has recently gone to Linux (*whew*), REDHAT Linux (doh!). I'm strugling to learn the tools since the organization wants us to use what is included with the system. My frustration is "dammit, I know where the bloody config is located, let me change THAT and kill -SIGHUP "!
I think I'm making progress there. The other issue is RPM. IBM, among other brian-dead SW manufacturers like to use RPM over something more loosely-coupled, like tar.gz. Sadly, Slack is out of the question there.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy