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Mandrake 9.2b1 Released, 2.6 Test Kernel in Cooker
DCowern writes "Mandrake today announced 9.2 beta 1 of their distribution. More interestingly, Mandrake has included a test version of kernel 2.6 in cooker (their development version). It's dated 27 July so it should be on all the cooker mirrors in the RPM2 directory by now. If you can't find it on your favorite mirror, it's definitely on ftp.sunet.se."
Better yet, Bruha points to BitTorrent files for the 1st 2nd, and 3rd ISOs, and a link to the Mandrake 9.2 wiki, writing "Note that the beta1 installation uses the same kernel as 9.1 did, so if you had problems installing 9.1, you may want to wait for beta2 (which will use an updated kernel)."
I know a lot of people use Mandrake (myself included), but really is it necessary to annouce the beta version of a point release? C'mon... Not that many people are interested in burning the ISOs for a b1. When the point release comes out of beta, then maybe it deserves a front page article, but this is just wasted space on /.s front page.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
Don't be fooled by labels such as "beta" and "test", I've been running 2.6.0-test1-mm2 on a server for about a week now and it's extremely stable. If you need any of the features that the 2.6 branch introduces or if you just want to try it out, mandrake is the way to go.
OTOH, the only thing I dislike about mandrake is that they force KDE down your throat like it's the next best thing after bread and butter, I really wish they would include mode optinons at install like wm2, ion, openbox, icewm, but also install the qt and gtk libs in the background so you could run gnome/kde applications. That way more people would find out about the alternatives to KDE (it's too distracting and relativealy slow for my tastes.)
Please don't post to stories that you don't think are interesting. If you do, you will just post uninteresting comments. A new release of a beta of linux version is very important. That's how the news reaches those who would beta test. I'm very interested in knowing what to expect, even if I don't test the beta.
New users shouldn't be using a beta
The simple fact is that no true partiot would use Linux at all. In these hard times we must rally around our companies, our economy, and our president. If we let the 'Linux Community' have their way, we will all be at the mercy of the Germans making KDE, or the Japanese with their desktop.
What are you saying? Oh no, there's other country outside USA... We should not help them. Yeah, they should buy US products, but please don't buy their products?
And after that, people will still be amazed that there could be an anti-american feeling in the old countries...
Montreal - Best city to live in!
Look, when I spend $50 on Red Hat instead of $2000 on Microsoft, the other $1950 doesn't just disappear. I spend it on other goods and services. So I still purchase $2000 of goods and services into the world economy, it just goes to more people than the ass-hats at Microsoft.
Ironically, the name of this fallacy is the "broken window fallacy".
"Well, not really, gentoo has had the option since 2.6.0-test1 came out."
/usr/src/linux, leaving you to configure it, build it and install it.
Yes, but all Gentoo does with a kernel is download the source and install it into
Anyone who can download a file and use 'tar' can do the same thing, quite easily.
And when you install a new kernel, Portage doesn't even tell you which ebuilds need to be re-installed (nvidia-kernel, i2c, lm-sensors, etc).
Not knocking Gentoo (I run Gentoo and Mandrake), but the binary distributions do more of the hard work for you. To some people that is their strength, to others it is their weakness.
The last Mandrake release ran a 2.4.21 prerelease kernel. I personally never had any stability problems with it. I also understand that Mandrake tends to gravitate toward the bleeding edge of the packages they include in their releases, but the kernel is one place I think shouldn't be included in this manner. I think Mandrake is a wonderful company who makes an awesome distribution. I even have a customer's server running Mandrake 9.0 for 7 months and they haven't had a single problem with it (they use it for Samba and DHCP primarily). I suppose if one is looking for the latest and greatest, look toward Mandrake. Otherwise stick to Slackware or Debian for more matured packages in a distribution release.
I'd prefer they be started with something sensible that doesn't cause them to think 'Linux is slow and bloated' right off the bat, frankly.
...
Remember that the competition now isn't Windows 3.11, it's Windows XP. We don't need to worry about bloat too much by default, but we are behind on features and usability.
If speed was all that mattered, why don't we just give them twm, mutt, links and vi?
Sorry, but there is no way you can put ice up against WindowsXP for a newbie, but you can with KDE, and maybe the latest GNOME release.
I think it would give a better initial impression to most newbies.
Riiight. Why can't I drag and drop to the desktop? Where is my "My Documents?", "Where is my CD-ROM drive?", "Why is the text in the menus so ugly?. Maybe 7 years ago, before Windows 98 ice could have competed with Windows
Instead, these things are left exclusively for those of us that know about them, know how to find them and how to configure them on our own time, while the newbies are being given a very bad impression of Linux
No, the people at mandrakeusers.org, mandrakeclub.com etc will quickly set them right.
if they try to install it on anything but a brand new box at least.
KDE plus OpenOffice.org plus Mozilla plus a few more utilities run just great on my 800 Duron which is now 3 years old (assuming you have about 192MB ram or more). My girlfriends 366 Celeron/128MB ram machine is a bit slow, but not noticably slower (except OpenOffice.org startup) than it was running Windows98.