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)."

Comments

Sweet...

[GameGod0]

Will this be the first major distro running the 2.6 kernel?

Re:Sweet...

[MuParadigm]

I think so.

Word on various boards seems to be that the 2.6 kernel is much faster than 2.4.x. People are claiming improvements of up to 50% in some operations.

Of course, these are early adopters, most of them with single cpu machines. I haven't heard of anyone testing it for robustness or stability in a high-end environment yet.

Anyone else got word on it's performance or bugs?

Re:Sweet...

[MuParadigm]

Sorry to post to myself, but I was wrong about Mamdrake being the first major distro to supply the 2.6 kernel. Red Hat has had an RPM for a few weeks.

Re:Sweet...

[Tirel]

Well, not really, gentoo has had the option since 2.6.0-test1 came out. The portage tree is wonderfully updates within a few hours with the main branch and others (mm, aa, ac, ck, ...), so the only thing you need to do is check out /usr/portage/sys-kernel and decice which one you want to have at install time (or later, if you're upgrading like me)

Re:Sweet...

[Arker]

Funny thing is, I'm no compiler guy, but even I know that a lot of the optimisation code is inefficient. Notice that Debian came out the best in that little test? And Debian sticks with i386 code. As does most of the commercial software. And Intel and AMD optimise their processors to run that commercial i386 code as fast as possible. Doh!

It wasn't a fair comparison since they were using different video drivers, of course, and also because 'identical machines' never are. To be fair you really have to run the same tests with the same drivers, and swap the installs around to each machine as well, so you can see just how unidentical they really are.

The really interesting thing to do would be to test various compiler settings with gentoo on those machines first. Try 386, 486, 586, 686, try -O2, see what works and what doesn't. Then compare the other distros to Gentoo with the best settings.

At any rate, it's not the processor optimisation flags that are the important part of compiling from source - you're not likely to see really dramatic results from them alone, even if you do take the time to experiment and find the best set for your architecture. Much more important are the configure scripts for individual applications. Leaving out KDE and/or Gnome support, for example, can seriously trim a program up without losing anything if you don't use KDE or Gnome.

Re:Sweet...

[mickwd]

"Well, not really, gentoo has had the option since 2.6.0-test1 came out."

Yes, but all Gentoo does with a kernel is download the source and install it into /usr/src/linux, leaving you to configure it, build it and install it.

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.

Re:Sweet...

[DrXym]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but 2.6 isn't out yet and is extremely unlikely to be for several months possibly even six months from now. The 2.6 test and prerelease stages are only starting and is likely to go through a significant number of iterations before being called 2.6.0. Therefore, unless Mandrake intend to release what is essentially a alpha state kernel with broken drivers and the ensuing carnage when it trashes or doesn't work in various machines, it would seem highly unlikely to me.

Of course they could always include it as a 'try this if you dare' advanced feature, which might make some sense, but one would hope that they kept the 2.6 package up to date with the latest changes if they did that.

Re:Sweet...

[Slime-dogg]

Gentoo's had the source available in portage since test 1 was released. It works too.

The only problem is that you need to use the open nvidia drivers, since the old drivers are not compatible. Who knows when Nvidia will release a version for this kernel. :sigh:

Re:Sweet...

[Slime-dogg]

Um... More like 4 hours. That's about how long it takes to download and compile the GNU OS. Once that's done, you have a fully usable system.

If you want X installed, which is completely optional and unnecessary, it'll be another 8 hours or so. All in all, it just takes a good day to do, not weeks.

Re:Sweet...

[Bryce]

OSDL has been doing heavy duty testing of the kernel 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6 on 1, 2, 4, and 8
processor systems, for the past 2 years. See
its Kernel
Testing website and tools. The particular tool
that does this is the Scalable Test Platform.

Bryce

Re:Sweet...

[FeeDBaCK]

Gentoo's ebuilds for the nvidia-kernel build perfectly under a 2.6test kernel. Have you tried it again recently?

Re:Sweet...

[Anime_Fan]

Actually, if you tried 2.6.0 you should see that it isn't as broken as you say. Its stability is excellent (I'm thinking of bringing the test1 kernel down just to test2, been running it since the first test was released).

Sure, some old modules won't work, but nvidia-kernel, nvidia-glx and vmware all work. Also, ALSA works straight from the kernel. True ATAPI burning is also nice (no more SCSI emulation).

I think it's a Good Thing (tm) that they release a beta of their OS, simply because it will make it easier for them to deploy the kernel when it is called stable.

Re:Sweet...

[KentoNET]

Given your arguments, I find it difficult to believe you actually use Gentoo regularly. (I know this post is incredibly late...). Gentoo now has a genkernel script which can build a .config, kernel image and initrd all automagically. And also, revdep-update.sh (a new Portage addon) allows reverse dependencies of libraries and other packages (also including kernels) to be calculated and reinstalled if needed. Yes, it does still make you configure grub/lilo...

Re:Sweet...

[jonadab]

Depends what you count as a major distro. Gentoo has the
2.5/2.6pre option I think. I suspect it's not what most people
choose yet, though. I didn't choose it. And it's several options
down the list of choices, IIRC, after the regular Gentoo sources,
the vanilla kernel.org sources, the server-oriented sources,
desktop/game-oriented sources, and maybe WOLK and a couple of
other options. Incidentally, ISTR that 2.2 was an option also. So,
to say "Gentoo uses the 2.6 kernel" without qualification would be
an overstatement.

Re:Sweet...

[jonadab]

> All in all, it just takes a good day to do, not weeks.

Depends. Depends on your connection, on how much you want to
install, and to a lesser extent on your system speed. It took
me several days, but I was installing over a shared dialup[1] and
had a number of packages I wanted to install (gnome-terminal[2]
has a lot of dependencies... so does DBD::mysql...), and I had
to work around other activities (such as going to work).

I did wimp out and use stage 3, though. If I'd have gone with
stage 1 I'm sure it would have taken somewhat longer.

ObTopic: I use Mandrake on my desktop, both at home and at work,
and on the whole I've been quite pleased with it. I'm not chomping
at the bit for 9.2, but as much as anything that's because the
version I have works. (At home, 9.1. At work, actually, I'm still
using 8.1, with upgrades to strategic packages (Mozilla, OO, Emacs,
and security updates), and honestly I don't feel compelled to
upgrade to 9.1 at work. I am glad I upgraded at home, though,
because the games have improved, and sound stuff, and other stuff
I don't use at work.)

As far as Linux 2.6, I'm looking forward to it, but at the same
time I'm hesitant to jump on it too soon. There are some features
in it that I want, but I'm afraid to try a x.x.n kernel where n is
a low number. It'd be different if I had a sandbox system to
just play with, but currently I don't, because I parted out my
old desktop and put half its parts in my new desktop and the other
half in a server. Such is the nature of living on a budget.

[1] Note: when doing this, make sure you're the one paying
the internet bill. My family would have rioted otherwise.
At one point, my dad was complaining about how long it was
taking to get his email; I told him I was emerging Emacs on
a PC downstairs, and he said that I should immerse it.

[2] I use gnome-terminal for remote administration, even on
headless systems, because of its terminal classes. This
way I can ssh into the remote system and have scripts that
launch terminals for various purposes which will each have
their own color scheme, their own icon, their own title,
and so forth -- so they're easy to recognise in my window
list. I generally use one of these for MySQL, one for CPAN,
one for tailing logs, and one for a regular shell prompt.
And I configure different appearances for these (especially
the shell prompt one) for each system. Helps me keep things
straight. That's worth some disk space.

Re:Sweet...

[jonadab]

> Of course they could always include it as a 'try this if you dare'
> advanced feature

That's what Mandrake Cooker is all about. The regular Mandrake
distro is somewhat less bleeding-edge (though more cutting-edge
than some other distros), but Cooker is for testing alpha stuff.

Re:Sweet...

[DrXym]

But the thing is there is no 2.6.0. There are 2.6.0-test releases, but there is a way to go yet. Even Linus says as much. And if you read the kernel traffic & post halloween documents you'll see there are a lot of things that have not been fixed or tested, especially some of the less common drivers.

And drivers and stability are the two most important things dists are interested in. And just like the 2.4.x series it was only after several more iterations after 2.4.0 that both of these things are likely to be achieved for mass consumption. Mandrake might pick it up pretty quickly once 2.6.0 is out proper but I imagine that 2.4 is still going to be the mainstay of dists until they go through their next major iterations.

11 days late

[peek-n-squeeze]

Beta 1 was put onto the mirrors on 22nd July. So by the time you read this, it'll be at beta2

Re:11 days late

[jm.one]

August 2nd + 11 days = ? oh it is so hard to understand so i`ll explain. July 22nd: Mandrake 9.2iisos where put on mandake ftps and mirrors. July 24th: the Mandrake website was updated so that day was "offical annouce" August 2nd: there`s a slashdot aricle claiming that mandrake9.2b1 was released today span between July 22nd and August 2nd is 11 days. i hope now you got it.

If you're running Redhat...

[warmcat]

... note that this guy at redhat is tracking the test releases with redhat-installable RPMs, over RH9.

If you try it, note that you must upgrade modutils and some other packages given in the link. Many modules have changed names, like usb-ohci.o -> ohci-hcd.ko so you will need to do some screwing around. I have been running test1 then test2 for a couple of weeks from the link on top of Redhat 9 and it has been working very nicely.

Re:Unfinished product?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a beta. Of course it's unfinished, they want you to help find bugs...

Why is this on the front page?

[groove10]

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.

Re:Why is this on the front page?

[OS24Ever]

Maybe because it's kernal 2.6 usage instead of YAPR (yet another point release)

Maybe that's why redhat just went from 8 to 9 , they want to be on the front page of Slashdot!

Re:Why is this on the front page?

[questamor]

More than a "Mandrake has updated" or "Look at this new point release" this is a "the 2.6 kernel is finally out and being used by AverageUser!" story.

That being said, if we have another dozen stories where every other distro releases a 2.6 kernel standard then I might go postal... but not yet :)

Re:Why is this on the front page?

[antiMStroll]

What part of 'News for Nerds' do you find confusing?

Re:Why is this on the front page?

[Vellmont]

"the 2.6 kernel is finally out and being used by AverageUser!" story.

Hardly... this is only the second test version of 2.6 that started in July. The 2.4 release had 12 test versions that stretched from May to December. This is simply an optional kernel included with Mandrake. Linus himself has previously asked that distributors include a test 2.6 kernel option to encourage more testing.

Missing option

[vidnet]

ftp.sunet.se _is_ my favorite mirror.

Oh, never mind.

Re:Missing option

[jonadab]

> ftp.sunet.se _is_ my favorite mirror

Yes, but the "your favorite mirror" part isn't supposed to be
evaluated unless ftp.sunet.se returns undef, because the or will
short-circuit. HTH.HAND.

Re:Missing option

[vidnet]

Crap, did I just admit to using VB?

Re:Missing option

[jonadab]

> > Yes, but the "your favorite mirror" part isn't supposed to
> > be evaluated unless ftp.sunet.se returns undef, because the
> > or will short-circuit. HTH.HAND.
>
> Crap, did I just admit to using VB?

Dunno about you, but my comment indicated Perlish thinking.
It's a standard idiom in Perl to do something like this...
open FOO, ">somefile" or die "Cannot write somefile: $!";
The program won't die unless the open fails somehow, because
or (like its higher-precedence cousin ||) short-circuits. If
you couldn't tell I was thinking in Perl, you must not be in
the habbit of reading signatures ;-)

As far as VB, I haven't used that since college. Version 3 IIRC.
I never considered it to be a programming language, so much as a
GUI macro toolkit for Windows. (Not that such a toolkit is a bad
thing to have around... but I never squeezed it into my budget.)

Re:Missing option

[vidnet]

Indeed. VB has the ugly habbit of not short circuiting conditional statements (I'm a java guy dammit!)

And was your signature perl? I thought the article was corrupted :p

Re:Missing option

[jonadab]

> And was your signature perl? I thought the article was corrupted

Yes, a Java guy wouldn't understand my signature, because it
uses closures. A lisp programmer might understand better.

test kernels

[Tirel]

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.)

Re:test kernels

[groove10]

Since I'm too lazy to go look at the changelog, could you tell me what's changed with the 2.6 kernel? I'm no kernel hacker, so put it in basic sysadmin terms if ya don't mind. Thanks.

Re:test kernels

[Tirel]

read this

Re:test kernels

[leviramsey]

Though Buchan has beat me to it, if you don't want KDE or GNOME, do a minimal install with urpmi, and then you can get most of the wm's you've listed from Mandrake contribs with urpmi.

Re:test kernels

[Azureflare]

Most Newbs who will be using that package selection during the install (i.e. not selecting individual packages) aren't going to want to muck around with the more complicated interfaces (Hey, I think it's complicated, and I'm a newb...kde and gnome are reassuring, because they are more like windows than the others. I like the speed of icewm, but config of toolbar/menu is a pain, and KDE is just so much easier.)

I think KDE is a good newbie GUI, and it's pretty effective for the average user. If you include all the window managers (A heck of a lot) it will only confuse the user. Limiting it to two good, solid GUIs that are very user-friendly, especially to people coming from windows/mac, is a good idea on Mandrake's part. If you're a pro, you should be using individual package selection. There's no other way to tailor a distro to an individual's tastes, since everyone is different.

Re:test kernels

[pa-guy]

Mandrake started life as an offshoot of RH that included kde. It should be no surprise that kde is the default. There are also a whole pile of alternative window managers with it. Just install the one you want.....

Re:test kernels

[usotsuki]

How about Themed and Unthemed FVWM2, they seem pretty simple for a n00b... ;)

-uso.
Raised on GS/OS

Re:test kernels

[Read Icculus]

If you do a minimal install make sure that you check the "with documentation" option if you ever plan on needing the man pages and any type of /usr/share/doc files. If you choose to not install the docs you will be screwed if you try to install man or rute or anything along those lines. At least this was the case as of 9.1, maybe it's fixed in this release?

Re:test kernels

[rootyard]

Did you know that you don't have to run KDE if you don't want to?

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir are an idiot. I am American, a Marine, and a patriot. Mandrake is a great product.

Don't post to stories you don

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Re:Don't post to stories you don

[hkmwbz]

Hear, hear! I don't even know what to say about people who don't want to read about something, but still post comments about it!

This is Slashdot. The editors will post whatever they feel like. You can even filter it out if you want to. There is no reason to whine about stories like this.

And a new release of Mandrake will indeed be interesting to a lot of people. It shows that troubled Mandrake is still up and running, working on future versions of their distribution.

Spam apologists and story whiners are two of the worst things about Slashdot. Quit promoting spam, and quit crying like a baby because someone posted a story you didn't like.

So you don't approve of a story posted on Slashdot? Tough luck. Maybe you should go and read some other site instead.

Anyway, commenting on stories you aren't interested in in the first place just goes to show that you need to get out more. Get off Slashdot and get a life.

HTH. HAND.

Re:Don't post to stories you don

[Vellmont]

I think his objection is that it was posted to the Front Page of slashdot. It should have been posted to something like Developers, as it's really not big enough news for a front page story IMO.

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (Please Read!)

[confuseddasein]

Support Microsoft over Mandrake? Why, just because the French are percieved as snobby? Setting the merits of their respective products aside for the moment, which company would you say is more honest and a better corporate citizen? As far as their products go, which OS is more secure? If you can't see past your hatred of the French, why not support Red Hat instead of Microsoft? After all, choosing Microsoft over Linux is like choosing slavery over freedom.

Re:Unfinished product?

[azzy]

New users shouldn't be using a beta

What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[buchanmilne]

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.

$ cat /etc/mandrake-release
Mandrake Linux release 9.2 (Cooker) for i586
$ urpmq --sources enlightenment windowmaker blackbox xfce olvwm waimea AfterStep amiwm evilwm fluxbox fvwm fvwm2 ion ion-metadome pwm ratpoison rox-session swm
ftp://ftp.cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/ Mandr ake/RPMS/enlightenment-0.16.5-13mdk.i586.rpm
ftp: //ftp.cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS/WindowMaker-0.80.2-4mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://f tp.cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS/blackbox-0.65.0-1mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp. cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS/xfce-3.8.18-1mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp.cae. co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/swm-1.2.5-3mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp.cae.c o.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/fvwm2-2.4.16-2mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp.ca e.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/amiwm-0.20.48-6mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp.c ae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/waimea-0.4.0-3mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp.ca e.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/olvwm-4.4-14mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp.cae. co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/AfterStep-1.8.11-3mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ft p.cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/ratpoison-1.2.2-2mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp .cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/fluxbox-0.9.4-2mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp.c ae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/pwm-1.0-11mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp.cae.co .za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/ion-metadome-20020605-3mdk.i586.rpm
ftp ://ftp.cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/evilwm-0.99.14-1mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp. cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/fvwm-1.24r-23mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp.cae .co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/ion-20030627-3mdk.i586.rpm
ftp://ftp.ca e.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/rox-session-0.1.20-1mdk.i586.rpm

(this is our internal mirror, find your own)

Is that enough? (oh, there's still qvwm in PLF, since it looks too similar to some other desktop we know).

Mandrake has never forced a desktop on anyone, and all you need to enjoy the Mandrake configuration tools is gtk+2 and perl.

Sure, not all the window managers are in the main distro, but without contrib, you're missing half of the distro anyway!

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[buchanmilne]

Sure, the default is KDE, usually with GNOME also (would you prefer newbies straight from Windows to be dumped into ion?), but you can uncheck KDE and GNOME during installation in the main package selection (this has been the case as long as I can remember, so at least since 7.0), and installing a different one is trivial. Plus, they all work out-the-box from whichever display manager you use, and most of them have the consistent Mandrake menus throughout.

If you don't want KDE, all you have to do is uncheck one pretty obvious checkbox ...

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[coats]

Yes, but does fvwm actually work?

Under MDK 9.0, at least, there were serious focus problems that kept you from being able to use it ;-(

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[Arker]

Sure, the default is KDE, usually with GNOME also (would you prefer newbies straight from Windows to be dumped into ion?)

KDE AND Gnome?

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.

IceWM maybe. Personally I prefer WindowMaker, but Ice is probably better for the folks that have never used anything but windows. Either way, if they'd put half the time they spend on KDE and Gnome into a sensible default setup with a WM that doesn't require a supercomputer to run at a decent speed, I think it would give a better initial impression to most newbies.

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, if they try to install it on anything but a brand new box at least.

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[jbolden]

In general very new computer users tend to care more about ease of use than speed. More importantly the application they often run the most, web browsing against multimedia intensive sites, is very demanding by PC standards. Quite simply beginner, modern and light have become one of those "pick 2" type choices in design.

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[Arker]

And just how do you figure that Ice with the menus and basic configuration setup would be harder to use?

I think the opposite is the case. The sort of bloat typical of commercial distros defaults these days are usability nightmares that not only bog the machine down but also bog the users brain down. The easiest way to make a machine easy to use is with a simple and consistent interface that doesn't have too many artifacts simultaneously crying for attention.

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[Read Icculus]

WTF? I've got a Radeon 9700 that works just fine with MDK 9.1. But I will agree that certain programs included with 9.1 are more buggy than I would like. GNOME and Nautilus for example will crash/lockup constantly on both of the Dell test boxes I've used, and some contrib packages seem to be straight out screwed-up. However even with it's faults I still think that MDK is the best newbie-friendly distro out there. Easy configuration and ease of use are a good addition to the distro pool.

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[buchanmilne]

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.

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[FeeDBaCK]

Do you really think beginners are picking up Linux in droves? Most people I know switching from Windows to Linux are quite technical people. I don't see too many Joe Rednecks out installing Mandrake Cooker. You also have to remember that "modern" does not equal "eye candy crap that has real addition to functionality" such as semi-transparent menus and other junk.

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[jonadab]

> GNOME and Nautilus for example will crash/lockup constantly on
> both of the Dell test boxes I've used

Nautilus is buggy. I removed it from my Gnome session and the
result was improved performance and stability. If you must use
a graphical file manager, there's gmc, but I prefer to do my file
management from the commandline anyway.

Another option is to use the gnome-panel (and possible a Gnome
window manager, such as sawfish) without the whole gnome-session.
But I found that just removing Nautilus solved my problems.
(This issue is not unique to Gnome; the file manager is a very
significant source of instability on Win32 also. That may or
may not be a coincidence. Unfortunately, removing the file
manager in Win32 is somewhat less practical than in Gnome because
then (among other things) where would your panel be? (There is
LiteStep, but that's hardly an improvement IMO).)

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[jonadab]

> KDE AND Gnome?

Yes and no. The default is to _install_ both of them (so that you
can use the apps from both), but only to launch one of them for
any given session; I believe the default is to launch KDE. Having
Gnome also installed only consumes disk space, not memory or other
system resources, unless you use it.

And it's quite handy to have both installed. That way you can use
the calculator from KDE (which is far superior to the Gnome one) and
the gnome-terminal (which is far superior to Konsole), and so on and
so forth.

Though, for end users, I would like to see the default be one
panel along the bottom with nothing but a task list and clock, and
another panel along the left edge with launchers for "Surf the Web"
(Moz or possibly Moz FB), "Type a Paper" (OO.o), and so on and so
forth, a drawer for Advanced/Setup (containing launchers for the
Mandrake Control Center, the Gnome Control Panel, and so on and
so forth), and the logout button at the bottom. Oh, and a drawer
full of games. I suppose the foot menu should be included as well,
but labelled "Extra Stuff" or something. For reasons involving
phone tech support, there should also be a terminal launcher,
probably in the Advanced/Setup drawer.

Oh, and the _first_ launcher, at the _top_ of the panel, should
bring up a help thingy that explains what each of the launchers
on the default panel do, and how to use (at a very basic level)
the apps that they launch. This should probably be described
backwards, as in:

* To Surf the Web:
(Explanation of the Mozilla launcher and how to use Moz,
and link to more info about using Mozilla.)
* To Type a Paper:
(Explanation of the OO.o launcher and how to use OO.o,
including how to turn off all the #@$! AutoCorrect/
AutoReplace/AutoFormat/AutoBullets/AutoNumbering crap,
which is the first thing every newbie asks me about it.
And a link to more info about using OO.o)
(And so on and so forth...)
* To Use Other Software:
(Explanation of foot menu and links to further info about
what programs to use for various tasks and also about
learning to download and install additional stuff, and
finally links to general, more advanced info.)

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[Reziac]

Speaking as a DOS/Windows user (accustomed to beating every species of Windows into submission, from 3.1 thru XP), Mandrake is the *one* linux disty that I immediately liked (out of a dozen or so that I tried), and found relatively straightforward to use right off -- for pretty much the reasons you cite. My first impression was "It works enough like Windows to be immediately usable", *not* "WTF do I do now??"

I really oughta update it, but.. I have MDK 7.2/KDE on a P3-450/256mb (a poor old K6-200 was too slow) and even that venerable disty compares more or less to WinXP on the same hardware. Not exactly crisp, but not notably laggy.

I'm glad to see Mandrake still progressing despite the company's setbacks. It gives me hope that there *will* be a viable alternative for myself and my clients, once M$'s ambitions go where I won't follow (as threatens to be the case with the next consumer Windows).

BTW, the MDK newsgroup was the first linux watering hole where I was *welcomed* as a newbie, rather than derided for my ignorance. Cheers!

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[jbolden]

I moved about 3 weeks ago. One of the movers saw my bookshelf and spent the day asking me detailed Linux questions (not advanced level). But in general I agree most people trying Linux are technical. They aren't neccesarily knowledgeable about windows. They often are quite young, and hence my comments about multimedia and web browsing are even more applicable.

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[jbolden]

On IceWM

1) No obvious "start here" button
2) No simple collection of desktop icons
3) No set of built in apps with unified theme and ways of working
4) No obvious choices for web/ftp/local file browsing.

etc...

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[Arker]

1) No obvious "start here" button

Bzzt Wrong. Windows style taskbar with start button. Never used it have you?

2) No simple collection of desktop icons

That's not the WMs job, and it's debateable if it's even a good thing. If you think it is, it's simple enough to configure. I did say they would need to spend a little time developing a good default setup.

3) No set of built in apps with unified theme and ways of working

Again not the window managers job, and again perfectly easy to setup. Ice is completely compatible with Gnome and KDE apps, so you could use one or the other set, or built another set of more traditional apps.

4) No obvious choices for web/ftp/local file browsing.

Hello?

File managers; DFM - TkDesk - Xfm - Xplore - FileRunner - kfm - sfm - XNC - Kruiser - gentoo - Gnu Midnight Commander - Nautilus, and more.

Web Browsers; Mozilla and derivitives - Opera - Konq - more there too I'm sure.

All the distro needs to do is choose a set and make sure they're on the menus and setup sanely.

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[jbolden]

If you read the original post the arguments was Ice vs. KDE. Now ICE itself can work as a windowmanager for KDE. What I was responding to is why use KDE type configurations rather than a more typical ICE. I don't have any opinion on ICE as a pure window manager in the sense you mean it vs. KDE's built in Window manager.

If I look at ICEWM themes ICE from an end user prespective doesn't look like anything (as is true with most window managers with different styles of thems). Its a pure framework. So it does or doesn't have icons on the desktop

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[Arker]

Ice went themeable due to user demand, of course. It originally was a light and fast win95 look-alike, and it's all still there, depending on the theme.

I've used it with both KDE and Gnome, it's quite easy to set up a good working environment with either using Ice as the WM, and it's noticeably faster and cleaner than using the POS that 'pure' KDE uses.

Not sure about KDE but with Gnome you can even set it up so that you can retheme the WM and the Gnome apps together, so that everything matches up nicely.

As I said in my original post further up the thread, I personally prefer WindowMaker. Using WindowMaker as the WM for Gnome is really far better in my opinion than the typical Gnome setup, it's faster, cleaner, and easier to use. You do have to do a little menu editing, not much else. If you want the desktop icon stuff you just have the file manager load with the WM. If you want the panels it's a one line entry and there you are. Personally I find them annoying and unecessary - the dock works great for persistent indicators, the clip works great for desktop management, and the regular WindowMaker interface is just fine for desktop management and task lists. Better than panels and start menus and taskbars any day, IMHOP.

The point is just that there are a lot more options available than people seem to give any credence too, and this fixation on full blown 'desktop environments' which seems to mean in practice 'windows clones' is counterproductive, I think. Why on earth, for instance, would you want a task bar and a start menu when there are so many more usable equivalents that don't take up screen space like that? With WindowMaker you just right click on the root window to bring up your applications menu. You can make it persistent, place it wherever you want, open a submenu and do the same with it, get rid of the main list but keep the submenu open or vice versa... it's much more flexible. Want a task list? Middle click on the root window. Again, you can make it persistent, relocate it wherever you want it, and close it completely if you don't need it. And it's always readable. That task bar sits there whether you need it or not, can be relocated but only to a limited set of options, and is often completely unreadable.

Re:What, 16 alternative WMs too few?

[jbolden]

Why on earth, for instance, would you want a task bar and a start menu when there are so many more usable equivalents that don't take up screen space like that?

I don't I agree with you regarding windowmaker and tend to prefer a simple windowmanager running terminals with a few X apps over a full blown gui (provided it has an automated menu building system from the distribution). On the other hand for a beginner the loss of screen real estate so that they have some idea on how to start (hit the start button) is cheap. Beginners can't generally use more than one app at a time anyway so they are either full screen or only need 1/2 the screen for their work....

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[PeteQC]

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...

Re:Unfinished product?

[snoozerdss]

Mandrake Linux 9.2 Beta 1 has arrived to offer you the opportunity of an entertaining summer bug squashing. Ranking of this next Mandrake, as for level of refinement, is partly in your hands. Join forces with the Mandrake Development team! Install the Beta and send your reports. Remember however that this is an experimental distribution not suitable to everyday-tasks machines. Take care.

Thats from Mandrake's website.
Jeeze...RTFA next time. Or go look up the definition of BETA software.

Huh?

[ErikZ]

I thought Mandrake needed millions of dollars in donations or it was going out of business? What happened?

Re:Huh?

[t482]

There distribution was alway profitable. It was there other business which pushed them into the equivalent of chapter 11.

Re:Huh?

[buchanmilne]

I switched my attention from Mandrake to Red Hat when I read that Mandrake was doomed.

Isn't that like kicking people when they're down? Here I was buying stuff from them (since I do generate spare income using Mandrake), and contributing to the distro, when I should instead have dumped and run for a distro that doesn't pay attention to the features *I* want?

Now it looks like Mandrake is back on track

They weren't ever off-track ... they have just had to cut down on cash-sapping activities, like expo-attendance etc

or are they releasing work that had already been done and this is going to be the last we hear?

Well, since they went into bankruptcy protection, they released 9.1, which was a pretty good release. And since 9.1, they have been making serious changes to allow greater community participation, to the extent that community contributors who know their stuff have commit rights into the main distro (although more recognition for the community work on maintaining the ports to alpha, hammer, sparc and ppc would be nice). But they have done a lot of work on GUI cleanups in the config tools etc, added more features in urpmi, and of course updated to the latest packages.

And they are still innovating more than Redhat ever did (unless the only thing you use linux for is an Oracle cluster - in which case you're probably better off with SuSE anyway ...).

Now, imagine what they could do if they had enough resources to employ more hackers?

Re:Huh?

[WindBourne]

I thought Mandrake needed millions of dollars in donations or it was going out of business? What happened?
No, you misunderstood. What they said was that if they did not get another million, that God would recall them. Apparently it worked. Just like it does here in America.

Re:Huh?

[bogie]

I appreciate your loyalty to Mandrake, but to say "They weren't ever off-track" except for some little things like oh say blowing through millions of capital while going into bankruptcy sounds pretty foolish. Mandrake was off track, waaay off track. I am glad they didn't disappear entirely and that they are still around since we need more desktop linux vendors, but at the same time I'll never have the faith in them I once did.

"Now, imagine what they could do if they had enough resources to employ more hackers?"

I don't know, they had a lot more resource available not long ago and it seemed to me that they were really just good at blowing money. Maybe the people that ran Mandrake into the ground are gone now?

Former Mandrake user.

Re:Huh?

[common_sence]

Couldn't that same thing be said of a good number of software companies during the dot-com era? It was OK to blow through capital. I'm glad they were able to hold on. I'm a Linux n00b and definitely prefer Mandrake to RedHat.

Re:Unfinished product?

[rocjoe71]

is mandrake trying to push an unfinished product on us?

Those *jerks*! The nerve of them shipping a BETA release with bugs in it.

And here I am, sitting around like a fool thinking "beta" was short for "betar than the final release".

Re:Does anyone know of old archives of Mandrake 6.

[MuParadigm]

Well, it's offtopic, but here ya' go anyway:

No iso's available. You *can* get the RPM's and SRPM's at:

ftp://ftp.linuxforum.hu/mirror/Mandrake-old/upda te s/6.1.

Heh, Slashdot's slow . . .

[Idou]

I downloaded those bitorrent iso's last week, way before they could get slash . . . wait . . . bitorrent . . .

I CAN'T WIN!

I would like to see OpenOffice 1.1 in mdk9.2

[t482]

I have been using OO 1.1 now for 6 months or so. Its beta - but it is very stable. Some of the features (print to pdf) make it worth including it in the distro now.

Also does anyone know if they have included the Ximain OO hacks for OO?

Re:I would like to see OpenOffice 1.1 in mdk9.2

[Kid Brother of St. A]

You can print to PDF in OO Writer 1.0.2 already. Just go File > Print... and select PDF converter under the printer name popup menu. That said, I'm looking foward to OO 1.1 as well. Good product.

Re:I would like to see OpenOffice 1.1 in mdk9.2

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

How that post gets marked as troll is baffling ??:|

Re:I would like to see OpenOffice 1.1 in mdk9.2

[jonadab]

The really great feature in OO 1.1 for me is that the error message
when it reads an invalid .sxw file is _informative_ (i.e., it tells
you where the problem is). This won't matter to people just using
it as a word processor, but since I generate documents using Perl
(pulling data from MySQL) and use OO.o to print them, this feature
is really incredibly helpful for debugging my scripts. Using this
feature, I was able to track down a problem (involving characters
that needed to be encoded as entities) that had me stumped under
OO.o 1.0.x.

Learn some econ, Troll-Boy

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[coats]

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... What are you saying? Oh no, there's other country outside USA...

One of the most profound students of "what is different about America was the Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. I*n his book Democracy in America describing what makes American culture distinctive, he said that the inclination of Americans to form informal, community-based non-government, non-corporate associations in order to do the projects the community needs. Volunteer fireman associations are but one common example.

And now the Internet has expanded the notion of community past walking-distance geographic boundaries, has expanded those needed community projects to include Linux, Apache, and the like, and has exported the whole volunteer community association idea to the world.

The sad thing is that now big government and corporatism -- and collusion between the two -- are destroying that uniquely American practice of volunteer community associations at home!

Torrents

[Bruha]

Those torrents I pointed out are from mandrake themselves.. They're running the tracker appareently.. I have not looked but I bet BT is installed in 9.2b.

Now I'm curious what bandwidth savings Mandrakesoft made with using Bt to distribute the files!

Re:Torrents

[Feztaa]

Those torrents I pointed out are from mandrake themselves..

I was quite impressed to see that. I hope that the Mandrake guys save lots of money on the bandwidth they save there. I seeded the files for about a day.

One thing, though -- I wasn't able to find the link to the torrents from their official website. Oh well; I guess BT is at that stage where it's provided but not actively advertised as the primary download method :)

Re:Torrents

[Bruha]

Actually the torrents were on the announcements page.. The portion of the story I posted was a exact copy of that announcement.

Re:Torrents

[Feztaa]

You quoted from the WIKI. Go to www.mandrakesoft.com, and try to find a link to the torrents. good luck :)

Go and test it!

[christophe]

...So it will be stable and clean when *I* will migrate to 2.6 :-)

I hope Mandrake doesn't burn it's self on this one

[Mipsalawishus]

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.

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[MuParadigm]

To say that the French are terrorists because of some random French idiots is kind of like saying Americans are terrorists because of Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber.

God, I must be bored. I'm talking to trolls.

Re:There vs. their.. ARGH!

[jbolden]

Yes it is difficult. Once the verbal language evolves so that two words are pronounced the same the written language evolves so they are spelled the same. 75% of all irregularities in a language are purged in each generation. Only very heavily used words manage to keep irregularities (like man and men which goes back to indo-european pluralization rules).

Their, there and they're are pronounced the same hence the spelling difference is highly unnatural.

Re:Unfinished product?

[G3ckoG33k]

Yup! IIRC, that was the strategy when 2.4.x came out too. Release the new series as a toy for early adopters, but with more frequent bug squashing as the serious agenda.

No, nothing more. Nothing less. Now, move on, here is nothing to see.

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[WindBourne]

I am a fool, but...
Now that I have your attention, I would like to discuss the larger issue of Linux in general. It is time for us, fellow patriots, to look at our situation in the world on a global scale. Microsoft is an American company. Bill Gates started with nothing and built an empire. What is the problem here?
Bill Gates father is a high-end corporate attorney. Bill grew up in a house that would be the == of somebody makeing > 7 figures today. In fact, Bill's father funded much of the early work. That is the fact.
There are many american enterprises that are failing due to MS's tactics.

We should be supporting American enterprise, not undermining it. 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.
And the www.whitehouse.gov runs what? The software that is sold to the CIA/NSA/Home Seucrity requires what? Say the word; Linux. Even the DOD is now moving to Linux as their base.
I agree about the economy. As such, our companies that have to move forward, but can not spend money wastefully, have all moved to Linux and are getting profits. Google, Amazon, Walmart, and Lowes are either running Linux or are moving to it (quietly).
I find it ironic that you are pushing MS when the net is horribly slow due to something aimed straight at its black heart. Likewise, the fact that Ridge had to issue a national security alert yesterday about it.
And this disregards the fact that MS IIS systems account for less than 25% of web servers and yet have nearly 100% of the credit card thefts (normally American CC's; These could be used by terrorist to further blow us up).

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. Do you plan to learn Japanese in the near future? You may have to, if we don't start poneying up to the bar and laying it down for our cause...
hummm.... free enterprise sounds like a good cause. If they are better, well.....

I hate the fact that I even took a second to answer back, but man, oh man...

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[Chicane-UK]

Holy cow... Microsoft must be getting desperate. They are really scraping the barrel with these AC anti-linux trolls on Slashdot! :)

Re:France

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Red Hat is an American distribution, will it brutally murder innocent civilians after I install it? Will it leave dupleted uranium on your keyboard? Inquiring minds want to know.

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[rking]

To say that the French are terrorists because of some random French idiots is kind of like saying Americans are terrorists because of Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber.

Well, the French certainly aren't the only western country to have a history of state sponsored terrorist acts but the "random idiots" who destroyed the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand's waters and caused one death (it could easily have been more, others managed to escape) were working for the French government.

I don't think any court has officially concluded that the French Government were responsible but I think you'd have to be fairly gullible to doubt it. Undeniably those convicted were agents of the French Government. Being as generous as possible to the French Government you'd have to say that commissioned officers that they assigned to assist their security forces were people who planted bombs in their spare time.

I'm sure you can dig up serious wrong doing by most powerful countries though. And that doesn't justify it of course.

Re:France

[gurumeditationerror]

Heh! Good one dude.

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (Please Read!)

[Centinel]

Pretty hard to boycott something you can't even buy

Mandrake 9.1 isn't available from any vendors listed on PriceGrabber.com, and I doubt 9.2 will be either.

Face it, Mandrake's US channel sales suck.

Take the context of the reply into account ...

[buchanmilne]

In my reply, the context of "ever" was post-bankruptcy filing, due to this being the context of the post I was replying to. Sorry, I should have been more clear about that.

Maybe the people that ran Mandrake into the ground are gone now?

They were kicked out a good few months before the bankruptcy protection filing, but it was too late ... to prevent the layoff of developers.

Former Mandrake user.

What changed?

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (Please Read!)

[common_sence]

Buy from the Mandrake store directly. Problem solved.

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[antiMStroll]

......Japanese with their desktop.

The Japanese with their one desktop?!?!? +5 Funny!

Apples and oranges

[stud9920]

Thank you for coming (totally selflessly as there was no Lusithania nor Silberberg telegram) to help us beat the Germans in 1917 (three years after the war began) after we decided to invade germany to rid them of their so blatant weapons of mass destruction.

Thank you again for coming (totally selflessly again as Pearl Harbour is a myth) to help us beat the Germans in 1941 (2+ years after the war began; 1+ year after the french lost it).

We are so selfish to have refused to help you defend yourselves against that internationally dangerous Saddam Hussein, who had already taken all of your east coast. But be sure we may eventually help the US in 2006 when it will be fully occupied by Saddam's world's fourth largest army in the world, might they decide to attack us by surprise.

Re:Apples and oranges

[stud9920]

nor Silberberg telegram

Oops I meant "Zimmerman". I guess Dr Kelly thought "Silberberg" would be cooler.

Paille. Poutre. Oeil (Pot. Kettle. Black)

[stud9920]

Because obviously, as a French speaking tourist in Western US, Everybody from the slave class people in the restaurant/hotel/tourism addressed me in a French that would have put Victor Hugo to shame...

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (Please Read!)

[antiMStroll]

In this day and age of slapdash, sophmoric, poorly crafted trolls, it's a rare pleasure to find an artiste of your stature craft a world-class gem such as you've graced us with today. Patriotism, xenophobic rants, feux anti-capitalist baiting, dead and foreign language links, you wield them as a master wields the foil. Sir, I salute you and your unwavering determination to rise to the top of your field.

The number one thing I'd like to see

[Joe Tie.]

Python 2.3. I was very surprised to not see python 2.3, even in mandrake cooker. Given the increased stability and speed I would have thought they'd have rushed to update to it when 2.3 was released. Worse for me, I'm unfamilier enough with rpm building to take the risk of trying to update python myself.

Re:France

[mhesseltine]

Since SuSE is a German distro, will it gather and slaughter millions of innocent people based only on their religion? Inquiring minds want to know.

Re:France

[mhesseltine]

Since Turbolinux is a Japaneese distro, does that mean it will launch its CDs into your servers, killing thousands when you least expect it? Inquiring minds want to know.

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[rking]

And I am sure you can dig up enough evidence of the US supporting innumerable terrorist groups in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe.

Agreed.

actually boot?

[Doppler00]

Will this new version of Mandrake actually boot from the CDROM ISO (like redhat or slackware)? I've had trouble with the last two versions simply giving me an error that it cannot read from the device during installation. This was tested on 3 different computer systems and none of them could even get to the installation screen.

Re:actually boot?

[jrcamp]

Mandrake has booted just fine from the CD-ROM for the longest time. Maybe you burnt a bad CD...?

Re:actually boot?

[Jamey12345]

Your problem might have just been the install kernel that was used in the prior versions. Beta 2 will be switching to a different install kernel, to fix some problems and unsupported hardware in the prior ones.

9.2 will default to a 2.4 kernel

[buchanmilne]

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.

Ummm, you did notice that the 2.6 kernel we're talking about is in contrib? Most newbies won't even be able to find it! 9.2 Will most certainly default to a 2.4.22 kernel (since we are rapidly approaching version freeze time), but there are already a few alternative kernels in contrib, and this will be just another choice.

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).

Same experience, on a clients Compaq Proliant (the software is more reliable than the hardare ;-), one disk failure, no software failures), on our own Dell PowerEdge boxes, but then again I can't think of a recent release that had issues on server applications (and I have run everything since 7.0 on production servers ... but 7.2 and 8.0 were a bit rough around the edges if you happened to use ReiserFS 2.x on a 2.2 kernel).

Otherwise stick to Slackware or Debian for more matured packages in a distribution release.

Would that be the Debain that lets you choose between samba-2.2.3a and 3.0.0alpha, with nothing in between? s/mature/obsolete/g (not that there's anything wrong with samba3, it's also available in Mandrake contribs since 9.1, and for a few other releases from my site).

Re:9.2 will default to a 2.4 kernel

[David Hartigan]

Well, I suppose that would make sense, since a new kernel is a major enough change for a version number change to 10, not 9.2

But in my opinion, Mandrake 9.1 was such a dramatic change from 9.0 that it should have been called Mandrake 10.. RedHat seemed to have got away with it.

Cheers,
David

Re:9.2 will default to a 2.4 kernel

[buchanmilne]

But in my opinion, Mandrake 9.1 was such a dramatic change from 9.0 that it should have been called Mandrake 10.

Well, some people complained that it was too similar to 9.0, and that it should have been called 9.0.1!

RedHat seemed to have got away with it.

Well, they broke binary compatability with their premature inclusion of NPTL.

Re:9.2 will default to a 2.4 kernel

[David Hartigan]

To me, Mandrake 9.0 and 9.1 are so very different that a .1 increment isn't enough.

Mandrake 9.0 had something that just felt out of place, but 9.1 felt right, it had something that made me think, wow, this is now going to be my primary operating system - and it has been, for the past few months - no Windows at all.

To me, that is reason enough for it to be called Mandrake 10.

Cheers,
David.

Re:France

[tindur]

French-based distro
Don't use a French-based distro. Use a freedom-based instead.

Re:50% faster?

[emuman_de]

Come on, why should 2.6 be 50% faster than 2.4? Maybe SCO will sue us 50% faster because of the stolen codelines in 2.6, e.g. for (i=0;in;i++)? But give me an benchmark to show the 50% performance improvement.

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[MuParadigm]

Offtopic, but...

Thanks for the link. That's actually a pretty interesting article and I wasn't aware of the French Secret Services responsibility for that particular act.

Here you go

[Newtonian_p]

Go here.

Re:Here you go

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

lol.. hilarious quote... hehe :)

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[rking]

Oh yes, definitely offtopic, and I'm not supporting a boycott of Mandrake or whatever :)

It's mainly interesting to me as a relatively clear cut example of a Western government doing something very wrong, apparently just to prevent a civilian group from embarrasing them. (Incidentally, in a world where tens of thousands can get killed in a terrorist attack or a retaliation it's hard to find words to describe an attack like this where "only" one person died that doesn't sound like either hyperbole or ridiculously weak).

I think the moral of the story is that whilst you don't want to fall for every conspiracy theory going that governments do need watching, and I certainly wouldn't limit that to the French Government.

Re:Its ALPHA, not beta

[buchanmilne]

I know (since I installed LM 9.2beta) how hard it was to select/unselect packages using mouse from hundreds of them.

When you could have taken the defaults, updated your drakxtools package, and been able to select again as usual.

Redhat uses a different beta cycle strategy (AFAIK, with only one beta release), and Mandrake uses multiple betas. This was just to get people up to speed with the changes in cooker (note the old kernel for example), especially to find the as yet unfound bugs in the mods they have made.

Anyway, since cooker is always in flux, *it* is considered alpha ... and it hasn't been too bad this release cycle (it's been worse).

2.6.0 Auto Loading Modules in Mandrake

[Totally_Tux]

Since we're talking about the Mandrake distribution here - has anyone found out why kernel module auto loading appear to be broken when using 2.6.0test2 in Mandrake 9.1?

One symptom of this is booting 2.6.0test2 and finding out that NO modules are loaded in for mouse, USB, Ethernet and so forth unless. To get around this I've had to manually list related kernel modules in /etc/modules or manually modprobe them in.

I'm wondering if this problem occurs in the 2.6.0 test kernel supplied by Mandrake?

Re:2.6.0 Auto Loading Modules in Mandrake

[Jamey12345]

The old modutils package doesn't work with 2.6 - there's a seperate version for 2.6, I'm guessing it's probably a dependancy of the 2.6.0 mdk kernel though. urpmi can grab the new modutils, but I don't remember the exact package name.

Re:2.6.0 Auto Loading Modules in Mandrake

[Totally_Tux]

You mean the module-init-tools package? Yes, we needed this in order for make modules_install to work.

My friend and I are not having that problem, but specifically that the 2.6.0 kernel doesn't appear to auto load kernel modules as needed. There is something specific in Mandrake that breaks this and I'm trying to find out why.

Re:I hope Mandrake doesn't burn it's self on this

[abdulla]

I've had one bad experience with Mandrake using the pre-release kernel for 9.1, I wasn't able to run GDB (it kept saying it could not set a breakpoint) until the latest kernel update (I think about a week ago). Since GDB is critical to development, I'd think they would have ironed out that problem a little earlier. Aside from that I've had no problems at all, it's been great.

Re:Anger problem.

[Grizzlysmit]

How'd you notice :-)

Re:The Mandrake Boycott (IMPORTANT!)

[crusher-1]

Urah! Semper Fi! :)

Troll boy just forgot to take his lithium. :)

Re:France

[bhtooefr]

IMHO, if their religion is RedHat, yes.

Re:There vs. their.. ARGH!

[jbolden]

How do the Japanese or Chinese manage to write with ideograms and get it right?

They don't. Written literacy is much lower in these languages relative to education, intellegence... With a complex script people produce less, more slowiy and of lower quality.

Do you pronounce they are as there?
No but I pronouce they're as there.

Join the club and vote for this!

[egghat]

You'll get two votes each week to vote for your favourite programs. The ones ranked highest will be packaged first. Very good idea.

Bye egghat.