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A Galaxy of Possibility: Mandrake 9.1 ProSuite
uninet writes "Our last consideration of Mandrake Linux was early this year when my colleague Eduardo Sanchez thoroughly reviewed Mandrake 9.0. In that review, Sanchez noted the numerous advances made in 9.0, but also reported some serious flaws that somewhat limited his enthusiasm. With that considered, we were anxious to find out if 9.1 could again return Mandrake to the amazing quality achieved in release 8.2. See what we found (including a look at features exclusive to the ProSuite edition)."
Other than the fact that is has a neato-keeno wizard to do some configuration chores, the article does little to explain how Mandrake is different or why it is a better choice.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
And speaking of server wizards ("drakwizard"), that's another feature we really appreciate with Mandrake. Mandrake's server wizards help to ease the setup of server processes on the system. These easy-to-use step-by-step tools make the initial setup of a web, DNS, DHCP, Windows file sharing (Samba) and other useful servers a painless task. We were able to configure the included Apache web server in just a few moments.
:)
Keep this up and Linux might be just as easy to use as Windows. Having everything come on one DVD is a nice touch too - something I wish would catch on more since DVD-Roms are almost standard these days. No mention of the price though (anyone who says $699 gets an automatic -1, Cliche
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
much as the windows world has zip? How can you compare rpm and zip? rpm = packaging system, zip = archive / compression format. It would be better to compare rpm with MSI.
Why not fork?
Because of XFree86's poor scheduler.
That's a load of crap and you know it - or at least if you don't know it, you don't know much.
XFree is nothing to do with the slowness of your average Linux desktop. In fact, XFree is possibly one of the best components of the Linux desktop experience.
Quite often, it can just be using something as large as Gnome or KDE - usually what people compare Windows to. Fire up fluxbox or waimea or another window manager instead of your Gnome/KDE and you'll often have a zippier, snappier desktop.
Applications being slow to launch comes down to a lack of refinement of application code. For instance, fire up Evolution. It loads in a couple of seconds - far faster than Outlook in it's native Windows. But then fire up the Gnome Calculator - it takes nearly twice as long as Evolution! That's because a lot more attention and focus is placed on Evolution, especially with it having commercial sponsor - Ximian. All of Gnome's apps could launch as quickly or more quickly than Evolution, there just hasn't been the manpower of the attention to detail to make them load up quickly. Another good example is Gnumeric which has a near-instant launch time.
Perhaps Gnome / KDE should dedicate a release phase to making their desktop applications more efficient. (Yeah, right, like that'd happen.)
Other issues with not being snappy, or the desktop slowing under IO or CPU load are down to 1) a crap video card / machine, 2) a crap connection from which you access your XServer (think modem) or 3) the Linux kernel itself.
I'm a Linux advocate, but I have to take my hat of to FreeBSD on (3) because it has had decent process / IO scheduling for quite some years. I hear a lot of good things about XFree under FreeBSD and it felt very smooth on the one occasion I tried it. A lot of hoo haa about Linux 2.6 is the new scheduling concepts that do indeed solve a lot of these problems, but the reality is that it's about time! If anything, until 2.6, Linux has been somewhat overrated at times.
Any performance problems are not XFree related. Just get over it, we can't keep making XFree a scape goat when it's not even an accessory to the crime in question, let alone the culprit.
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I like Mandrake a lot. We're currently running 9.0 and 9.1 on a few of our machines, but we're slowly moving over to Debian based distros. I'll give you a quick run down of why.
.debs) to get me back on the Mandrake train: Please explain in absolutely explicit detail the difference between your security modes. You *HAVE* to do this during the install process as well. If I'm rebuilding my firewall, for instance, I don't have the option to go out to the internet to find out what these things mean. This is a very important critical decision that should not be taken lightly. The only way we can properly make that decision is if the knowlege is made available to us when we need it most.
1. We're sick of RPM. We've hard RPM break on a few machines already (I think the RPM database becomes corrupted if I remember correctly). Needless to say, it's hard to upgrade your machine when your package manager goes kaput. APT/debs are SO much easier to deal with anyway.
2. Too much crap! Literally, Mandrake has TOO MUCH crap these days. I know Debian is hardly innocent, but the dependency train for whatever reason seems to be much more palatable when using Debian as opposed to Mandrake. Maybe it's all the package/package-dev combo packs that the Mandrake/RedHat people like, I'm not entirely sure. It's just too much honestly. Let me install mySQL and be done with it.
3. The big reason (for me personally), the Mandrake security model is totally whack. Once upon a time, Mandrake used to just run a nightly script which would email an audit of your system to the Administrator letting you know what was wrong. That's all it did, and that was nice. Now there's a set of different (horribly documented) security models that have all sorts of (horribly documented) behavior. I don't mind the security model idea, what I do mind is my system doing things for me (such as changing file permissions) without being explicitly told when and why this is going to happen. This has caused major problems for us on a few occasions and it's simply unacceptable. Maybe we haven't looked in the right place for the documentation, but I've tried to find it in the past with little success. I should have to go reading scripts to find this out.
What I've found is that with Debian I have a much better idea what's going on inside our systems. There are no surprises, things so far just straight up work the way we expect them to. We're competent programmers and system administrators, so this is great for us. If I were a newbie, I would definitely still recommend Mandrake. Whatever the security scripts are doing, it IS making the system more secure, but sometimes you don't want that.
If I wanted Mandrake to do one thing (short of switching to
Bryan