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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
But... if someone wants to make a fork, call it Womandrake, and includes lots of hot chicks throughout, I'll be there in a minute.
Personally, one of the first things I do is build the NFS share so I can do net installs on everything, update packages, etc. Not to mention its usually a pretty fast way to install
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
I'm glad we have such a professional Sweet of software availiable to the users. This is so Suite!
Well seeing as Mandrake is in freeze for 9.2 gold (rc1 is out), isn't this a bit late?
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.
I'm currently running Mandrake Cooker and its coming on nicely over the last few weeks. Some things to look forward to is the new Gnome 2.4 desktop (along with loads of new apps), Kernel 2.4.22 (and an optional 2.6-test kernel for the adventureous!), KDE 3.1.3, which is now very stable. If you like gnome, but don't like Redhat's version, then Mandrake 9.2 is for you!
It's also very stable, unlike my experiance of 8.1!
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
http://mandrakeuser.cjb.net
New web site up on how to set up mandrake 9.1 to ease the configuration pains of the new linux user. Written and catered for the moderate computer user. It covers how to get and install mandrake and add in most of the needed applications. Covers most of the major software included in the distribution, other freely available applications, newbie command line tutorial, how to handle some common and annoying bugs peculiar to each application.
This HOWTO is my first contribution community, and since I found newbie documentation wanting, I wrote one myself. It is for the impatient user who wants to reduce their startup time, and would apply to other distributions and mandrake versions as well.
Written from a user's point of view, it covers how to get and install Mandrake, add in most of the needed applications, a newbie command line tutorial, and how to handle some peculiar bugs to each application. This guide might spare you a lot of googling for answers as it's all placed on one convenient website.
PART I
1. Introduction
2. Indispensable Tools for the Linux User
3. Useful links
PART II - Mandrake Installation
1. Getting Mandrake 9.1
2. Installing Mandrake 9.1
3. Going through the install sequence
4. Using Mandrake
5. Nice things to add easily
6. Configuration with Mandrake Control Center
7. Configuration with Gnome Control Center
8. Important Configuration of Menus and MIME Types
9. More Advanced Configuration
PART III - Linux Shell and Apps
1. Navigating around terminal
2. Shells -- bash, csh, rsh, sh
3. Environments and Paths
4. File Permissions
5. Editing files
6. Linking
7. Finding Files
8. Using grep
9. Basic bash scripts knowledge
10. Running Remote X applications
11. Mounting Remote File Systems
12. Language setup for man pages
13. Handling Print Jobs
PART IV - Software Packages
1. What are packages?
2. Specifying Sources For Online Downloading - Mandrake Mirrors, Texstar, PLF
3. Packages to be installed from Mandrake CDs - Mesa, mplayer, Timidity, pan, gaim, mozplugger
4. Packages to install from Texstar - Macromedia Flash, nano, Real Player
5. Mplayer and Codecs
6. Other essential packages- Open Office, Sun Java, Adobe Acrobat 5, BitTorrent
7. Setting up SMB share for Windows
8. Using vncserver for remote desktop applications
9. File Sharing - p2p networks - Limewire, edonkey, lmule
10. Running M$ Office under Linux.
11. Games - SNES, MAME, WineX
PART V - Advanced FAQ
1. How do I get DRI 3D acceleration to work?
2. Mandrake Fonts Deuglification and Anti-aliasing
3. Email Clients and Web Browsers (Handling mailto: and http:)
4. Full Mozilla Plugins Configuration (Quicktime, Java, Flash, Mplayer)
5. Konquerer Plugins Configuration
6. X Windows xmatrix screensaver
7. How to adjust the sound volume permanently
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?
This user account is inactive account replaced by the PDA
Despite the fact that this article appears to copy the text of my article, it has been modified to include one or more offensive remarks. Please read the original instead.
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"You would not get a high grade for such a design" -- Andy Tanenbaum on Linus' Linux design.
InfoWorld recently compared Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, and Turbolinux for a use inside a corporate environment. The result was that the 4 all products were excellent, but the Mandrake Prosuite 9.1 ranked first with the best overall note. Additionnally the ProSuite is by far the less expensive product (around $200). You'll find this 3-page article at InfoWorld. And the Mandrake 9.1 ProSuite is available for purchase directly from MandrakeSoft at MandrakeStore (Mandrake Club Members usually get rebates on most Mandrake products).
I run mandrake on a ti powerbook g4 (apple) and the support from the mandrake ppc community is excellent. (Stew Benedict deserves mentioning). Mandrake PPC is on a slower (annual) release cycle.
I hope mandrake can stay the most popular linux distribution, it earned it through dedication to user friendliness and keeping to the spirit of open source arguably better than RedHat and SuSe.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
I upgraded (yes, upgraded) my RedHat distro to Mandrake 9 on my Thinkpad this morning in the car on the way to work. Yes, it really was that easy, and sitting in traffic has never been so enjoyable.
It picked up the Thinkpad's cs46xx soundcard, allowed xfree to run in 11x8, and although it skipped past installing the bootloader without giving me any say in the matter (installing lilo straight to my MBR instead of putting grub on the Linux boot partition, like I would have preferred), it didn't completely destroy my MBR and refuse to boot my XP NTFS partition like RedHat did.
The whole install was incredibly quick, even on a P2 366 - all in all about 30 minutes, finishing just as I pulled into the office. On the down side, the installation procedures are a little more inflexible than that of RedHat or SuSE, and KDE 3.1 seems to be broken(?).
On the whole, after a couple of hours of tooling about, it seems to be an excellent release.
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Well, the big 3 RedHat, SuSE, and Mandrake are all standardized on RPM. It's the non-commercial niche distros like Debian and Gentoo that choose not to use vanilla RPM. Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with that, it's how innovation happens, but it really negates the "everybody does it different" argument. RPM is "good enough" and it does the job 95% of the time. A far more important goal I think is the LSB which could eventually lead to a single common x86 Linux RPM for all distros, now that would be an accomplishment. The problem there is that the further you stray from kernel land, the greater the disagreements on how things "should be".
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Besides its installer, there are two things that, in my opinion, make Mandrake a great distro compared to Red Hat:
1) its calpability to install/uninstall software easily with the urpmi tools, from multiple sources - for instance, just type (or use the rpmdrake app): urpmi the_app_I_need and urpmi will automatically search for the other packages needed for this app (dependencies) and install them if you accept. The power of this tool is that if you added a FTP source (or multiple FTP sources) in addition to your DVD source for insta,ce, it will look for the missing libs/missing apps in all these sources. This is very convenient.
2) the Mandrake Club applications sources (60,000 packages!) which can be added to the URPMI sources. It provides many many many apps, including most common commercial software (FlashPlayer...). Just select an app in the list (or use the search utility), click on install and it downloads and installs the app. This is powerful actually.
Additionnally, using the "PLF" (plf.zarb.org) source of apps (unofficial) just provides direct download and install access to all codecs needed to play all videos formats (AVI, MOV...) under Xine and other video-players for instance... Maybe not very legal, but convenient for the least.
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.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
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
Interesting reviews, but ...
I for one am tired of seeing a new distribution every 6 months from Mandrake and RedHat.
My problem is upgrading - the distributions support it, but basically end up reinstalling the whole system. I'd rather they only came out with one major release per year, which was very stable and easily upgradeable.
I don't care if it doesn't ship with the latest and greatest KDE and kernel!