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Mandrake Linux 9.2 Hits the Street
joestar writes "Just announced at Mandrake's website, Mandrake 9.2 (FiveStar) has just been released. Mandrake Club members get full access to 9.2 ISOs (through BitTorrent), as well as... all 9.2 contributors and translators. But the best news, in addition to all (impressive) 9.2 features is that everybody can access the traditional binary & sources tree! Public release of Mandrake 9.2 ISOs will happen at the same time as Mandrake 9.2 Pack availability in retail. It makes sense."
FYI I'm getting an average of about 20KB/sec with bittorrent. Certainly not lighting fast. Peak has been about 140KB/sec, low around 5KB/sec. Estimated total time about 17 hours.
Some of the members of Mandrake Club can't get the ISOs because they are behind "transparent" proxies set up by their ISPs. The reason is that MandrakeSoft is using the user's IP to allow the bittorrent download, but for people behind this proxies MandrakeSoft sees the proxie's address instead of the user's address and doesn't authorize the use of the bittorrent tracker.
This is happening to anyone using Spain's Telefonica ADSL. This covers almost everyone in Spain.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
You make technology decisions based on vague rememberings of something that you can't find evidence of?
Maybe you're thinking of the ads displayed during the install process rather than spyware? That's a pretty hefty accusation to be tossing around, even in a vaguely-worded statement such as yours.
I've had success installing Mandrake using the network install floppy. Here are some simple instructions, but the gist is that you download the network.img and note the location of a rpm mirror for when it asks you. It downloads a 45mb cramfs image and uncompresses it to memory so you should ideally have 90+mb of ram, or mount a swap partition from one of the other terminals.
I would recommend doing a very minimal install consisting of nothing but GNOME or KDE and any servers you wish to run. Then after the install, use urpmi to install any other packages. With 9.1 I would get lynx and use it to grab a list of mirrors from Easy Urpmi. I recommend using Texstar's repository whenever he starts packaging for 9.2. The page currently only has 9.1 and earlier sources, but expect people pestering him from this link to illicit an update.
Ok, Mandrake's site is running really slow, and I still have the window opened, so here's the text of their press statement:
A controversy has erupted today in the Linux community about the upcoming Mandrake Linux 9.2 and advertizing. Although the overall reaction from the community is mostly positive, a few people don't seem to be happy about having advertizing in Mandrake 9.2. We'd like to explain briefly why we have done this and why you shouldn't worry.
0) There won't be any ad in the screensavers in Mandrake 9.2
There will be one paid-ad in the installation procedure, and a few paid-links in bookmarks.
1) Ads are selected and won't be intrusive.
Our advertizing plan is only offered to MandrakeSoft partners - we select only ads that make sense as complementary Linux solutions. Additionally, ads won't be intrusive (no pop-up windows) and can be removed easily.
2) There have been ads in Mandrake Linux for years.
Maybe you didn't notice it, but in the installation procedure and in browser's bookmarks, there have been many links to Mandrake products, the GNU project, many Open Source projects and so on. In Mandrake 9.1 there was the first "commercial" link to a technical book content provider. Nobody was annoyed, we didn't get any feedback about that.
3) Free Software and business model.
As we are firmly committed to Open Source/Free Software, we want to keep on exploring business models that are compatible with this spirit.
This space for rent, inquire within.