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Mandrake 9.2 Initial Review
joestar writes "Mandrake Linux 9.2 was released yesterday, and a first review is already available at ofb.biz! It focuses on the new desktop-oriented Mandrake 9.2 flavor, the Discovery, a 2-CD office/multimedia product for beginners which comes without any server capability. It seems that a new competitor to Windows is born, and according to Tim Butler, 'Another key to making a distribution novice friendly is insuring that everything works out of the box, and Mandrake Linux 9.2 succeeds there.(...) To the best of my knowledge the only other distribution presently including the Radeon drivers from ATI is Lindows.' Waiting for reviews of 'real' Mandrake 9.2 products (PowerPack, Corporate Server...), this review is nevertheless quite comprehensive and very interesting reading, and this new Mandrake Discovery thing should do well with the public, at least as an office desktop affordable solution in corporations."
XP is the "latest greatest", and it's down right stable compared to 9x/ME.
/. about a non-biased study which claimed that KDE is pretty much just as easy to use as XP.
.. but for people who just want to check their e-mail, surf the web, look at pictures of their grand children, listen to mp3s etc. I can't really think of any reason to justify them switching to Linux. No matter how easy it is to use.
Simplicity has nothing to do with anything. XP really isn't that simple to use, at least compared to MacOS, yet Windows still has the majority of the market share.
There a few reasons people use Windows:
1) It came with their computer.
2) They have no reason to change.
3) Everything imaginable, just, plain, works.
I'll elaborate on point #3. Devices, apps, games etc. You can walk in to any Staples or Best Buy and pick up any piece of software or any printer, digital camera, mp3 player etc. bring it home, plug it in, insert the cd-rom and presto! it just works.
Even if Linux is a million times faster and a million times more stable and has a replacement application for every common windows app if you take away that one little piece of convenience you may as well forget it.
KDE and Gnome are very windows-like and any person who's been using a Windows computer for more than a year will pick up how to use those two desktops with very little effort. I'm even reminded of a recent article published here on
Yet why change? What's the problem exactly that Linux is supposedly able to fix? Stability? I'm running XP right now and I've had more hardware issues than software.
The only thing I can really think of that Linux offers over XP, for non-tech users, is security and the ammount of free (as in cash, not beer) software that's available for it.
I work professionally as a UNIX admin right now. I deal mainly with Linux boxes, though we have some Solaris. I used to use Linux exclusively on my desktop, and to this day I wouldn't dream of using a non *nix OS at work. I can think of millions of advantages that Linux has over windows for coders, web developers, sysadmins and anyone who's really techie and likes to hack at their computer.
Now don't get me wrong. There are hidden costs to using Windows, such as MS licensing, the MS tax etc. Considering that I do look forward to the day when Linux is installed on every new desktop PC being pushed out of Future Shop and when every single device will work on Linux out of the box, ditto for games and apps. But until then I just can't see recommending Linux to anyone but my techie friends.
- Garett
It is a real possibility that even if there were a lot of diverse computing platforms that the strive for interoperability would make worms more interoperable too.
I could easily see, for example, mozilla as the de facto standard browser across all platforms (luckily we also have KHTML). If there was a security problem with the code it would be a major problem (just as it is for IE today).
The main source of strength is not from a hetrogenous environment, but from an open one, where people can identify and fix flaws before they become out of hand.
I don't understand this. Why should we say that Mandrake is for newbiew. Do you mean that it is not good for someone experienced in Linux? If it works out of the box then it MUST be evil is that it?
There are some iritating things about Mandrake, yes (automounter anyone?) but i can not say that it is made for stupid users and does not allow the knowledgable user to do his work. I can install a Mandrake distro and have it running perfectly in much less than Windows or any other distro i have seen. (but i haven't seen them all)
I would like to hear someone come with a good explanation why Mandrake is a Newbie Distro. I have seen other distros and it all boils down to the same things. If you can do it in one you can do it in the other.
I am afraid that it is the same old thing. When something becomes popular the it must be evil right? If you are not using WeirdUnsusualAmazinglyBizzareDistroFromHell version 0.666 then you are not 31337 right?
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
The idea of releasing the isos two weeks early to the club members was to give some kind of a benefit to those who've actually bothered to support the development of the Mandrake GNU/Linux distribution.
They could've gone the other way like SuSe and many others (Lindows, Xandros and so on) - make a small insignificant bit of their distribution non-free and let no-one download the isos, but they wanted to try something that would keep the whole distribution free, right according to the GNU philosophy.
They decided to trust that their club members would hold off distributing the isos just for the short time of two weeks. In my mind that would've been the decent thing to do. Limit the leeching a bit for a very limited time period and create a little incentive for actually giving something to the company that has done all the work.
Moderators, could you not mod this down?
Gosh, I sure wish I was uber-cool like you! Nothing quite says "Sex God" like spelling Windows "winbloz"!
Son, pull your inflated and feculent head out of your ass and grep a clue. Nobody is impressed by your 'tude.
While you've got your cranium out of your colon, who about you fixing the problem? Or aren't you a programmer?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I definitely agree with you.
I think people equate "newbie distro" with "crippled" or "unsuitable for the power user". I think a newbie distro can still be useful to somebody who knows what he's doing.
I'm a Solaris admin by day, and by night, I don't want to have to WORRY about it. Sure, I -could- invest the time in getting some crufty complex distro running, but I don't want to. I'm not obsessive-compulsive about programs on the system I won't ever use, so I let Mandrake install them. If I need something, I can put it on. Pull down the RPM or build it from source. It's not like it's not supported.
At the end of the day, if it's Linux, it's running the Linux kernel and you can do what you want on it. It's just a question of what other junk comes with it. I happen to like the junk Mandrake includes, especially their installer. I can click through most of the default options and have a functional system up in the time it takes the package to install, and still watch hockey in the background.
If you (in the general sense, not you-the-author-of-the-parent-post) derive your geek-self-esteem by doing more work to make your computer run than I do, more power to you. I'll spend the time doing something else, and you can be the bigger geek.
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
DLL Hell and a no-name audio card with a auto-configured IRQ conflict will make bald men even balder, young women turn into Pug-faced hags, and kids turn inside out spilling their Speghetti-o's all over dad's new desk.
...... ......
Are you trying to be funny? Or are you just stupid?
Nothing you mentioned is valid. And even if it was, how is it any worse than buying hardware for Linux?
Research the product you want to buy to make sure it "works" with Linux. 2 or 3 weeks later when you find hardware that "works" (meaning Linux can see it, although 50% of the functionality is removed), you go out and buy it. You bring it home, plug it in. Nothing. You find out your kernel doesn't have support included for the hardware you bought. So you recompile the kernel. Reboot. Several hours go by of tinkering with config files and boot options. Then you spend another 2 or 3 hours on newsgroups and Linux help sites and find out that your kernel version doesn't have support for the product even though it claims to. So you get a patch. Recompile the kernel. Reboot. Kernel panic. Reboot again back to the old safe kernel. Fix the problem. Reboot. Kernel panic. Reboot. Fix the problem. Reboot. No kernel panic this time. Woohoo! modprobe ModuleName. Some obscure meaningless message. More research. More newsgroup searches. You find 150 people describing the exact same problem you are having. But unfortunatley no one seems to know the answer. You reboot again just for good measure hoping against hope it will magically fix the problem. It doesn't, of course. After a 30 hour marathon in front of the computer to get your device working, you fall over on the floor and pass out. 12 hours later you wake up feeling like death has sucked out your soul, but get back to work anyway. Another 8 or 10 hours goes by. By now you've downloaded 50MB worth of libraries, source code, drivers, scan tools, etc... and installed it on your system. God only knows where. You feel like you need to format and re-install just to clean up your system now. A dozen or so reboots, and kernel compilations later you decide the device might be defective. So you reboot and select your WinXP partition to verify that device is physically bad.
"Found New Hardware -- Would you like to install it?"
"Yes"
"Your hardware is now ready to use!"
I had the exact opposite problem. HP printer connected through USB. In Mandrake (some aold version from over a year ago), it took a couple of clicks in PrinterDrake to install. No fuss, no mess, as easy it one could imagine. One could hardly ask for a more pleasurable experience that does not involve alcohol, drugs, and/or sex.
Now in Windows, I made the horrible mistake of leaving the printer connected. Most hardware on most OS's, you connect the hardware then instal drivers. But some idiotic HP engineer thought it would be funny to design thier drivers so that if you do not connect the printer halfway through the driver install, it will not work. I guess they were trying to top the Low created by ATI. After finally editing the registry to show ghost devices, I was able to yank the misconfigured printer driver out of Device Manager and get it installed. My POS Acer Prisa scanner will actually make tolerable images in Linux, good luck getting anything better than a bad photocopy in Windows.
The only thing I would need to recompile my kernel for to get working fully, is my 8-in-1 card reader. Apparently there is some scsi option I need to enable to use anything besides the compact flash reader. As I primarily got it to read CF and the other things were a bonus, I am not in a big rush to recompile.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life