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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."
About two weeks ago I decided to try and install Linux on my old K6-2 450mhz machine gathering dust in the basement.
A friend of mine gave me a few cd's that had something called 'Mandrake' on it.
He said "This is supposed to be the most user-friendly 'distro' out there. Give it a try."
So with trepidation about wiping out my beloved win98se install on the old machine, I jumped right in.
On firing up the install disk, the Man-drake installer asked me if I wanted to remove the win98se partition that already existed. After pondering this for several minutes I though, 'what the hell, I can always reinstall it!' So I let it fly.
After what seemed like 45 minutes of swapping cd's in-and-out of the drive, the man-drake (isn't that some sort of bird?) installer ask me what I wanted to use this linux machine for. So many choices! games, office, mail server, web server, about 2 dozen choices flooded my screen. This is madness! So after carefully considerating my options
I decided to choose them all! I would be a Linux power-user to end all linux power-users!
So after this decision was made I waited. And waited. And waited. During this I started to wonder. My Windows XP Home intallation on my other Peecee didn't ask me thse kind of questions, and it easily has the all the abilities that man-drake advertised to have. After all, I paid for WinXP Home. Sigh, I guess this it the price one pays
for being part of the linux elite.
Approximately 50 mintues later I get another prompt from the man-drake installer asking me what kind of GUI I wanted to use, KDE or GNOME. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! I selected both and let it fly.
After only about 20 mintues this time it appeared the install was completed. The mandrake installer told me it was going to reboot and then I would revel in Linux goodness. I waited with baited breath while the reboot churned away, eagerly waiting the opportuntity to use the KDE/GNOME interface. Page after page of command line
stuff flew by my screen, seeming to get faster and faster as the time of my linux deliverance approached. Then, the screen flashed black (kinda like those scenes from the movie Wargames). I gasped and was presented with something like this:
bsh: blah/blah/blah/ ____
What the hell was this? Wasn't this man-drake linux supposed to be user friendly? Instead of the friendly confines of a WinXP like GUI instead I was given an ugly DOS like prompt, which looked supiciously like the TRS-80 system I first learned BASIC on in high school. Is this all the farther the great open-source movement has progressed?
After serveral minutes of sobbing and knashing of teeth, I came to a decision. All the linux fags out there were not going to defeat me! They were not going to cry "Bend over WinXP boy, you're going to take linux OUR WAY and like it!".
I quickly found my old musty copy of 'Unix in a Nutshell' from my college days and got to work. In a few hours I found out how to start the KDE GUI. This made life so much easier. After several days I was able to get the machine's 14.4 internal modem working with man-drake and connected to the internet, using a browser called Mozilla. Where oh where were the glorious pop-ups that appeared as I was surfing porn sites? Those bastards!
After several more days I was starting to feel somewhat comfortable. Using something called Gimp to manipulate my growing collection of adult images was becoming a habit. And because I was ashamed to let my friends and neighbors know I was using a gasp! free operating system like mandrake, I kept the pee-cee in the basement. Now my girlfriend things the sounds emanating from below are me just woodworking or lifting weights. I guess linux has freed me after all!
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
linux is linux. distros dont matter. if the core is linux, then linux is what it is. the distros are becoming, "who can add the most shit to a distribution." come on, why does everything need to be installed?
i think linux with an install of the base gnu utils would be a perfect linux machine.
All those distributions out there are just so bloated. Fuck them all.
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Indeed, Apple has successfully produced/marketed "computers" for children. Keep up the good work Apple! I want to buy one in purple! Not to mention the AOL support is fantastic!
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
P.S. We love the one button mouse!
Where did this "Linux users are fags"-crap come from? I mean Slashdot's supposed to be pro open source but these days every thread seems to be more about bashing linux and the open source than micro$oft.
Anyway, you're full of shit and I can prove it. Linux users cannot be fags because they are smart. A smart person does not put their penis into places where the good God did not intend it to go. After all, he didn't create Adam and Steve but Adam and Eve. Pushing your penis into some other guys lubed rectum is clearly a sign of low IQ. And if you have a low IQ you can't use Linux. Ergo, Linux users can't be fags.
> 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.
Your experience has been remarkably different from my experience. In my
experience, it's like this:
Windows:
1. Buy hardware, first checking to make sure it has a Windows XP logo
on it, because if it's got the old Win98 logo you just don't know if
it'll work.
2. Plug it in, put in the CD, and install the drivers.
3. Try to use it, and find that it doesn't work.
4. Uninstall the drivers, re-read the install instructions, and then
reinstall the drivers. Reboot several times. Swear, if you're the
sort of person who swears.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 for about two and a half days.
6. Magically, the hardware works! Go into System Restore and make darn
sure you have a restore point, labelled as WORKING, because you never
want to repeat this again, EVER.
7. The next day you discover that some other random thing has stopped
working now. But that's okay; with System Restore you can switch
back and forth between your two restore points whenever you need to
have the one thing or the other thing working. Easy!
Mandrake:
1. Before you buy the thing, you google for reviews that mention Linux,
just to be sure it'll work.
2. Buy it.
3. Plug it in.
4. Turn it on.
5. HardDrake will configure it for you.
There is no driver CD to fool with.
6. The hardware works.
7. The next day, everything else that worked before still works.
Sure, step 1 is easier for Windows. But Step 1 by itself isn't enough.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Mandrake is a half assed slackware ripoff
I'm guessing you haven't seen an OEM system since your mom bought you a Compaq Presario in 1997.
I guess the new Win XP machine a friend of mine got doesn't count, where McAffe won't work worth a damn and Blaster took the machine out before a person could say "What a POS."
Microsoft is doing practically nothing to protect their customers. It's like Ford putting a blasting cap into their gas tanks, just because.
The only-stupid-people-don't-patch excuse doesn't work, when there are literally hundreds or thousands of unknown exploitable bugs in Windows, Outlook, IE, etc. One only needs a statistical argument here (a bug per thousand lines...100 million LOC...you do the math). Releasing four patches a week is only lip service to a problem bigger than the Hoover Dam.
Microsoft will either renew themselves or evolution will take them out. My bet is on natural selection rather than their ability to suddenly become modest and revamp their work force of tens of thousands of people and years of counter-intuitive hiring and cultural indoctrination.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin