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Mandrake 9.2 Initial Review

Posted by michael on from the fast-food dept.

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."

8 of 403 comments (clear)

  1. Discovery. by ideatrack · · Score: 3, Informative

    I like the look of this Discovery package, if it lives up to it's promise.

    The main thing putting most everyday users off Linux (arguably the people who need it most, just look at the reaaction to Blaster) is how to learn it. XP is dayglo and simple, that's why people use it.

    If Discovery is attractive, easy, and comes with a nice little introduction to get started, that's got to be a good thing.

    1. Re:Discovery. by garett_spencley · · Score: 5, Insightful

      XP is the "latest greatest", and it's down right stable compared to 9x/ME.

      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 /. about a non-biased study which claimed that KDE is pretty much just as easy to use as XP.

      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. .. 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.

      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

  2. Download the ISOs now, for free by bconway · · Score: 3, Informative

    Torrents of the GPL ISOs are availabe at http://suprnova.org/. Search the front page for "Mandrake" and you'll find them (their location has changed a few times, so I won't post direct links).

    The more people that jump on, the faster it'll be, so spread the word. These are the download editions and legal under the GPL, of course. You can check the md5sums against those posted in the earlier Slashdot article comments.

    --
    Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
    1. Re:Download the ISOs now, for free by slux · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

  3. Article Text by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    FIRST LOOK: Mandrake Linux 9.2 Discovery Edition
    By Timothy R. Butler
    Editor-in-Chief, Open for Business
    October 14, 2003, 12:45:03 EDT

    It's official. By the time you read this, Mandrake Linux 9.2 will be available to Mandrake Club members around the world. Mandrake Linux 9.2 marks the first release from the "big 3" distributors in about six months. If you're wondering whether you should rush out and install it, read on for our first look at a distribution from the Fall 2003 distribution release cycle.

    For the purposes of this brief preview of Mandrake Linux 9.2, we tested a copy of the new "Discovery Edition" provided to us by MandrakeSoft. The Discovery Edition replaced the "Standard Edition" offered in previous releases, but it isn't just a fancy new name - it's a desktop focused distribution intended especially for novices (although, we feel more advanced users may be pleased with the simplicity of the Discovery Edition as well).

    First there is the installation. Now, if you've installed any of the major GNU/Linux distributions in recent times, you know that most are quite simple to install as is, and Mandrake Linux is no exception. Discovery Edition takes a page out of the LindowsOS and Windows XP installers, however, and makes the existing Mandrake installer even simpler by removing package selection. While many additional packages are included for installation later, should they be needed, Discovery Edition focuses on installing what the average user needs without making them sift through tons of unfamiliar programs.

    Once booted, Discovery Edition includes another quickly apparent simplification - task based menus. While Mandrake usually includes task-based menus as an option in Menudrake, they wisely chose to make it the default in this edition, thus freeing the user to worry about what they want to do rather than how they want to do it. I found the menu layout very intuitive, making it a snap to find the programs I wanted for various tasks. The standard menus were also available as a submenu for those wanting a specific tool for the job.

    Another key to making a distribution novice friendly is insuring that everything works out of the box, and Mandrake Linux 9.2 succeeds there. When the system was booted for the first time, we were surprised and delighted to find ATI's official FireGL driver for the Radeon 9700 video card was already installed. To the best of my knowledge the only other distribution presently including the Radeon drivers from ATI is Lindows.

    Other hardware that has been problematic also was installed. Our Hewlett-Packard PSC 2210's photo card reader was automatically mounted and unmounted (with a convenient icon on the desktop) - making it as easy to access the compact flash card that we inserted as it was to access a CD. This puts Mandrake Linux further in the lead as far as Hewlett-Packard multifunction devices are concerned, since we are unaware of any other current distribution that even properly detects the PSC 2210, much less properly configures the photo card reader.

    The only issue we had with the hardware was actually a non-issue - the master, speaker and PCM volume controls on the soundcard were muted. Admittedly I should have caught it, but I overlooked the PCM volume control in my haste. It would have been nice if the friendlier aumix had been preinstalled along with kmix (which gets absolutely obnoxiously large when used with a SoundBlaster Live), but if this is the worst we have to complain about, it isn't much.

    Also included was the newly released OpenOffice.org 1.1, which just barely made the release cycle. With this release's much speedier startup times, using the suite is much more pleasant than before. OpenOffice's many new features perfectly complement the Discovery Edition's improvements in usability to make the distribution perfect for a Windows replacement on an office desktop with no fuss at all.

    We were esp

  4. Time to change domains... by johnthorensen · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...to www.cfb.biz

    5.274 minutes after being posted to slashdot, ofb.biz is now Closed for Business :)

    -JT

  5. Mixed blessing by Lane.exe · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I've always said that Mandrake would be the distro to cause MS users to seriously consider switching. I started my Linux oddysey on Mandrake (hell, I still use it!) and fully believe that it offers the widest spectrum of a Linux experience.

    The average user can get it working right out of the box (or download). That's something you can't say for most Linux installs -- or even some Windows installs. The hardware support is phenomenal.

    And the ease of use doesn't have to detract from its power -- Mandrake gives you plenty of choices, from a fully-loaded, app-laden KDE or Gnome interface to light, fast WMs like Fluxbox. And best of all, it's Linux, pure and simple, so that all our favorite apps are still there.

    I originally switched away from Mandrake because of the poor package management they used to have, but the implementation of urpmi in 9.1 convinced me to scrap my Debian install for Mandrake. Package management is a breeze once you get your sources configured. It's still not as developed as apt, but at least it doesn't break things the way apt is wont to.

    Mandrake is Linux's best hope for widespread adoption.

    --
    IAALS.
  6. Desktops are "real" by fmaxwell · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Waiting for reviews of 'real' Mandrake 9.2 products (PowerPack, Corporate Server...)

    It's that kind of elitist attitude that keeps Microsoft happily selling countless copies of Windows XP while Linux venders have to beg for donations. 99.99% of users don't need to run their own web server, FTP server, SMTP server, Telnet server, or SSH server. They use their computers for web browsing, games, e-mail, word processing, and maybe doing their taxes. They wouldn't know how to configure USENET news servers if their lives depended on it.

    To look down on an OS release solely because it isn't configured for a server role is silly. And it's counterproductive. Do you think that Microsoft would sooner give up server OS sales or desktop OS sales?

    A desktop product is no less "real" than is a server product. It's just an OS for a different audience. If we want to see Linux prosper, it has to get a real foothold on the desktop and, for that reason, this release is far more important than the "real" releases to which you referred.