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Mandrake 9.2 ISOs Available
joestar writes "Since LG has released updated firmwares and a recovery procedure for all so-called ATAPI LG cd-rom drives that were "destroyed" by a feature of Mandrake 9.2, MandrakeSoft has publicly released the set of Mandrake 9.2 ISO images which are now available on a number of FTP mirrors. Mandrake 9.2 is one of the few remaining 100%-OSS major Linux distributions, so considering a MandrakeClub membership or joining Cooker - Mandrake's open development version - is certainly an excellent idea."
Here's the feature list.
It's very easy: Red Hat has dropped support for it's Free Software Linux distribution, and wants Fedora to be the replacement for Red Hat Linux as you know it. SuSE is not an OSS Linux distribution. Slack is dying :-( Now your choice for major Linux distribs is: Debian or Mandrake. And maybe Knoppix in the future.
Considering that RMS seems to think even Debian isn't really a Free Software(tm) distro, I find it difficult to image that Mandrake qualifies.
On the 9.2 comparison chart you can clearly see that every version of Mandrake other than the Download edition includes plenty of proprietary software.
Take a look at the M's in Debian's non-free section and compare it to Mandrake's package list.
Don't get me wrong. Most of what I know about GNU/Linux I learned on Mandrake. Implying that it's the last of the free software distros is comical though.
Excellent - thank you! I'm currently doing my bit - download speed is about half my upload, which is maxed out (on a 512/256Kbps ADSL line).
This'll be the third distro I've tried in almost as many days. Despite being a long-time 'drake user, when I heard about the problem, I thought it perhaps best to try another distro (I have an LG drive myself).
Gentoo came with 49 pages of installation instructions. 49. Now, I'm no newbie - my first Linux install was Slackware 3.something back in '97. I downloaded it at college and took it home on floppies - lots of floppies. But Gentoo I simply couldn't be bothered with - I got it installed, rebooted, saw a ton of module loading errors and booted back to Windows to download something else.
That something was Fedora Core 1. Installed fine, booted, everything working - except, it didn't recognise my ADSL modem (Speedtouch USB Home, the frog one). Okay, fine - back to Windows, downloaded some stuff, back to Fedora. What do you mean, "fs type ntfs isn't supported by this kernel"?! Apparently RedHat (and so Fedora) is the only distro that doesn't include the ntfs module. Thanks for that, guys.
Well, I can't be bothered, frankly. I'm going back to Mandrake, which I know supports my ntfs partition and ADSL modem out of the box (as it were). These days, while I'll happily make the effort to get stuff configured just the way I want it, I will *not* waste that much time just getting something installed, and with Mandrake, I don't have to.
It's official. Most of you are morons.