Mandrake 10.1 Official Publicly Available

joestar writes "Just announced: the latest major Mandrakelinux release - 10.1 Official - is ready for public download on a number of FTP mirrors and through Bitorrent. This new version is now also available on a convenient ISO-DVD image, and as an experimental mini-ISO-CD image (which needs a fast Internet access to complete the installation). This new version provides many new features and a better hardware support, including improved support of mobile and wireless technologies. Download is available here."

Comments

Thank god they didn't call this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandrake 10 Service Pack 1.

10.1 was a step back for me

[poofyhairguy82]

A month ago I installed 10.1 Official on my computer by installing the Community version and using URMPI to get the official version. I was looking forward to 10.1, as I need a good laptop OS. Yet I was very disappointed. My Linksys Wireless card (which worked fine in 10 official) wouldn't work. I tried in vain to fix it, but eventually gave up for Fedora Core 3. I would prefer to use Mandrake, as it probably has the most unofficial binary packages of any RPM distro and I hate compiling from source, but the non working drivers stopped the show for me.

Of course, this is my own experiance and other may differ.

Re:10.1 was a step back for me

[ReverendRyan]

I agree. I installed 10.1 Official when it went to .torrents to clubmembers, and I'm basically sorry I did.

I've basically noticed the polish leaving MDK since 8.0 (well maybe 8.2). 9.2 was the last one that didn't REALLY piss me off. I installed 10.1 hoping it would fix the flaws of 10.0, but its made enough of them worse that I'm considering leaving.

The biggest flaw I've found is their urpmi gui ("Mandrakelinux Update") will crash on "bad signature"s. Thats, fine. But it taints the RPM database by marking them installed, and refuses to try again. Then I have to go muck around at a shell to get the graphical tool working again. Oh well.

Re:10.1 was a step back for me

[thegrassyknowl]

I am a Mandrake user, and I paid the momeny to get an early copy of 10.1, based on their fabled support of wireless and notebooks.

I was sorely disappointed when I installed it and their configuration tools did not understand WPA out of the box, even though it is practically everywhere now. I had to go and get wpa_supplicant (which I couldn't find on the install CDs) and install that. I still haven't actually got WPA stable yet.

I also had a killer of a time with my synaptics pad when I plugged in a USB mouse and my external USB keyboard wouldn't work without some tweaking - it kept using the internal keyboard.

The only other problem I had was it bollocksed up the URPMI config for my CDs. That may have been caused by trying to add my locally mirrored updates as a URPMI source though. A couple of the discs were referenced incorrectly and I couldn't install files from them. It seems to work after tweaking the config file.

I must say that 10.1 is certainly impressive though, if you discount the few obvious flaws above. I have the PowerPack release, and "urpmi package" usually finds the package in my local copy of the CDs. The default install is simple enough for newbies to pick up and run with. There are enough tools and functionalty provided that advanced users (like me) can feel mostly confortable as well.

Re:10.1 was a step back for me

[thegrassyknowl]

*grumbles*

s/momeny/money
s/confortable/comfortable

Re:10.1 was a step back for me

[tealtalon]

I have installed Gentoo 3-4 times in all the different stages without problems on my laptop. Looking for a non source based distro I installed Mandrake 10.1 and the install was very nice. Lots of pretty buttons. I set everything up, and rebooted. My laptop never even booted into X. It just hung. I tossed the cd in the trash, and grabbed the latest Gentoo install cd and started all over. They want you to pay for this?

Re:10.1 was a step back for me

[Stevyn]

I agree. When I decided to make the switch to Linux, I figured I'd start with something easy. Mandrake 10 was easy to install, but everything else was a pain in the ass. I switched to gentoo about a month later and I'm very happy with it. The installation is long and tedious, but not difficult. Comparing URPMI to portage is comparing night and day. Portage is worlds better.

I think newbies thinking Mandrake is the way to go will be disappointed with linux

Re:10.1 was a step back for me

[paulatz]

9.2 was the last one that didn't REALLY piss me off. I hear someone saying "(X-1).2 was the last one that didn't REALLY piss me off." every time a new mandrake version is shipped. It could be because many newbies used mandrake 1 version ago?

Re:10.1 was a step back for me

[paulatz]

Wow, a live example of the Mandrake-Gentoo migration syndrome.
More info here: http://greenfly.org/mes.html

Bittorrent, Bittorrent, Bittorrent,

[DeadBugs]

Please use the Bittorrent link.

Estimated time left: 54 hour 10 min 30 sec = :-(

Re:Bittorrent, Bittorrent, Bittorrent,

[paulatz]

I am using Bittorrent and I have uploaded twice what i have downloaded.
I am getting a bit tyred.

Recent Mandrake Problems

[empirionx3]

I am going to download and install this version (when my 200h bittorrent dl is finished), but hope that it is more functional than the 10.1 community. I ended up having many problems with it, including inablilty to install NVIDIA drivers. Seems to me that they are falling behind other distros.

Re:Recent Mandrake Problems

[fastduke]

strange? the nvidia drivers have always worked fine for me in 9.2, 10 community and this release 10.1. Although I did an upgrade to 10.1 rather than a clean install and had to reinstall the nvidia driver , but nvidia's install found the previous install and removed it and installed the new one just fine.

I do wonder, since I got the club release if this download contains the updates? On some machines konqueror would freeze completely after pluging in a usb key.

Re:Recent Mandrake Problems

[MarkRose]

The problem was for a while, NVidia didn't have support for the latest 2.6.8 kernel, which you would have if you did the updates for 10.1 Community. A basic 10.1 Community install had 2.6.7, iirc, which worked fine with the existing NVidia driver. Just recently, NVidia released a new version of their driver which works with the latest kernels.

Fedora vs. Mandrake vs. SUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a regular mandrake user, and am disappointed to see that they seem to be losing ground to Fedora (esp. Core 3). I've never had much experience with SUSE beyond the 9.2 Live DVD, which seemed to be pretty nice. Any recommendations as to which I should be using at the momemnt?

Also, did they ever fix the problem with Fedora and Windows running on the same drive? Did FC3 correct that?

Re:Fedora vs. Mandrake vs. SUSE

[thegrassyknowl]

Also, did they ever fix the problem with Fedora and Windows running on the same drive? Did FC3 correct that?

So it clobbered all your windows installs. Where is the problem?

FC2 to Windows:
"All of your partition are mine!"

Re:Fedora vs. Mandrake vs. SUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

FC2 to Windows: "All of your partition are mine!" "All your partition are belong to us. You are on your way to destruciton." -FC2 to Windows

Re:Fedora vs. Mandrake vs. SUSE

[konstantinlevin]

Did FC3 correct that?

Fedora Core 1, my first Linux install, deleted the Windows Virus for me.

Re:Fedora vs. Mandrake vs. SUSE

[tropicflite]

I have an older system, PIII w/256 ram, and I am not able to install anything > Mandrake 9.1.. all higher releases hang during installation. Also, my 9.1 system didn't reliably detect my CF and Smartmedia cards, and I could never get my HP officejet 4215 multifunction's printer function to work, even after getting the ppd from linuxprinting.org.

So I switched to SUSE 9.1, and now all of my devices are working correctly. YMMV.

Mandrake 10.1 Community no problems...

[samdu]

I've been running 10.1 community without a single issue since it was first available. Everything installed without a hitch and has been chugging along without incident since the initial install. I'll be grabbing the official release asap. I have two clients running Fedora and I haven't had any issues to speak of with them either. All in all, I'd say the quality and ease of use of all of the major distros is getting better by leaps and bounds. Novell was kind enough to send me a copy of SuSE Enterprise 9 that I'll try to get installed on some machine here soon.

In contrast, I've had major issues with SBS 2003 and some minor issues with other MS Server OSes lately. I won't be installing 2003 SP1 any time soon. It's a sad thing when I'm prepared to upgrade an entire OS on the Linux side yet afraid to even install a SP on the Windows side. Clearly Microsoft still has some work to do.

Mandrake

[Scott7477]

Based on the number of comments posted so far related to this story, I would say the editors shouldn't bother posting any more stories about Mandrake.

Madrakae

[allden]

I saw the official ISOs around yesterday afternoon (CST). There were 3-4 US mirrors on the download page of which only one was fast till 7 PM (CST) after which it came to a crawl. Today, I saw 5-6 servers listed on the download page.

Anyways it seems that I have sufficiently messed up with my current mandrake installation so much so that the 10.1 official upgrade process just hangs and it takes 5 minutes for KDE to show up it's face after I login.Its all because of my misuse of urpmi tool

I am also looking for a good builtin wireless support(atleast for my PCI wireless card) - my PC is on the 2nd floor while the router is in the basement. Another thing I am looking for is a builtin support for Linux PVRs like mythTV or Freevo - I have wasted more than suffiicent time to unsuccessfully configure them.

This time I might go for Gentoo if I get good wireless and PVR builtin pacakges. It might be another learning curve.

DVD's! nice!

[rubee]

Why aren't more distros offering DVD isos? it would be so much more tidy, not to mention more torrent-friendly.

Re:DVD's! nice!

[paulatz]

As far as I know most distributions offer DVDs right now.

Evening One: Wasted

[Dr. Spork]

Well, I thought I'd try this, since my Linux partition needed a rewrite, and I was intrigued by the single disk deal which auto-fetches RPMs. But it turned out to be a very sloppy disk indeed.

First of all, installation just got stuck and needed a hard reboot just because one of my disks is SATA. Gah, is SATA isn't exactly bleeding edge stuff... Once I figured out what was killing the installer, I disabled that disk in bios and the installer let me go on. I set up my internet connection and I asked it to fetch extra packages by FTP, since I wan't planning to install a whole lot at the start. Well sure, the servers are probably busy, but can you guess how the installer reacts to that? Yup, it just cuts out. The big grey box in the installer just gets empty, the pointer turns into the hourglass, and that's how it stays. That's just sloppy and disappointing.

So I finally just reformatted and stopped asking the installer to try getting stuff from servers, saying I only have this one disk. From there the setup went fine, but it left me with a system that has exactly one GUI application: the terminal. If they put in a graphical file manager, rpm manager and maybe Mozilla (they had plenty of space on the disk), I would have had more of a will to go on, but as it is, I think I'll just go to bed and overwrite this monstrosity with something else. That is, unless somebody can recommend a way to go on with the installation from the GUI.

Mandrake

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't tried Mandrake on a laptop (unlike most people who complain on this page about their experiences with Mandrake) but I used 9.1,10 and 10.1 Official on a desktop and it worked very well.In my opinion 10.1 Official it's a step forward for Mandrake(solved a few little problems I had with 10.0).Urpmi it's probably the best package manager if you use rpms,MCC(Mandrake Control Center) is as good as YAST and there are many software repositories for Mandrake.

Works fine for me

[BenjyD]

I just installed Mdk 10.1 on my laptop and desktop for a test, and it looks pretty good. Suspend to disk works nicely on the laptop (old Compaq armada m300), NVIDIA drivers installed easily and wireless (Netgear WG311 v2) on the desktop works fine with the ndiswrapper driver. It's pretty fast and stable so far: definitely better than 10.0, which was very buggy.
My only complaints:
- default theme in GNOME is nasty
- Removable memory cards don't work properly (it doesn't detect card insert/remove like HAL based distros do)
- Xemacs is broken, but emacs-X11 works fine
- general bugginess in rpmdrake. It stopped seeing CDs after a while, for example.

Different experience

[czarangelus]

A lot of people are posting negative comments about how their MDK 10.1 install turned out, and I'd just like to temper that with my experience.

I've had nothing but good fortune with my install of 10.1. It detected everything (including my Synaptics touchpad, trackball USB mouse, and wireless card) perfectly and got it up and running with no hassles.

I really like the administrator tools in Mandrake, which is one of the reasons I use it instead of any other distribution. In 10.1 the GUI tools are very clean and look great.

I do have some complaints, like I don't like how the Mandrake security tools change permissions on files once an hour, requiring me to add a new rule to reset it back to the permissions I wanted. This was a neverending source of frustration to me until I finally figured out what was doing it.

But all in all I've had a very good experience with Mandrake 10.1. This is on a Presario 2190US laptop, and as you can see, your mileage may vary.

"small" problems -> Evening One: Wasted = "big"

[KWTm]

I've said it before on Slashdot ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=127781&cid=106 78681) so I won't rehash it all, but this is a prime example of how "small" problems can turn out to be showstoppers for Linux. Look at how diverse people's experiences are: "I installed Mdk10.1-o, and it's wonderful!" "I did the same, and it was a big waste of time!"

Why is that? Why does a single problem with fetching RPMs across the net cause the installer program to just decide to give up? Why do distributions fail to account for something like SATA? (The least they could have done was put a note: "If installation fails, it might be because SATA is not supported. Here's what to do...") Why does Linux feel like the "Plug'n'Pray" era of Windows? Someone remind me again of the point of releasing the Community edition before the Official edition?

If there's one thing people want more than a chance of a great experience with Linux, it's a dependable lack of a bad experience.

I love ya, Mandrake, but I'm sticking with 10.0-o. If you want my money, you know what to do.

Mandrake 10.1 and laptops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone tried to install Mdk 10.1 Official on a laptop? If so, how did it turned out? And what about wireless support?

Re:"small" problems - Evening One: Wasted = "big"

[swv3752]

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/errata.php3

Oh, you mean like an errata page?