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."
Of course, this is my own experiance and other may differ.
Open Source Sushi
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.
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.