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

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.

Bittorrent, Bittorrent, Bittorrent,

[DeadBugs]

Please use the Bittorrent link.

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

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!"

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.

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.

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.