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Mandrake 2006 Will Integrate Conectiva Components

Linzer writes "Mandrakelinux just issued this press release presenting (1) a new one-year release cycle, with a year-based naming scheme and (2) their updated development roadmap. In a nutshell: the upcoming 10.2 becomes a transitional release, labeled 'Limited Edition 2005.' Next fall will see Mandrakelinux 2006, merging Mdk and Conectiva know-how (and possibly some know-not?) For the amnesic: Mandrakesoft and Conectiva recently merged." Not everyone is pleased, though: Tingulli 3 writes "As a member of the Italian Mandrakelinux translation team , I spent nights translating some packages to be on schedule for the 10.2 release. I was quite disappointed when I discovered that a new roadmap has been announced and that there will NOT be any 10.2 release, without anybody announcing it to the community."

3 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. Flaky networking made me switch to Fedora by onlyjoking · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Around 10.0 Mandrake's networking went down the pan. Cards which worked with 9 suddenly didn't work and lost their settings. At other times the same cards couldn't be detected. Mandrake's Control Centre's display config tool was also terrible. I switched to Fedora and never looked back. One thing Fedora has over Mandrake is the option to install everything. This makes installation a breeze as it's much easier to remove stuff later than plough through Mandrake's maze of sub-menus at install time.

    1. Re:Flaky networking made me switch to Fedora by redhog · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes, except yum is much inferior to urpmi, both theoretically (urpmi has better algorithms and datastructures) and practically (yum has a shitload of bugs, such as big problems working with an install-root different from /). urpmi and apt-get are on par with each other in my experience (mature, good performance scaling), and I can't see why redhat shose yum, as both apt-get for rpm and urpmi are available to them and are both superior...

      A proof of how bad yum really is, is that some people have independently set up Fedora repositories managed by apt-get!

      --
      --The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
  2. I've got one real compaint about Mdk by The+Master+Control+P · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And that is the way their GUI system config program, drakconf, doesn't seem to interact with CLI tools properly. Something caused my network setup to go down the toilet; When I try to figure things out, drakconf says one thing and ifconfig/route/netstat/etc seem to say another. I say "drakconf, delete eth0", and ifconfig still shows it. In the end, I gave up and just canned all network settings and setup the network from scratch (not a big deal: 1 DSL modem, two 10/100 cards), but I shouldn't have had to. Other than that, I think that the keypad-like (as opposed to side bar) button layout of Drakconf in 10.0 sucked bigtime from the usability perspective - good thing that changed with 10.1.

    Main things I like are that Mdk unifies the look and feel of KDE and Gnome. It's GUI tools are friendly enough for everyday tasks but you can still go back to the CLI any time you want the power. Oh yeah - did I mention that Konqueror starts in about 2 seconds, eats ~5MB of memory per instance, and has tabbed browsing?