One of the interesting things of Mandrake is the installer, which is really good. It has about 5 filesystems available, it has raid and lvm, it is in a logical following order.
Also their draktools can be quite good. Some of them I like, some of them not so much. One I like is Printerdrake. You can select which spooler you want (cups, lpr, lprng), and which drivers. It detects your printer (even during install) and suggests a driver. For my Epson 670 I have fairly good printing. Actually, it was the first time I got Cups going. About a year ago I tried to set up Cups by hand, but i just didn't understand. I know how to set up lpd and ghostscript by hand, but Cups had horrible docs imo.
What is also interesting about Mandrake is that they have up-to-date software. And if you really want bleeding edge, and love debugging yourself, you can run Cooker, which is Mandrake-devel.
Well, we can all ramble now on Slashdot about angry users, how we can feel with themn, or feel with Mandrake and try to understand their decision.... But...
Can someone please point out an angry user? On Mandrakeforum all I found were a few posts of someone who said to be disappointed, and another one who was displeased. That's not the same as angry. Well, maybe on Slashdot, but not in the rest of the world:-)
So maybe this story has the size of a mosquito, where on Slashdot it is blown up to the size of an elephant?
A lot of applications that run on kde2 are not yet ported to kde3. It is nice to have a newer release of kde, but the major improvements are maybe just a better khtml and kjs, and maybe it is a bit faster. But you want to run your applications too.
I believe you cannot run kde2 and kde3 apps at the same time. Here it complained that dcopserver was already running, and after killing kde2 processes kde3 apps woud start.
But if you want kde3, you have to wait for the final release of kde3. It will then be packaged for Mandrake 8.2 and I believe also for 8.0 and 8.1, and it will be available as a download.
For Gnome2; I do not know much about it, but it might still be a release for developers. And most gnome developers will run gnome from cvs I assume. Most gnome apps run fine on Gnome 1.4
Xkobo is a funny game. It is included in most distributions, at least Mandrake and Debian. Around level 30 I have to use -cheat mode though, to be able to get any further.
My Mandrake 8.1 installation has now lost the default "fixed" font for no apparent reason.
I guess your xfs service is not running.
Try turning xfs on inside drakconf, that should give you your fonts back.
Xfs is a fontserver which is listening on port 7100 i believe.
You should check out the PLF distro (not PLD). It contains non-free rpms for mandrake, installable with urpmi/rpmdrake. Only mplayer is not available in binary rpm, just source.rpm.
PLF is actually built on a current cooker distro (cooker-mandrake-devel), but there is someone recompiling them against mdk 8.1. Just try them.
I am struggling for some time now to get it going, but I still do not understand how it works. On my end I have a linux firewall with iptables. And what I could not figure out is what to do with the packet filtering, do I need to accept traffic over 50/ip on the ipsec0 interface or the eth0 interface. Same question for the 500 udp/ip traffic.
And the other part of the network is connected to a freebsd server with racoon running. That is a completely different ipsec implementation. At least for configuring it is different.
I believe running a packet filter is quite hard if you want to do it right. You have to understand networking and just play with for a few weeks just to understand it. If anyone would tell me he has a secure packet filter running, but cannot explain how it works, I just cannot believe it. You just have to know what you are doing. Same with ipsec. Ipsec is not only networking, but also crypto. So there is more you need to know about it, and it adds extra complexity to firewalling.
I guess the topicstater had his answer; Beowulf is for fast computing, Windows clusters are for load balancing.
What I would find more interesting, how is the stability managed? High end clustering on Intel is still delivered by Calderas UnixWare (Openunix now). A cluster consists of 2 rootnodes which manage the cluster. If one rootnode goes down, another clustermachine becomes rootnode. The rest of the system is also designed that there is the least possibility of a single point of failure.
I do not know if Linux and Windows can compare to UnixWare clustering. On Linux it will not be Beowulf then, Beowulf is for speed, not stability or reliability. On Windows I am not sure, but I do remember Bill Gates at some ComDex event standing by a cluster of 7 Windows 2000 machines, running Fords website. He turned off 1 machine the hard way, and the website kept on running. I do expect him to exactly know which machine to power off, and be sure not to hit a rootnode.
Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. Realtech makes no representations
about the suitability of this software for any purpose.
It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
So it is clear that a public CVS repository wont work.
Maybe it is an idea that there is a CVS tree (or something like it) where the maintainers of the subsystem have access to.
Like a core group of developers.
I could imagine people like Alan Cox, Jeff Garzik or Al Viro have access to that.
So someone like Jeff Garzik can submit patches to the network drivers without having to pass it to Linus first.
I would say it should cause less patches being dropped on the ground and it would lift the burden on Linus.
Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 come with 3 compilers; 2.91 (egcs), 2.96 (default), and 3.0.3.
The ppc version comes with 2.95 instead of 2.96.
Through/etc/alternatives you can choose whichever you want.
Btw, please read up on gcc2.96.
That should teach you complaining about 2.96.
Means you need to specify a source.
You can use urpmi.update -a. Which will update all sources.
Or choose urpmi.update K. That source seems to be your only one so that should do just the same as -a.
Yes, SNF it is updated to a 2.4 kernel with iptables.
At install, deselect all the packages, I believe by choosing minimal install or basesystem.
Then in package selection, select snf_en.
That package defines some other packages and you should be fine.
For Audio and Video:
There is not yet a standard for Audio/Video.
There are some codecs available, some players, but they all follow their own rules.
Along with Gnome2 there will be a multimedia framework Gstreamer.
It is not really aimed at Gnome, it is meant to be able to build apps on it, so Kde could use it too.
There is discussion planned at Kde about how to deal with Multimedia. Somehow I hope they choose to build on Gstreamer, and support the building of one standard.
I also hope they don't screw up Konqueror with the Smart "window.open" Javascript policy.
Right now, I love being able to turn off those X10 pop-ups.
Yes, it is nice.
But I set it to ask if it is allowed to popup a new window.
Then when I log into my bankaccount it tries to popup windows, and if I do not clock on Ok fast enough (1 millisecond) it timesout, and I get dropped back to the login.
Maybe they fixed that?
Or maybe my bank needs a fix.
Well, I have both gnome and kde installed, which are big desktop environments.
Also, building from source; a lot of packages need other packages like tetex to even build.
And compiling kde on my previous amd300, kdelibs took already 6 hours or so.
I am sure my dual celeron will be somewhat faster at it though.
Yup, you are right about the control thing.
But instead of compiling everything from source you can just get the specific src.rpm, edit the specfile and rebuild the rpm with your options.
I am mostly just talking from the way I deal with it.
Mostly I do not really care about dependencies or build options. There are just a few packages for which I find it really important.
Another point though.
Building software from source has often its own dependencies. You need a compiler suite and lots of headerpackages.
I recently struggled a lot to get a kernel built on my Alpha firewall with only 300 Mb disk.
I am sure it is all nice and optimised when you compile everything from source.
There is just one disadvantage; while you are compiling that latest version of XFree86, gnome or kde the computer does not feel really optimised.
Compiling everything is just too much hassle, and takes too much time and computing power.
For a server there are not that many packages installed, so it can be usefull. But on my desktop I have about 2Gb software installed. Keeping that up to date.......nah.
Just let me update everything from binary, be it apt-get or urpmi.
Btw, I have a friend who was horrified when I showed him apt-get. Do you update from binaries? Do you call that security?
He liked to install security-updates from source.
When asking sometime later how he kept his FreeBSD boxes up to date he said he did not do that. He felt safe behind a firewall.
Hmm, I guess it is just too much hassle.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides Epson, I believe Umax did release the specs of their scanners also.
And Mustek (or was it Plustek?) developed some drivers for their scanners.
You can find it here:
Qt-mozilla
One of the interesting things of Mandrake is the installer, which is really good.
It has about 5 filesystems available, it has raid and lvm, it is in a logical following order.
Also their draktools can be quite good. Some of them I like, some of them not so much.
One I like is Printerdrake. You can select which spooler you want (cups, lpr, lprng), and which drivers. It detects your printer (even during install) and suggests a driver. For my Epson 670 I have fairly good printing.
Actually, it was the first time I got Cups going. About a year ago I tried to set up Cups by hand, but i just didn't understand. I know how to set up lpd and ghostscript by hand, but Cups had horrible docs imo.
What is also interesting about Mandrake is that they have up-to-date software. And if you really want bleeding edge, and love debugging yourself, you can run Cooker, which is Mandrake-devel.
What exactly do you want to rewrite?
You can use iptables with PREROUTING, to rewrite the destination ip.
Maybe you can even change more things with it (?), but I'm not sure about that.
Well, we can all ramble now on Slashdot about angry users, how we can feel with themn, or feel with Mandrake and try to understand their decision....
:-)
But...
Can someone please point out an angry user?
On Mandrakeforum all I found were a few posts of someone who said to be disappointed, and another one who was displeased.
That's not the same as angry. Well, maybe on Slashdot, but not in the rest of the world
So maybe this story has the size of a mosquito, where on Slashdot it is blown up to the size of an elephant?
Did I just see a Dell article, and it is gone now?
A lot of applications that run on kde2 are not yet ported to kde3. It is nice to have a newer release of kde, but the major improvements are maybe just a better khtml and kjs, and maybe it is a bit faster.
But you want to run your applications too.
I believe you cannot run kde2 and kde3 apps at the same time. Here it complained that dcopserver was already running, and after killing kde2 processes kde3 apps woud start.
But if you want kde3, you have to wait for the final release of kde3. It will then be packaged for Mandrake 8.2 and I believe also for 8.0 and 8.1, and it will be available as a download.
For Gnome2; I do not know much about it, but it might still be a release for developers. And most gnome developers will run gnome from cvs I assume. Most gnome apps run fine on Gnome 1.4
Xkobo is a funny game. It is included in most distributions, at least Mandrake and Debian.
Around level 30 I have to use -cheat mode though, to be able to get any further.
My Mandrake 8.1 installation has now lost the default "fixed" font for no apparent reason.
I guess your xfs service is not running.
Try turning xfs on inside drakconf, that should give you your fonts back.
Xfs is a fontserver which is listening on port 7100 i believe.
Nice to see portals for the BSD OS's
I still find real documentation for say FreeBSD too scarse (besides the handbook).
Besides, there is another portal already in Dutch language:
http://www.bsdfreaks.nl/
You should be able to update the packages with up2date on redhat.
And also, you should check redhats errata page regularly for security updates.
You should check out the PLF distro (not PLD).
It contains non-free rpms for mandrake, installable with urpmi/rpmdrake.
Only mplayer is not available in binary rpm, just source.rpm.
PLF is actually built on a current cooker distro (cooker-mandrake-devel), but there is someone recompiling them against mdk 8.1.
Just try them.
I am struggling for some time now to get it going, but I still do not understand how it works.
On my end I have a linux firewall with iptables.
And what I could not figure out is what to do with the packet filtering, do I need to accept traffic over 50/ip on the ipsec0 interface or the eth0 interface. Same question for the 500 udp/ip traffic.
And the other part of the network is connected to a freebsd server with racoon running. That is a completely different ipsec implementation. At least for configuring it is different.
I believe running a packet filter is quite hard if you want to do it right. You have to understand networking and just play with for a few weeks just to understand it.
If anyone would tell me he has a secure packet filter running, but cannot explain how it works, I just cannot believe it. You just have to know what you are doing.
Same with ipsec.
Ipsec is not only networking, but also crypto.
So there is more you need to know about it, and it adds extra complexity to firewalling.
I guess the topicstater had his answer; Beowulf is for fast computing, Windows clusters are for load balancing.
What I would find more interesting, how is the stability managed?
High end clustering on Intel is still delivered by Calderas UnixWare (Openunix now). A cluster consists of 2 rootnodes which manage the cluster. If one rootnode goes down, another clustermachine becomes rootnode.
The rest of the system is also designed that there is the least possibility of a single point of failure.
I do not know if Linux and Windows can compare to UnixWare clustering.
On Linux it will not be Beowulf then, Beowulf is for speed, not stability or reliability.
On Windows I am not sure, but I do remember Bill Gates at some ComDex event standing by a cluster of 7 Windows 2000 machines, running Fords website. He turned off 1 machine the hard way, and the website kept on running. I do expect him to exactly know which machine to power off, and be sure not to hit a rootnode.
It sounds to me like a BSD license
Taken from dxglwp-src-0.04.zip
/projects/src/d3d.cpp
File: d3d.cpp
Description: Direct3D 8 Wrapper
Copyright: Realtech VR 2001
Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. Realtech makes no representations
about the suitability of this software for any purpose.
It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
So it is clear that a public CVS repository wont work.
Maybe it is an idea that there is a CVS tree (or something like it) where the maintainers of the subsystem have access to.
Like a core group of developers.
I could imagine people like Alan Cox, Jeff Garzik or Al Viro have access to that.
So someone like Jeff Garzik can submit patches to the network drivers without having to pass it to Linus first.
I would say it should cause less patches being dropped on the ground and it would lift the burden on Linus.
Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 come with 3 compilers; 2.91 (egcs), 2.96 (default), and 3.0.3. /etc/alternatives you can choose whichever you want.
The ppc version comes with 2.95 instead of 2.96.
Through
Btw, please read up on gcc2.96.
That should teach you complaining about 2.96.
DrakX can do LVM or raid installs for you.
It is not offered as an obvious option, but if you know LVM, you should be able to set it up.
The error:
the entry to update is missing
(one of K)
Means you need to specify a source.
You can use urpmi.update -a. Which will update all sources.
Or choose urpmi.update K. That source seems to be your only one so that should do just the same as -a.
Yes, SNF it is updated to a 2.4 kernel with iptables.
At install, deselect all the packages, I believe by choosing minimal install or basesystem.
Then in package selection, select snf_en.
That package defines some other packages and you should be fine.
For Audio and Video:
There is not yet a standard for Audio/Video.
There are some codecs available, some players, but they all follow their own rules.
Along with Gnome2 there will be a multimedia framework Gstreamer.
It is not really aimed at Gnome, it is meant to be able to build apps on it, so Kde could use it too.
There is discussion planned at Kde about how to deal with Multimedia. Somehow I hope they choose to build on Gstreamer, and support the building of one standard.
I also hope they don't screw up Konqueror with the Smart "window.open" Javascript policy.
Right now, I love being able to turn off those X10 pop-ups.
Yes, it is nice.
But I set it to ask if it is allowed to popup a new window.
Then when I log into my bankaccount it tries to popup windows, and if I do not clock on Ok fast enough (1 millisecond) it timesout, and I get dropped back to the login.
Maybe they fixed that?
Or maybe my bank needs a fix.
Well, I have both gnome and kde installed, which are big desktop environments.
Also, building from source; a lot of packages need other packages like tetex to even build.
And compiling kde on my previous amd300, kdelibs took already 6 hours or so.
I am sure my dual celeron will be somewhat faster at it though.
Yup, you are right about the control thing.
But instead of compiling everything from source you can just get the specific src.rpm, edit the specfile and rebuild the rpm with your options.
I am mostly just talking from the way I deal with it.
Mostly I do not really care about dependencies or build options. There are just a few packages for which I find it really important.
Another point though.
Building software from source has often its own dependencies. You need a compiler suite and lots of headerpackages.
I recently struggled a lot to get a kernel built on my Alpha firewall with only 300 Mb disk.
I am sure it is all nice and optimised when you compile everything from source.
There is just one disadvantage; while you are compiling that latest version of XFree86, gnome or kde the computer does not feel really optimised.
Compiling everything is just too much hassle, and takes too much time and computing power.
For a server there are not that many packages installed, so it can be usefull. But on my desktop I have about 2Gb software installed. Keeping that up to date.......nah.
Just let me update everything from binary, be it apt-get or urpmi.
Btw, I have a friend who was horrified when I showed him apt-get. Do you update from binaries? Do you call that security?
He liked to install security-updates from source.
When asking sometime later how he kept his FreeBSD boxes up to date he said he did not do that. He felt safe behind a firewall.
Hmm, I guess it is just too much hassle.