Probably the primary reason they are using us as a pilot region is the relatively high cost of computing resources in South Africa. An entry level computer is about the same as the monthly wage of well educated people, and about 6 months salary at minimum wage.
Thus, the motivations for maximum ROI on technology resources are much more apparent here than in the UK (where I gather minumum wage would easily pay for a new computer in under a month).
Large majority of todays apps are limited by the i/o of the harddrives. So what's the point in having multiple machines accessing the same drives at almost the same time?
High availablity of the data on such "hard drives"
Now if the shared storage is a rackfull of ram (flash or dram + batteries), that's something completely different.
In general (up to now), this is the case for most people considering paying for support on GFS...
Then such a shared filesystem can really show its muscles. Of course, if the locking and fencing system can keep up with the demands:)
A fibre-attached storage array (such as those from EMC, HP etc) do...
I was involved in migrating a large (ISP) mailstore from a RAID 10'd 28*73GB 15k U160 SCSI-attached storage array to an EMC. Write performance (using the same hardware on the server doing the writes) improved over 4 fold...
Hell no! You'll get my inches, miles, and gallons when you pry them from my cold dead hands!
And I'll try and use them if you can (out of your head) tell me the dimensions in inches of a cubic container that holds 1 gallon, or how many inches are in a mile, or how big your petrol^H^H^H^H^H^Hgas tank must be to drive 1000 miles if your car^H^H^Hautomobile has a fuel consumption of 50 miles per gallon.
This is all trivial to do with metric units, and we haven't even gotten to more complex (multi-dimensional) units (like foot-pound vs newtwons etc etc).
As you'll have seen from various other comments; Mandrake 10 has the same problem therefore if you're using M10 without problems then FC2 will work just as well.
Actually, the problem was only present in Mandrake 10.0 Community, it was fixed for the official release. See the bug report
is that one of the primary ways to improve the efficiency of petrol (ok, gasoline, or more technically, spark ignition engines) is to prevent your pumping losses (required since the air/fuel ratio must be constant, so at lower throttle settings you have to induce resistance in the intake to reduce the air going in). This is why you need to try and run the spark ignition engine at wide-open-throttle as much as possible (and stick the extra energy in something like a battery).
However, diesel engines don't have pumping losses (or, much less significant losses), so there isn't so much to gain making diesel hybrids (since with a diesel hybrid, you will lose most of the benefit to losses in your electro-mechanical transmission).
But, if there is a more efficient way to store the excess energy, it may become feasible.
Why didn't you just unmute it? Isn't that how simple it is? Isn't that all that's required?
Yes, for basic sound. But that hour included setup of sound fonts (which at present isn't very intuitive... feel free to file a bug on it).
I spend about one minute getting my SBLive! to work well under XP, 2000, ME, and 98. It shouldn't take a damned hour to get your sound card working.
But that doesn't get you working sound fonts. For that you have to run the proprietary provided installer from Creative, which takes about 20 minutes to set up sond fonts etc etc.
For example, you quote the Mandrake support lifetime as 18 months (which applies to the download/free software version), but then you only quote the Mandrake Enterprise version in the price matrix.
I only endure the pain of a RedHat system when I absolutely have to, and that's only when you need enterprise support (ie someone to sue). In all other cases, I prefer a distro that is easier to administer, like Mandrake.
Support lifetime isn't as important for non-enterprise deployments, where you most likely would gain some benefits by upgrading your server every 18 months or so.
My Sound Blaster Live! worked in Mandrake up until around 2-3 years ago, and hasn't since.
So, you missed every single post on every Mandrake mailing list covering the SB Live! driver?
Mandrake switched the SBLive! to ALSA in 9.0 or 9.1 IIRC, and by default, ALSA mutes the output on the card (to prevent doing something nasty), and until 9.2 it was not being unmuted by default.
However, if you simply used any supplied mixer and unmuted the card, you would have had working sound. (I think there might have been another issue, to do with the analog output jack or something, but google will tell you in under a minute).
Why did Mandrake switch the SBLive to ALSA? Because then it supports up to 32 simultaneous output streams and can load Midi sound fonts (again, you will need to google, since there isn't a GUI for setting this up yet).
So, I wonder if the review had similar issues.
IE, blaming the OS instead of at least doing some research into their hardware and how to utilise it. Yes, I agree this should not be necessary, but it's a lot better than not having working drivers at all.
So, other posters will note that Creative provided drivers for the outdated sound system and some utilities, and due to the information available, the ALSA people provided working drivers and ensured that all features worked. But, ALSA integration work isn't complete, so in some cases you may have to fiddle with the mixer.
Yes, I spend about one hour getting my SBLive! to work well under Mandrake 9.1. I don't have the box at present, so I can't tell you much about Mandrake 9.2 and 10.0 and the SBLive and whether things have gotten better, but judging from the fact that there were no bug reports for the SBLive for the 10.0 development, I would guess it hasn't gotten worse.
Well, considering very few people have seen this problem (I think there may have been one bug report, but no confirmations), it would have been nice if you could at least have tested some things (like, whether startx works as a normal user, what happens if you change the default desktop to GNOME etc etc).
But, since you didn't bother to, we don't know if it's fixed, what the cause was etc etc.
The whole point of the community release is to find these issues which only affect a few people (thus can't always be caught in the main beta test series), but you didn't even bother to take the 5 minutes to do so.
Let's hope the issue doesn't affect you when you eventually get your sarge box as up-to-date as Mandrake 10.0...
Maybe you needed to add something like 'intel-agp' to/etc/modprobe.conf to ensure that DRI actually works. IIRC this has been fixed.
IIRC, you could also just have booted a 2.4 kernel until you figured that out.
Gives a fucked up login screen on my i865 video can't see anything
IIRC this has been fixed.
HUNDREDS OF MB OF UPDATES AFTER INSTALL!
Yes, that's to fix the final small issues people found (like the 2 you mentioned above).
Give me a break! Why don't you issue updated cds?
Uhh, you actually read the title of this slashdot article?
I have a damn dialup connection, and there are so many updates you might as well forget it.
Then, maybe you should consider only running an "Official" release of Mandrake. The community release of Mandrake is not really intended for people limited to dialup.
Samba, hylafax, postgres and mysql (and virtually any other server) is included in the 3 download CD set. Kolab-server (and the GUI config tools for it Mandrake wrote) are specifically excluded from the download CD as it is seen as a value-added package. However, it (kolab-server) is available on the FTP mirrors.
Please check the *real* facts before posting... (and not the press release).
(Links to the files listing the contents can be found on the MandrakeClub article).
2. Boot: One major issue, every time I booted it would alternate between thinking my Orinoco gold pcmcia wireless card would be not present, or thing a new one had been put in and try to reinstall it, this was a real pain the in ass, and was the major reason Mandrake 10 got booted for a second time (9.2 is no longer on my good list either) from this laptop. Maybe this distro is just better for desktops.
Seems to be some kernel-2.6-related issue, booting on the (provided) 2.4 kernel doesn't exhibit this behaviour. In most cases, the problem under 2.6 can be resolved by placing: yenta_socket in/etc/modprobe.preload.
There are good x86 installers for Debian, from Progeny at least, but it, like Mandrake's, just isn't portable enough to be officially Debian.
Mandrake's installer is in perl and perl-GTK2. A platform that doesn't have perl isn't a real unix, and one that can't run perl-GTK2 isn't going to be worthwhile for GUI use...
And, considering the community is reviving the sparc/sparc64 port of Mandrake and maintaining the alpha port, the Mandrake community would welcome help in porting DrakX to the architectures it doesn't currently support.
The same zealots who flame windows users for "not knowing how the computer works" and for using "an OS that hides half of the files" etc., now flame linux newbies for WANTING to know where the files actually are?
I have never flamed windows users for not knowing how a computer works.
But, the poster was saying it's too difficult, because he doesn't know where the files went. But, the fact is that it's really no concern on most linux distros (whereas it is on Windows), so it's not more difficult. You're saying he *should* know, which would prove his point that Linux is too difficult (which it isn't).
learn how the computer works, and learn to do it HIS way!
No, my comment is "unlearn the bad habits you learnt on Windows, it's easier than you think if you don't try and do things the Windows way".
there are a LOT of things that should be WAY more simple on the mandrake desktop.
Not one thing he mentioned is a valid issue. File a bug on any *real* issues.
BTW, using non-Mandrake packages on Mandrake (when packages exist, as is almost always the case) is the best way to get your bug marked as INVALID...
1) Often there aren't any distro packages, or they are out of date. No the answer is not to "just use Debian", even in Debian Unstable, packages are still often out of date or missing.
Use Mandrake. No need to mix stable/unstable.
2) It's "common sense" that distro packagers know how best to package software. It's what they do, right? It's common sense - but it's wrong.
So, you're saying that packagers who actually use their own packages in production on large installations don't know what they're doing?
From packages that put things in the wrong place, to packages that don't even get the basics right (like running ldconfig) or that alter the defaults/switch off debugging information etc - the fact is that the people who best know how to install software are the people who wrote it. Period.
Sorry, but I don't agree, which is why I maintain the packaging files for Mandrake in the samba tree.
The authors of the software may know how their software should be packaged, but they don't necessarily know all the implications *other* software has on their packages, and vice versa.
In Mandrake, if a package is broken, you file a bug, and the maintainer will fix it.
Of course, if you have a means to cover all the issues that are handled by packagers in Mandrake (buildrequires, automatic -devel package requirements, menu entries, pre/post scripts, virtual provides, alternatives etc etc etc), the problem becomes that you get too distro-specific to be generic.
Well, if you do, don't compain when you have problems installing them.
The pilot-link package in Mandrake works out-the-box, and is trivial to install (I have been using it with my Visor since Mandrake 8.1).
Do you download drivers specifically for Windows XP and install them on Windows 98? No. Do you purposely rename msvcrt4.dll to mscvrt6.dll to try and make something work? This is effectively what you are doing when you install packages from one distro on another one. It may work in some cases, but it may be more effort, and it may cause problems later.
If Windows can do it this way, and make it work, I don't see why the option can't work for Linux as well.
Because each linux distro is slightly different in the versions of libraries that are included. This is not the case with Windows.
When I got bored after several hours of messing around with dependencies, and eventually deleted Mandrake, I'm sure I was doing something *wrong*, but point is that it is difficult to do the *right* thing.
How difficult is it to use the tools provided in the distribution to install the software that is included??
I have introduced many total newbies to Mandrake, and just showed them the Mandrake Control Center once, and *they* managed. If you can't use the tools provided, and instead *insist* on doing it your way, don't blame the distro....
I hardly think the original poster needs this made clear?
All he made clear was that he didn't bother to take 5 minutes to use the software tools provided by the distro to install the packages it has that wouuld work for him.
And I don't understand what you're getting up by telling him he shouldn't "provide false information".
So, you think it's the objective of slashdot to spread FUD? I thought it was to try and provide accurate information...
Whenever I can do what I want without going anywhere near the command line, then I'll consider Linux.
You can. But, not if you don't use the tools provided. Have you even tried?
Sure, the rpm update could't immediately fix the symptoms of the bug (if you read the summary of the problem in MandrakeUpdate you would see that), it fixed the cause of the problem. The symptoms are fixed by a number of different actions (logging out and back in, installing another package, running the menu editor and saving with no changes, running 'update-menus -v' etc etc).
Well I don't mind some instability but that many patches and changes?
Does the number of changes have any relation to the impact of those changes?
If you read the changelogs, you will notice most of them are trivial fixes (like fixing a crash in knotes when run from inside kontact), not major issues.
An update of kdebase on it's own leads to about 75MB of updates... for one trivial fix...
So, I don't think the size of updates is proportional to the magnitude of the problems being fixed...
I'm running 10.0 community, and it's very stable (besides one issue with USB storage devices, which is a kernel-2.6.3 bug which is fixed by 2.6.4 - I checked - and should be good for final).
People seem to forget that this is the first release on a new kernel series, and there *will* be small teething problems, just like there were back with 8.0, but it's still a heck of a lot better than any other available distro (if you don't have hardware problems - in which case you should run the 2.4 kernel).
You most likely have set it up with a generic X driver. Without details on your machine (specifically the display card), there's nothing we can do to help you...
Kidding aside, the biggest reason more workstations are sold with Linux is that there aren't enough professional applications (design stuff like ProE, The pSPICE family (at least Cadence and Synopsys, etc) haven't all been ported to linux yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably the primary reason they are using us as a pilot region is the relatively high cost of computing resources in South Africa. An entry level computer is about the same as the monthly wage of well educated people, and about 6 months salary at minimum wage.
Thus, the motivations for maximum ROI on technology resources are much more apparent here than in the UK (where I gather minumum wage would easily pay for a new computer in under a month).
Large majority of todays apps are limited by the i/o of the harddrives. So what's the point in having multiple machines accessing the same drives at almost the same time?
...
:)
...
...
High availablity of the data on such "hard drives"
Now if the shared storage is a rackfull of ram (flash or dram + batteries), that's something completely different.
In general (up to now), this is the case for most people considering paying for support on GFS
Then such a shared filesystem can really show its muscles. Of course, if the locking and fencing system can keep up with the demands
A fibre-attached storage array (such as those from EMC, HP etc) do
I was involved in migrating a large (ISP) mailstore from a RAID 10'd 28*73GB 15k U160 SCSI-attached storage array to an EMC. Write performance (using the same hardware on the server doing the writes) improved over 4 fold
Hell no! You'll get my inches, miles, and gallons when you pry them from my cold dead hands!
And I'll try and use them if you can (out of your head) tell me the dimensions in inches of a cubic container that holds 1 gallon, or how many inches are in a mile, or how big your petrol^H^H^H^H^H^Hgas tank must be to drive 1000 miles if your car^H^H^Hautomobile has a fuel consumption of 50 miles per gallon.
This is all trivial to do with metric units, and we haven't even gotten to more complex (multi-dimensional) units (like foot-pound vs newtwons etc etc).
1. Partition in an older, safe system. E.g. knoppix.
...
Actually, I don't see how you equate "knoppix" to "older".
Partitionining with any distro (or live cd or distro installer) that has a 2.4 kernel would probably do the trick.
Of course, Knoppix isn't guaranteed to default to a 2.4 kernel for much longer
As you'll have seen from various other comments; Mandrake 10 has the same problem therefore if you're using M10 without problems then FC2 will work just as well.
Actually, the problem was only present in Mandrake 10.0 Community, it was fixed for the official release. See the bug report
is that one of the primary ways to improve the efficiency of petrol (ok, gasoline, or more technically, spark ignition engines) is to prevent your pumping losses (required since the air/fuel ratio must be constant, so at lower throttle settings you have to induce resistance in the intake to reduce the air going in). This is why you need to try and run the spark ignition engine at wide-open-throttle as much as possible (and stick the extra energy in something like a battery).
However, diesel engines don't have pumping losses (or, much less significant losses), so there isn't so much to gain making diesel hybrids (since with a diesel hybrid, you will lose most of the benefit to losses in your electro-mechanical transmission).
But, if there is a more efficient way to store the excess energy, it may become feasible.
Why didn't you just unmute it? Isn't that how simple it is? Isn't that all that's required?
Yes, for basic sound. But that hour included setup of sound fonts (which at present isn't very intuitive
I spend about one minute getting my SBLive! to work well under XP, 2000, ME, and 98. It shouldn't take a damned hour to get your sound card working.
But that doesn't get you working sound fonts. For that you have to run the proprietary provided installer from Creative, which takes about 20 minutes to set up sond fonts etc etc.
Except, your artical has some inconsistencies.
For example, you quote the Mandrake support lifetime as 18 months (which applies to the download/free software version), but then you only quote the Mandrake Enterprise version in the price matrix.
I only endure the pain of a RedHat system when I absolutely have to, and that's only when you need enterprise support (ie someone to sue). In all other cases, I prefer a distro that is easier to administer, like Mandrake.
Support lifetime isn't as important for non-enterprise deployments, where you most likely would gain some benefits by upgrading your server every 18 months or so.
My Sound Blaster Live! worked in Mandrake up until around 2-3 years ago, and hasn't since.
So, you missed every single post on every Mandrake mailing list covering the SB Live! driver?
Mandrake switched the SBLive! to ALSA in 9.0 or 9.1 IIRC, and by default, ALSA mutes the output on the card (to prevent doing something nasty), and until 9.2 it was not being unmuted by default.
However, if you simply used any supplied mixer and unmuted the card, you would have had working sound. (I think there might have been another issue, to do with the analog output jack or something, but google will tell you in under a minute).
Why did Mandrake switch the SBLive to ALSA? Because then it supports up to 32 simultaneous output streams and can load Midi sound fonts (again, you will need to google, since there isn't a GUI for setting this up yet).
So, I wonder if the review had similar issues.
IE, blaming the OS instead of at least doing some research into their hardware and how to utilise it. Yes, I agree this should not be necessary, but it's a lot better than not having working drivers at all.
So, other posters will note that Creative provided drivers for the outdated sound system and some utilities, and due to the information available, the ALSA people provided working drivers and ensured that all features worked. But, ALSA integration work isn't complete, so in some cases you may have to fiddle with the mixer.
Yes, I spend about one hour getting my SBLive! to work well under Mandrake 9.1. I don't have the box at present, so I can't tell you much about Mandrake 9.2 and 10.0 and the SBLive and whether things have gotten better, but judging from the fact that there were no bug reports for the SBLive for the 10.0 development, I would guess it hasn't gotten worse.
Well, considering very few people have seen this problem (I think there may have been one bug report, but no confirmations), it would have been nice if you could at least have tested some things (like, whether startx works as a normal user, what happens if you change the default desktop to GNOME etc etc).
...
But, since you didn't bother to, we don't know if it's fixed, what the cause was etc etc.
The whole point of the community release is to find these issues which only affect a few people (thus can't always be caught in the main beta test series), but you didn't even bother to take the 5 minutes to do so.
Let's hope the issue doesn't affect you when you eventually get your sarge box as up-to-date as Mandrake 10.0
Even though it was more of a release candidate than a full release, I was shocked myself at how terrible it was.
...
It is the first mainstream distro with a 2.6 kernel. That always means there will be hardware issues.
I had problems installing it on a few different computers.
Did you try the provided 2.4 installation kernel? Did you file bug reports?
(Note, many NForce2 boards have issues unless you boot with 'noapic nolapic', at least with the kernel the community install CDs had).
I'm pretty sure that the official release will not have these problems.
If you had filed bugs (or searched to see if they had been filed already), you would know for sure
And, did you at least bother to spend 5 minutes filing a bug report?
...
Fedora what? Core 1 or 2? If 1, maybe you have a kernel-2.6 issue, which you will discover in core 2.
Probably your mobo needs noapic or nolapic under kernel-2.6 at present
99% of hardware issues on Mandrake 10.0 seem to be due to the 2.6 kernel.
That's why a 2.4 kernel is provided. Booting the 2.4 kernel seems to fix most issues.
Most 2.x.y kernel releases where x is even and y =10 are "too crap usually".
Mandrake 10.0 official is quite solid though (IMHO).
No support for my Radeon 7200
/etc/modprobe.conf to ensure that DRI actually works. IIRC this has been fixed.
Maybe you needed to add something like 'intel-agp' to
IIRC, you could also just have booted a 2.4 kernel until you figured that out.
Gives a fucked up login screen on my i865 video can't see anything
IIRC this has been fixed.
HUNDREDS OF MB OF UPDATES AFTER INSTALL!
Yes, that's to fix the final small issues people found (like the 2 you mentioned above).
Give me a break! Why don't you issue updated cds?
Uhh, you actually read the title of this slashdot article?
I have a damn dialup connection, and there are so many updates you might as well forget it.
Then, maybe you should consider only running an "Official" release of Mandrake. The community release of Mandrake is not really intended for people limited to dialup.
Samba, hylafax, postgres and mysql (and virtually any other server) is included in the 3 download CD set. Kolab-server (and the GUI config tools for it Mandrake wrote) are specifically excluded from the download CD as it is seen as a value-added package. However, it (kolab-server) is available on the FTP mirrors.
... (and not the press release).
n load-1 343011 libhylafax4.1.1-4.1.8-2mdk.i586w nload-1 1007728 postgresql-7.4.1-2mdk.i586d -1 1374169 samba-client-3.0.2a-3mdk.i586l oad-1 2165126 samba-server-3.0.2a-3mdk.i586l oad-1 3244793 samba-common-3.0.2a-3mdk.i586l oad-2 24491 php-mysql-4.3.4-1mdk.i586- 2 26466 postgresql-tcl-7.4.1-2mdk.i586n load-2 140591 perl-Mysql-1.22_19-9mdk.i586o ad-2 213584 MySQL-client-4.0.18-1mdk.i586l oad-2 261335 libmysql12-4.0.18-1mdk.i586a d-2 731916 postgresql-jdbc-7.4.1-2mdk.i586w nload-2 866338 MySQL-bench-4.0.18-1mdk.i586o ad-2 1066342 postgresql-test-7.4.1-2mdk.i586w nload-2 1314929 postgresql-devel-7.4.1-2mdk.i586o wnload-2 3043337 postgresql-server-7.4.1-2mdk.i586D ownload-2 5332585 MySQL-common-4.0.18-1mdk.i586l oad-3 581656 hylafax-server-4.1.8-2mdk.i586n load-3 716060 samba-winbind-3.0.2a-3mdk.i586n load-3 1437556 MySQL-4.0.18-1mdk.i586a d-3 5338633 samba-doc-3.0.2a-3mdk.i586d -4 15869 apache2-mod_auth_mysql-2.0.48_1.11-1mdk.i5860 -Official-Download-4 16629 prelude-manager-mysql-plugin-0.8.7-3mdk.i5860 -Official-Download-4 20875 gda-mysql0-0.2.96-10mdk.i586o ad-4 24908 gda2.0-mysql-1.0.3-3mdk.i586o ad-4 26276 postfix-mysql-2.1.0-0.20040209.18mdk.i586f ficial-Download-4 28860 gda-postgres0-0.2.96-10mdk.i586w nload-4 31636 gda2.0-postgres-1.0.3-3mdk.i586w nload-4 35221 libqt3-mysql-3.2.3-17mdk.i586l oad-4 40100 samba-passdb-mysql-3.0.2a-3mdk.i586l -Download-4 41068 samba-passdb-xml-3.0.2a-3mdk.i586D ownload-4 113629 postgresql-pl-7.4.1-2mdk.i586l oad-4 346519 libhylafax4.1.1-devel-4.1.8-2mdk.i586i al-Download-4 452718 postgresql-contrib-7.4.1-2mdk.i586- Download-4 845237 libmysql12-devel-4.0.18-1mdk.i586D ownload-4 1012653 snort-postgresql-2.1.0-1mdk.i586o wnload-4 1014587 snort-mysql-2.1.0-1mdk.i586a d-4 1045166 snort-postgresql+flexresp-2.1.0-1mdk.i586f ficial-Download-4 1046817 snort-mysql+flexresp-2.1.0-1mdk.i586a l-Download-4 1087022 postgresql-docs-7.4.1-2mdk.i586w nload-4 1654389 MySQL-Max-4.0.18-1mdk.i586
Please check the *real* facts before posting
(Links to the files listing the contents can be found on the MandrakeClub article).
$ grep -iE "(samba|hylafax|postgres|mysql|kolab)" 10.0-download.cd
10.0-Official-Download-1 42843 hylafax-4.1.8-2mdk.i586
10.0-Official-Download-1 144636 hylafax-client-4.1.8-2mdk.i586
10.0-Official-Dow
10.0-Official-Do
10.0-Official-Downloa
10.0-Official-Down
10.0-Official-Down
10.0-Official-Down
10.0-Official-Download
10.0-Official-Dow
10.0-Official-Downl
10.0-Official-Down
10.0-Official-Downlo
10.0-Official-Do
10.0-Official-Downl
10.0-Official-Do
10.0-Official-D
10.0-Official-
10.0-Official-Down
10.0-Official-Dow
10.0-Official-Dow
10.0-Official-Download-3 1495433 samba-swat-3.0.2a-3mdk.i586
10.0-Official-Downlo
10.0-Official-Downloa
10.
10.
10.0-Official-Downl
10.0-Official-Downl
10.0-O
10.0-Official-Do
10.0-Official-Do
10.0-Official-Down
10.0-Officia
10.0-Official-
10.0-Official-Down
10.0-Offic
10.0-Official
10.0-Official-
10.0-Official-D
10.0-Official-Downlo
10.0-O
10.0-Offici
10.0-Official-Do
REJECTED master disc 10.0-Official-Download-1 (27) 8165 fax4CUPS-hylafax-1.23-1mdk.noarch (Some needed dependencies rejected: fax4CUPS-1.23-1mdk.noarch)
REJECTED master disc 10.0-Official-Download-1 (27) 490278 kolab-server-1.0-0.16mdk.noarch (Explicitely excluded: kolab-server)
2. Boot: One major issue, every time I booted it would alternate between thinking my Orinoco gold pcmcia wireless card would be not present, or thing a new one had been put in and try to reinstall it, this was a real pain the in ass, and was the major reason Mandrake 10 got booted for a second time (9.2 is no longer on my good list either) from this laptop. Maybe this distro is just better for desktops.
/etc/modprobe.preload.
Seems to be some kernel-2.6-related issue, booting on the (provided) 2.4 kernel doesn't exhibit this behaviour. In most cases, the problem under 2.6 can be resolved by placing:
yenta_socket
in
There are good x86 installers for Debian, from Progeny at least, but it, like Mandrake's, just isn't portable enough to be officially Debian.
...
Mandrake's installer is in perl and perl-GTK2. A platform that doesn't have perl isn't a real unix, and one that can't run perl-GTK2 isn't going to be worthwhile for GUI use
And, considering the community is reviving the sparc/sparc64 port of Mandrake and maintaining the alpha port, the Mandrake community would welcome help in porting DrakX to the architectures it doesn't currently support.
Go to Mandrake forums and read about all the poeple that have difficulties with getting the installer to work properly.
No, most problems are with the kernel and chipsets that have issues with acpi/apic (ie NForce2).
Of course, those people could always file their bugs, and ensure that the issues are fixed in the "Official" release.
At present, Mandrake 10.0 has some minor issues, but probably supports more x86 hardware out-the-box than any other distro at present.
And yes, there are other ports (amd64, ppc, and sparc/sparc64 and alpha are being maintained by the community).
The same zealots who flame windows users for "not knowing how the computer works" and for using "an OS that hides half of the files" etc., now flame linux newbies for WANTING to know where the files actually are?
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I have never flamed windows users for not knowing how a computer works.
But, the poster was saying it's too difficult, because he doesn't know where the files went. But, the fact is that it's really no concern on most linux distros (whereas it is on Windows), so it's not more difficult. You're saying he *should* know, which would prove his point that Linux is too difficult (which it isn't).
learn how the computer works, and learn to do it HIS way!
No, my comment is "unlearn the bad habits you learnt on Windows, it's easier than you think if you don't try and do things the Windows way".
there are a LOT of things that should be WAY more simple on the mandrake desktop.
Not one thing he mentioned is a valid issue. File a bug on any *real* issues.
BTW, using non-Mandrake packages on Mandrake (when packages exist, as is almost always the case) is the best way to get your bug marked as INVALID
1) Often there aren't any distro packages, or they are out of date. No the answer is not to "just use Debian", even in Debian Unstable, packages are still often out of date or missing.
Use Mandrake. No need to mix stable/unstable.
2) It's "common sense" that distro packagers know how best to package software. It's what they do, right? It's common sense - but it's wrong.
So, you're saying that packagers who actually use their own packages in production on large installations don't know what they're doing?
From packages that put things in the wrong place, to packages that don't even get the basics right (like running ldconfig) or that alter the defaults/switch off debugging information etc - the fact is that the people who best know how to install software are the people who wrote it. Period.
Sorry, but I don't agree, which is why I maintain the packaging files for Mandrake in the samba tree.
The authors of the software may know how their software should be packaged, but they don't necessarily know all the implications *other* software has on their packages, and vice versa.
In Mandrake, if a package is broken, you file a bug, and the maintainer will fix it.
Of course, if you have a means to cover all the issues that are handled by packagers in Mandrake (buildrequires, automatic -devel package requirements, menu entries, pre/post scripts, virtual provides, alternatives etc etc etc), the problem becomes that you get too distro-specific to be generic.
Why shouldn't I download 'arbitrary' packages?
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Well, if you do, don't compain when you have problems installing them.
The pilot-link package in Mandrake works out-the-box, and is trivial to install (I have been using it with my Visor since Mandrake 8.1).
Do you download drivers specifically for Windows XP and install them on Windows 98? No. Do you purposely rename msvcrt4.dll to mscvrt6.dll to try and make something work? This is effectively what you are doing when you install packages from one distro on another one. It may work in some cases, but it may be more effort, and it may cause problems later.
If Windows can do it this way, and make it work, I don't see why the option can't work for Linux as well.
Because each linux distro is slightly different in the versions of libraries that are included. This is not the case with Windows.
When I got bored after several hours of messing around with dependencies, and eventually deleted Mandrake, I'm sure I was doing something *wrong*, but point is that it is difficult to do the *right* thing.
How difficult is it to use the tools provided in the distribution to install the software that is included??
I have introduced many total newbies to Mandrake, and just showed them the Mandrake Control Center once, and *they* managed. If you can't use the tools provided, and instead *insist* on doing it your way, don't blame the distro
I hardly think the original poster needs this made clear?
All he made clear was that he didn't bother to take 5 minutes to use the software tools provided by the distro to install the packages it has that wouuld work for him.
And I don't understand what you're getting up by telling him he shouldn't "provide false information".
So, you think it's the objective of slashdot to spread FUD? I thought it was to try and provide accurate information
Whenever I can do what I want without going anywhere near the command line, then I'll consider Linux.
You can. But, not if you don't use the tools provided. Have you even tried?
Sure, the rpm update could't immediately fix the symptoms of the bug (if you read the summary of the problem in MandrakeUpdate you would see that), it fixed the cause of the problem. The symptoms are fixed by a number of different actions (logging out and back in, installing another package, running the menu editor and saving with no changes, running 'update-menus -v' etc etc).
... for one trivial fix ...
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Well I don't mind some instability but that many patches and changes?
Does the number of changes have any relation to the impact of those changes?
If you read the changelogs, you will notice most of them are trivial fixes (like fixing a crash in knotes when run from inside kontact), not major issues.
An update of kdebase on it's own leads to about 75MB of updates
So, I don't think the size of updates is proportional to the magnitude of the problems being fixed
I'm running 10.0 community, and it's very stable (besides one issue with USB storage devices, which is a kernel-2.6.3 bug which is fixed by 2.6.4 - I checked - and should be good for final).
People seem to forget that this is the first release on a new kernel series, and there *will* be small teething problems, just like there were back with 8.0, but it's still a heck of a lot better than any other available distro (if you don't have hardware problems - in which case you should run the 2.4 kernel).
You most likely have set it up with a generic X driver. Without details on your machine (specifically the display card), there's nothing we can do to help you ...
Kidding aside, the biggest reason more workstations are sold with Linux is that there aren't enough professional applications (design stuff like ProE, The pSPICE family (at least Cadence and Synopsys, etc) haven't all been ported to linux yet.
Pro\E *is* available on Linux, and in fact, on HP workstations.
Many other scientific applications are available on Linux, including Matlab, most CFD suites, most FEM suites, and more maths packages are coming.
Why would I go out and buy a $3K PC to run games, and then turn around and run those games under WineX?
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Because a gamers PC isn't a high-end workstation.
A high-end workstation earns it's $5000 + price tag by doing real work
And, most of the software to do that real work is available for Linux.