Sure, but you're talking commercial linux distros here.
Surely "commercial" is the wrong adjective here.
Gentoo is just as commercial as Mandrake is... they sell goods on their site, and Mandrake is: -totally GPL (the development tree, public stable tree, and download ISOs) -more open than Debain and Fedora
I think you may prefer to use non-free or similar (yes, Debian has non-free software in contrib AFAIK...).
Most likely you selected the wrong driver for your mouse during installation. The 2.6 kernel now makes this a lot easier... so Mandrake 10.0 should get this right.
2. By far the biggest problem: Installing programs. In XP it's as easy as double clicking an icon and picking a directory. Not so with Linux. You can read my post on the newbie forums here.
Your problems are *precisely* because you think WindowsXP does things right, which it doesn't. You should not be downloading arbitrary packages from the internet WHEN THE PACKAGES ARE PROVIDED BY THE DISTRO!!!!!
Don't install ALT Linux packages on Mandrake, when Mandrake provides packages.
Don't go looking on the net first for packages, USE THE PACKAGE MANAGEMENT TOOLS PROVIDED!!!
Mandrake has it's own pilot-link packages, and you can install them in the Mandrake Control Center->Software Management->Install software, or you could do it with 'urpmi pilot-link'.
Just becuase you're used to XP only providing 20% of the functionality you need out-the-box doesn't mean Linux is like this.
If you have downloaded a Mandrake RPM, double-clicking on it should actually install it for you. Did you actually *try* this? It's worked every time I tried it.
I have no idea where anything installs to
Why do you need to know? Everything is installed so that is just works. If you really need to know, the package management tools will tell you.
, nor the best way to uninstall things.
Use the package management tools (Mandrake Control Center->Software Management->Remove software).
3. Despite claims of stability, Konqeror crashed repeatedly. I can not say why
Well, unless you tell use what you were doing, there's not much we can do to find out what the problem was... or whether there is a solution.
4. After installing a program, finding where it installed to would be like pulling teeth. Making a shortcut would be even worse.
Well, if you don't use Mandrake packages, this is what happens. The equivalent would be compiling and installing all the files on Windows, and when last did you do that?
5. Installing the correct driver for my soundcard was very complicated, even after reading the INSTALL file. I eventually gave up.
Unless you are using a card with proprietary drivers, the chances are you already had the driver installed, either: -the card was muted by default (ALSA does this to prevent damage), and Mandrake hadn't been provided with the necessary information to unmute your sound card on first boot (as it does for most cards, since users have provided the necessary information) -your card works better with a different driver WHICH IS INCLUDED!! You could have run draksound to switch drivers and give the other driver a try.
6. I got a sync out of range message when I first tried running Mandrake. I left the monitor settings on default during install. This took hours to discover and fix.
Essentially the same problem. Mandrake includes information on all monitors it can. But, if no-one bothers to report their hardware settings, nothing can be done to fix it...
Then you are doing something wrong, and you should be careful not to give out false information when you haven't got enough experience to tell if you are just doing the wrong thing.
Forget what you learned about the easy way to do things on Windows, they are WRONG! Things are much easier on Mandrake, *if* you are prepared to actually change your habits...
but I think Mandrake is less stable than Windows XP.
What you think doesn't matter. What you experience does.
Mandrake *is* stable. Maybe not as stable as Debian stable, but at least it's not obsolete...
I can't even run Debian stable on servers, because it's too far behind, and doesn't support features I need on *servers*. Mandrake does (and after a bit of work, so does Red Hat).
No drives were killed, their firmware was merely overwritten becuase the drive was non-compliant. Drives with never firmware didn't exhibit the problem (so, obviously LG was aware of the problem, they just didn't bother to inform *their* customers). LG provided a means to reflash the firmware on the drives (for those that had already had the firmware overwritten) and tools to update the firmware for those as-yet unaffected.
BTW, the patch that caused the problem originated with SuSE...
And, Gentoo had the same problem, they just have so little market share no-one was bothered to fix the problem until Mandrakesoft found the cause...
screwed up menus
Guess who didn't install updates for 9.2...
non bootable boot CDs
On some hardware, only on the download version, and CD2 does boot and can be used to start installation (and all of this is covered in the errata).
10.X been out a week or so and already 400MB of patches!
10.0 Community has been out for a week. And, that's the whole point of the community release, to iron out all the really minor issues that end-users really care about, but some of us couldn't care less about.
You should really wait for 10.0 Official to give out to newbies...
Mandrake is often more cutting edge. 2.6 Kernel and so forth but Cutting Edge often means you bleed.
So, install the 2.4 kernel available with the distro.
A.0 release on a new kernel series is always problematic (do you remember 8.0?).
automountd is a piece of crap, and no other distro than Mandrake AFAIK includes it
Well, I have no idea what automountd is.
All distros include automount daemons (either autofs or amd), since they are really useful.
Now, I guess you actually mean supermount, or to be more precise, supermount-ng. And yes, many other distros now include supermount-ng.
Redhat has developed magicdev to do something similar to what supermount-ng does, but it's actually one of the problems on Mandrake 10.0 (it's much better to remove magicdev and enable supermount). There are many scenarios supermount-ng has been adjusted for, which magicdev (being user-space) can't do.
And, you do see a number of people from Mandrake involved in development on GNOME, freedesktop.org, gcc, glibc lists...
You may notice that Mandrakesoft is substantially smaller than Redhat, has less IPO money, and has to be profitable for the next few years to survive... which does limit what they can do. But, they did employ Jeff Garzik for quite a while.
they're for mdk 10.0, not 9.2. Probably that wouldn't work.
You didn't say you wanted 9.2. The 9.2 ISOs have *just* been removed to make place for the 10.0 ISOs, but a number of mirrors will probably still have the 9.2 ISOs that have been publicy available for 5 months.
(same thing applies for your two other points)
Yes, all freely-licensed software in the distribution is available publicy.
where do I get a free, stable, mdk-modified kernel for 9.2 ?
ftp://mandrake.contactel.cz/Mandrake/9.2/i586/Mand rake/RPMS/kernel-2.4.22.10mdk-1-1mdk.i586.rpm (or on any of the other Mandrake mirrors - where they have been for over 5 months). And, it's trivial to set the distro up to install packages from the network, unlike many other "commercial" distros (I'm fighting with this on a Redhat box inside a heavily firewall network... with things that are trivial on Mandrake).
But I don't want to *subscribe* to anything because it diminishes my freedom to switch to another distro whenever I want to - hence it diminishes the level of concurrence between the various distros.
No one is forcing you to subscribe. They are just making it attractive, so that they can pay their rent.
Even in the case of patched (hence nonstandard) sources, only standard patches should be used, ie patches available for any distro.
All patches are visible in the SRPM and in Mandrake packaging CVS.
If you want to have broken software (ie some software doesn't compile with gcc-3.2 out-the-box, some perl packages were broken by perl-5.8.2), insist on this. If you want software that actually works out-the-box for everyone, patches are essential. We don't patch software for fun. We patch software to add features or bugfixes that we feel are necessary.
it prevents you from truly learning gnulinux
Has Mandrake has installed a patch which prevents vi from editing a config file? Or, maybe removed the man pages? Or maybe removed documentation?
Get real.
Any linux distro can be used to learn about Linux. It's the user who has to make the choice.
On distros like Slackware you don't have a choice, and that's why it is unproductive to do other things (besides learning the distro) on them.
For example, I much prefer documenting the setup of features that are much more difficult on other distros than spending hours getting basic configuration done.
oh really ? Then tell me how I get the mdk rpm's for, say, kde 3.2 or kernel 2.6 if I'm not a club member ?
In the ISOs that were just released?
On the cooker mirrors?
On the stable mirrors that have just been updated?
Oh. Then tell me how you compile a new kernel on a system like mdk that has its own *modified* kernel.
# urpmi kernel-source # less/usr/share/doc/kernel-source-2.6.3/README.Mandrake (which will tell you to become root, change to/usr/src/linux, run 'make mrproper;make xconfig;make bzImage modules modules_install' or similar, just like on any other binary-based distro.
Sure, if you want to compile a vanilla kernel, you may have to be careful how you configure your system or look for patches for functionality you can't live without, but that's the same with any distro.
And for that you have to be a club member.
?????
If you aren't a club member, you don't get the rpm's, so urpmi doesn't help. Cooker is the development version. I want a stable version. The pretendingly stable version is already buggy enough.
Stable releases are public (but, paying customers do get benefits... like first access... maybe you have a better business model???).
Current cooker is exaclty the same as the community release
If you're not paying, and you think the distro is "buggy", either don't complain, or file your bug reports like everyone else
I don't see where your misconception about RPMS only being available to Club members comes from. This whole thread is about the public release of the ISOs that were available to the Club members last week. There is a lag for "freeloaders", but that's not the same as being unavailable.
I've followed Mandrake's releases enthusiastically for years (I think version 5(?) was the first one I tried) until I found that version 9 *still* took forever to automount data CDs.
9.0 yes. 9.1 was better, 9.2 was excellent in this regard.
Of course, now many other distros (who you would not dare to criticise) use supermount-ng like Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 did.
And, maybe you missed the options in the Mandrake Control Center to disable supermount (for those people whose CD-ROM drives can't distinguish between an open tray and an empty drive).
Ahh, if you were having problems with MandrakeMove, then your CD-ROM drive *is* one of those that can't tell the difference. In Mandrake 10.0, the default has been changed. Supermount still works, but it won't try and close the tray on access (which is what was causing you problems) by default. And you should have been able to set this on 9.x anyway.
I had to boot with cd 2, then put in cd 1.Cd 1 isn't bootable for me. Not a huge problem, but not good for a "newbie friendly" install.
Yes, this is noted in the errata. Only some drives are affected.
The rest of your problems seem to be very suspect... I would think it's a hardware-specific problem.. there haven't been any other reports of this on the cooker list, or in bugzilla.
So, your conclusions don't seem to be valid... many other users (including some hardcore Gentoo-only users) I have supplied with CD sets have been very happy... and reckon there isn't a distro that can currently compete with 10.0.
My girlfriend's parents just wanted a computer to be able to have email contact with her while she was overseas. Their only computer experience before this was DOS. It's not practical for me to get there often, and (this being South Africa...) since we're all on dialup, VNC wouldn't really be that practical.
So, they're running Mandrake 9.1 (with all the updates that were available at the time) with kmail and mozilla for internet use, and OpenOffice.org for the odd document, with a decent firewall config (no inbound traffic). It's running fine on a 2nd-hand Celeron 366 with 128MB ram that cost them under $200 at the time. Sure, it would have been better to set up automatic updates too, but updating KDE for a really minor vulnerability over a 33.6 dialup is a bit excessive.
Did I have to install patches for them for all the latest worms? Did I have to educate them about not clicking on attachments? No.
Have I (or anyone else) ever had to "fix" their computer? No.
The lowest maintenance solution (depending on the requirements the user has) *is* Linux.
Probably less than 5% of the people in South Africa would be prepared to pay for a Mac for personal use...
Club members have been asking for ftp servers as the bittorrent releases don't work.
Users who can't used bittorrent can request FTP/HTTP access, as you can see on your bittorrent page. However, they prefer that you use bittorrent (since it is more efficient for everyone).
When I visit https://www.mandrakeclub.com/user.php?op=myBittorr ent, I see:
If you really can't use BitTorrent, please ask for a HTTP/FTP access, please use our form and please be patient, you should receive special login and password on your main email address within 4 working days.
I'm currently getting less than 10kB/s down using bittorrent.
Then, you haven't read the article linked to on the bittorrent page:
If you read the cooker archives for today, you will see some people complaining abot getting 10k/s, and they are answered by people getting 150k/s or more.
Many users had all 5 ISOs (if you're a silver member) less than 6 hours after they started.
And them's the facts.
No, that's your opinion, and I don't agree with it.
Mandrake has a policy that no non-free software may be in the download edition (well, really in main and contrib).
If you want to see display drivers for your display card in the free (freely licensed, as opposed to free to use) version, contact your hardware vendor.
No exceptions are made, the last non-free software (netscape 4) was removed in 7.x.
BTW, there are a few issues with "Debian-style package management".
Firstly, there's a package installation backend, dpkg vs rpm. It's too much work to change between them.
Secondly, there's a package management frontend, urpmi vs apt. apt in Mandrake has been patched to work with the same hdlists as urpmi, so it's really no issue.
The third issue is the package quality and standards, and Mandrake probably has the best package quality of the major rpm distros, because there is a sane library policy, and many tools and automatic checks run on packages.
So, IMHO, apt-get is irrelevant. urpmi has most features apt has, and many apt doesn't have.
and I hope fedora has provided security updates for the minor security hole in releases prior to 3.0.2.
Mandrake 9.2 shipped with 3.0.0 in contrib (because we knew it wasn't going to be production-ready).
And, since contrib is unsupported, there aren't official updates, but there are unofficial ones on the samba mirrors, provided by the Mandrake maintainer (me).
You really don't want to run 3.0.0... not for a serious deployment.
1) My HP PSC 2210 USB printer doesn't work (worked in 9.2).
I think that is fixed by kernel-2.6.3-4mk, and/or some other package updates recently, someone reported success recently. But, you could just go and search in bugzilla yourself...
2)Add media for your new release. If that's the CDs, insert disk one and do # urpmi.addmedia --distrib 10.0-cd removable:///mnt/cdrom
3)Update urpmi (in future this won't be necessary, the urpmi in 10.0 will automatically update itself if it sees there is an update, and then restart...)
# urpmi urpmi
4)Upgrade everything else # urpmi --auto-select
5)Choose a kernel # urpmi kernel
6)Reboot # reboot (only if you need to... but if you don't you will most likely at least want to restart your window manager..).
So, in 10.0 (or if you're running a beta or rc or cooker), it about a 3 or 4 step process - new/update media; urpmi --auto-select;urpmi kernel
Note that if you don't use the installer, some things are not done for you, so read the release notes...
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but you're talking commercial linux distros here.
... they sell goods on their site, and Mandrake is:
...).
Surely "commercial" is the wrong adjective here.
Gentoo is just as commercial as Mandrake is
-totally GPL (the development tree, public stable tree, and download ISOs)
-more open than Debain and Fedora
I think you may prefer to use non-free or similar (yes, Debian has non-free software in contrib AFAIK
1. My mouse was uncontrollable.
... so Mandrake 10.0 should get this right.
... or whether there is a solution.
...
...
Most likely you selected the wrong driver for your mouse during installation. The 2.6 kernel now makes this a lot easier
2. By far the biggest problem: Installing programs. In XP it's as easy as double clicking an icon and picking a directory. Not so with Linux. You can read my post on the newbie forums
here.
Your problems are *precisely* because you think WindowsXP does things right, which it doesn't. You should not be downloading arbitrary packages from the internet WHEN THE PACKAGES ARE PROVIDED BY THE DISTRO!!!!!
Don't install ALT Linux packages on Mandrake, when Mandrake provides packages.
Don't go looking on the net first for packages, USE THE PACKAGE MANAGEMENT TOOLS PROVIDED!!!
Mandrake has it's own pilot-link packages, and you can install them in the Mandrake Control Center->Software Management->Install software, or you could do it with 'urpmi pilot-link'.
Just becuase you're used to XP only providing 20% of the functionality you need out-the-box doesn't mean Linux is like this.
If you have downloaded a Mandrake RPM, double-clicking on it should actually install it for you. Did you actually *try* this? It's worked every time I tried it.
I have no idea where anything installs to
Why do you need to know? Everything is installed so that is just works. If you really need to know, the package management tools will tell you.
, nor the best way to uninstall things.
Use the package management tools (Mandrake Control Center->Software Management->Remove software).
3. Despite claims of stability, Konqeror crashed repeatedly. I can not say why
Well, unless you tell use what you were doing, there's not much we can do to find out what the problem was
4. After installing a program, finding where it installed to would be like pulling teeth. Making a shortcut would be even worse.
Well, if you don't use Mandrake packages, this is what happens. The equivalent would be compiling and installing all the files on Windows, and when last did you do that?
5. Installing the correct driver for my soundcard was very complicated, even after reading the INSTALL file. I eventually gave up.
Unless you are using a card with proprietary drivers, the chances are you already had the driver installed, either:
-the card was muted by default (ALSA does this to prevent damage), and Mandrake hadn't been provided with the necessary information to unmute your sound card on first boot (as it does for most cards, since users have provided the necessary information)
-your card works better with a different driver WHICH IS INCLUDED!! You could have run draksound to switch drivers and give the other driver a try.
6. I got a sync out of range message when I first tried running Mandrake. I left the monitor settings on default during install. This took hours to discover and fix.
Essentially the same problem. Mandrake includes information on all monitors it can. But, if no-one bothers to report their hardware settings, nothing can be done to fix it
See how you can help here.
But above all installing programs is a pain.
Then you are doing something wrong, and you should be careful not to give out false information when you haven't got enough experience to tell if you are just doing the wrong thing.
Forget what you learned about the easy way to do things on Windows, they are WRONG! Things are much easier on Mandrake, *if* you are prepared to actually change your habits
Hmm, from your symptoms, I am guessing you should try booting with the options 'noapic nolapic'.
Everything works out-the-box on my laptop.
but I think Mandrake is less stable than Windows XP.
...
What you think doesn't matter. What you experience does.
Mandrake *is* stable. Maybe not as stable as Debian stable, but at least it's not obsolete
I can't even run Debian stable on servers, because it's too far behind, and doesn't support features I need on *servers*. Mandrake does (and after a bit of work, so does Red Hat).
Little things like killing CD-ROM drives
...
...
...
...
.0 release on a new kernel series is always problematic (do you remember 8.0?).
No drives were killed, their firmware was merely overwritten becuase the drive was non-compliant. Drives with never firmware didn't exhibit the problem (so, obviously LG was aware of the problem, they just didn't bother to inform *their* customers). LG provided a means to reflash the firmware on the drives (for those that had already had the firmware overwritten) and tools to update the firmware for those as-yet unaffected.
BTW, the patch that caused the problem originated with SuSE
And, Gentoo had the same problem, they just have so little market share no-one was bothered to fix the problem until Mandrakesoft found the cause
screwed up menus
Guess who didn't install updates for 9.2
non bootable boot CDs
On some hardware, only on the download version, and CD2 does boot and can be used to start installation (and all of this is covered in the errata).
10.X been out a week or so and already 400MB of patches!
10.0 Community has been out for a week. And, that's the whole point of the community release, to iron out all the really minor issues that end-users really care about, but some of us couldn't care less about.
You should really wait for 10.0 Official to give out to newbies
Mandrake is often more cutting edge. 2.6 Kernel and so forth but Cutting Edge often means you bleed.
So, install the 2.4 kernel available with the distro.
A
automountd is a piece of crap, and no other distro than Mandrake AFAIK includes it
...
... which does limit what they can do. But, they did employ Jeff Garzik for quite a while.
Well, I have no idea what automountd is.
All distros include automount daemons (either autofs or amd), since they are really useful.
Now, I guess you actually mean supermount, or to be more precise, supermount-ng. And yes, many other distros now include supermount-ng.
Redhat has developed magicdev to do something similar to what supermount-ng does, but it's actually one of the problems on Mandrake 10.0 (it's much better to remove magicdev and enable supermount). There are many scenarios supermount-ng has been adjusted for, which magicdev (being user-space) can't do.
And, you do see a number of people from Mandrake involved in development on GNOME, freedesktop.org, gcc, glibc lists
You may notice that Mandrakesoft is substantially smaller than Redhat, has less IPO money, and has to be profitable for the next few years to survive
But after a while I tried Debian out on a spare computer and was even more impressed with apt-get (especially upgrade).
So, you never tried urpmi I take it?
but Debian for the more experienced who are in a position to fiddle with lilo.conf, modutils, etc.
So, what prevents you from doing this on Mandrake?
they're for mdk 10.0, not 9.2. Probably that wouldn't work.
d rake/RPMS/kernel-2.4.22.10mdk-1-1mdk.i586.rpm ... with things that are trivial on Mandrake).
You didn't say you wanted 9.2. The 9.2 ISOs have *just* been removed to make place for the 10.0 ISOs, but a number of mirrors will probably still have the 9.2 ISOs that have been publicy available for 5 months.
(same thing applies for your two other points)
Yes, all freely-licensed software in the distribution is available publicy.
where do I get a free, stable, mdk-modified kernel for 9.2 ?
ftp://mandrake.contactel.cz/Mandrake/9.2/i586/Man
(or on any of the other Mandrake mirrors - where they have been for over 5 months). And, it's trivial to set the distro up to install packages from the network, unlike many other "commercial" distros (I'm fighting with this on a Redhat box inside a heavily firewall network
But I don't want to *subscribe* to anything because it diminishes my freedom to switch to another distro whenever I want to - hence it diminishes the level of concurrence between the various distros.
No one is forcing you to subscribe. They are just making it attractive, so that they can pay their rent.
Even in the case of patched (hence nonstandard) sources, only standard patches should be used, ie patches available for any distro.
All patches are visible in the SRPM and in Mandrake packaging CVS.
If you want to have broken software (ie some software doesn't compile with gcc-3.2 out-the-box, some perl packages were broken by perl-5.8.2), insist on this. If you want software that actually works out-the-box for everyone, patches are essential. We don't patch software for fun. We patch software to add features or bugfixes that we feel are necessary.
it prevents you from truly learning gnulinux
Has Mandrake has installed a patch which prevents vi from editing a config file? Or, maybe removed the man pages? Or maybe removed documentation?
Get real.
Any linux distro can be used to learn about Linux. It's the user who has to make the choice.
On distros like Slackware you don't have a choice, and that's why it is unproductive to do other things (besides learning the distro) on them.
For example, I much prefer documenting the setup of features that are much more difficult on other distros than spending hours getting basic configuration done.
As I said, you have some misconceptions.
In the ISOs that were just released?
On the cooker mirrors?
On the stable mirrors that have just been updated?
Oh. Then tell me how you compile a new kernel on a system like mdk that has its own *modified* kernel.
# urpmi kernel-source
# less
(which will tell you to become root, change to
Sure, if you want to compile a vanilla kernel, you may have to be careful how you configure your system or look for patches for functionality you can't live without, but that's the same with any distro.
And for that you have to be a club member.
?????
If you aren't a club member, you don't get the rpm's, so urpmi doesn't help. Cooker is the development version. I want a stable version. The pretendingly stable version is already buggy enough.
I don't see where your misconception about RPMS only being available to Club members comes from. This whole thread is about the public release of the ISOs that were available to the Club members last week. There is a lag for "freeloaders", but that's not the same as being unavailable.
I've followed Mandrake's releases enthusiastically for years (I think version 5(?) was the first one I tried) until I found that version 9 *still* took forever to automount data CDs.
9.0 yes. 9.1 was better, 9.2 was excellent in this regard.
Of course, now many other distros (who you would not dare to criticise) use supermount-ng like Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 did.
And, maybe you missed the options in the Mandrake Control Center to disable supermount (for those people whose CD-ROM drives can't distinguish between an open tray and an empty drive).
Ahh, if you were having problems with MandrakeMove, then your CD-ROM drive *is* one of those that can't tell the difference. In Mandrake 10.0, the default has been changed. Supermount still works, but it won't try and close the tray on access (which is what was causing you problems) by default. And you should have been able to set this on 9.x anyway.
You clearly don't understand anything about Mandrake Linux.
...).
/. ???
You don't need to subscribe to the Club (there are benefits though).
You don't need to subscribe to an udpates service, all security and bugfix updates are free (ie they don't hold the security of your box to ransom).
You don't need to pay for upgrades if you don't want to (but there are some advantages
You don't need to be "very skilled" to update anything.
Have you heard of urpmi? Cooker? rpmdrake?
Do you know anything about Mandrake besides what you read on
I had to boot with cd 2, then put in cd 1.Cd 1 isn't bootable for me. Not a huge problem, but not good for a "newbie friendly" install.
... I would think it's a hardware-specific problem .. there haven't been any other reports of this on the cooker list, or in bugzilla.
... many other users (including some hardcore Gentoo-only users) I have supplied with CD sets have been very happy ... and reckon there isn't a distro that can currently compete with 10.0.
Yes, this is noted in the errata. Only some drives are affected.
The rest of your problems seem to be very suspect
So, your conclusions don't seem to be valid
My girlfriend's parents just wanted a computer to be able to have email contact with her while she was overseas. Their only computer experience before this was DOS. It's not practical for me to get there often, and (this being South Africa ...) since we're all on dialup, VNC wouldn't really be that practical.
...
So, they're running Mandrake 9.1 (with all the updates that were available at the time) with kmail and mozilla for internet use, and OpenOffice.org for the odd document, with a decent firewall config (no inbound traffic). It's running fine on a 2nd-hand Celeron 366 with 128MB ram that cost them under $200 at the time. Sure, it would have been better to set up automatic updates too, but updating KDE for a really minor vulnerability over a 33.6 dialup is a bit excessive.
Did I have to install patches for them for all the latest worms? Did I have to educate them about not clicking on attachments? No.
Have I (or anyone else) ever had to "fix" their computer? No.
The lowest maintenance solution (depending on the requirements the user has) *is* Linux.
Probably less than 5% of the people in South Africa would be prepared to pay for a Mac for personal use
Users who can't used bittorrent can request FTP/HTTP access, as you can see on your bittorrent page. However, they prefer that you use bittorrent (since it is more efficient for everyone).
When I visit https://www.mandrakeclub.com/user.php?op=myBittor
I'm currently getting less than 10kB/s down using bittorrent.
Then, you haven't read the article linked to on the bittorrent page:
If you read the cooker archives for today, you will see some people complaining abot getting 10k/s, and they are answered by people getting 150k/s or more.
Many users had all 5 ISOs (if you're a silver member) less than 6 hours after they started.
And them's the facts.
No, that's your opinion, and I don't agree with it.
(Mandrake has something with urpmi, though I think installing unlisted packages is a little clumsy)
How so? You can install any rpm which you can access via ftp/http/ssh/local files by running:
# urpmi path/to/package
And, any dependencies urpmi already knows about will be installed, along with the package.
If you need dependencies from the same location, you need hdlists for remote sources, or to add a virtual urpmi medium for local sources.
Mandrake has apt in contrib, patched to use the same hdlists as urpmi does.
You get apt the same place you get everything else with Mandrake, urpmi:
...
First, add a contrib medium (go to http://www.urpmi.org/easyurpmi if you need help to do this), then:
# urpmi apt synaptic
Of course, urpmi is officially supported, apt isn't, so doing an upgrade is is probably a better time to use urpmi than apt
Mandrake has a policy that no non-free software may be in the download edition (well, really in main and contrib).
If you want to see display drivers for your display card in the free (freely licensed, as opposed to free to use) version, contact your hardware vendor.
No exceptions are made, the last non-free software (netscape 4) was removed in 7.x.
# urpmi.addmedia --distrib mymirror ftp://mymirror.com/path/to/mandrake/release/arch
# urpmi apt
# urpmi synaptic
BTW, there are a few issues with "Debian-style package management".
Firstly, there's a package installation backend, dpkg vs rpm. It's too much work to change between them.
Secondly, there's a package management frontend, urpmi vs apt. apt in Mandrake has been patched to work with the same hdlists as urpmi, so it's really no issue.
The third issue is the package quality and standards, and Mandrake probably has the best package quality of the major rpm distros, because there is a sane library policy, and many tools and automatic checks run on packages.
So, IMHO, apt-get is irrelevant. urpmi has most features apt has, and many apt doesn't have.
So, why don't you give it a try?
... considering samba3-3.0.0-2mdk shipped with contribs for 9.2 ...
Your point?
and I hope fedora has provided security updates for the minor security hole in releases prior to 3.0.2.
... not for a serious deployment.
Mandrake 9.2 shipped with 3.0.0 in contrib (because we knew it wasn't going to be production-ready).
And, since contrib is unsupported, there aren't official updates, but there are unofficial ones on the samba mirrors, provided by the Mandrake maintainer (me).
You really don't want to run 3.0.0
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/Rel easeInfo
...
...
...
You will notice there were 2 betas not3) and 2 RCs ( not 3).
This round there have actually been more releases (if you count the cooker snapshot).
9.2.0 killed CD-ROM's
Which the stable releases of 2 other large distros also did, and they didn't find the problem until Mandrake did
And, they didn't kill them, since it's LGs bug, LG provided fixes and workarounds
And judging a realease by a beta2 isn't really that fair
1) My HP PSC 2210 USB printer doesn't work (worked in 9.2).
...
I think that is fixed by kernel-2.6.3-4mk, and/or some other package updates recently, someone reported success recently. But, you could just go and search in bugzilla yourself
sorry ...
1)Remove all media for your old release
...)
...)
... but if you don't you will most likely at least want to restart your window manager ..).
...
# urpmi.removemedia -a
(beware, -a removes all media
2)Add media for your new release. If that's the CDs, insert disk one and do
# urpmi.addmedia --distrib 10.0-cd removable:///mnt/cdrom
3)Update urpmi (in future this won't be necessary, the urpmi in 10.0 will automatically update itself if it sees there is an update, and then restart
# urpmi urpmi
4)Upgrade everything else
# urpmi --auto-select
5)Choose a kernel
# urpmi kernel
6)Reboot
# reboot
(only if you need to
So, in 10.0 (or if you're running a beta or rc or cooker), it about a 3 or 4 step process - new/update media; urpmi --auto-select;urpmi kernel
Note that if you don't use the installer, some things are not done for you, so read the release notes
Is it 3.2.0
...
No.
and to instead wait for 3.2.1, which was released to distro packagers only a few days ago.
And for the past two months, Laurent Montel has been doing sync's with CVS at least once a week on most KDE packages to get all the bug fixes.
$ rpm -q --changelog libkdecore4 |head -n `rpm -q --changelog libkdecore4|grep -n -E "(3.1.9[0-9]|3.2.[0-9])"|tail -n1|cut -f1 -d:`|grep -i cvs|wc -l
65
And, that's only "kdebase"
Seems awfully fast for Mandrake to have already included the 3.2.1 fixes (multimegabyte).
Heard of CVS?
This is one of the reasons I like Debian
Because everyone tells me Debian is unstable, and I've never tried Mandrake?