Our home network ran a samba-2.2.8a+LDAP domain controller (for me to test), but some of the machines are in their own workgroup, and can access the samba server (which is in another workgroup) with no problems.
On our business network (running samba-2.2.8a on LDAP etc), we often have consultants bring their own machines, some of which are joined to their own Windows domains, and they have no problems accessing our samba boxes.
Of course, it would help if you gave more detail, but it would be more appropriate for the samba list.
But, I don't think the problems you were seeing are common.
BTW, we have been running samba as a production DC since 2.0.7...
Unless you are talking about domains, no, there is no reason you should be having any trouble to connect (besides the usual windows browsing problems, but you should use WINS to prevent that).
I have Mandrake 9.1 and Slackware 9.0 dual-booted on one machine (cheap no-name 1.1 GHz with 224 Mb RAM).
For display problems, it would help if you mentioned what display card it was using...
Mandrake had several problems, notably configuring X (no screen definitions) and not seeing my wheel-mouse. I had to copy my XF86config file from my Slack partition to get Mandrake to work.
Alternatively you could have done: # mv/etc/X11/XF86Config*/tmp # XFdrake --expert --noauto (do your configuration but don't test) # service dm restart
There were some cards which caused a crash during the X test on 9.1, resulting in a corrupt config file. Removing it, running the configuration again, not testing (to avoid another possible crash), and restarting the display manager fixes this.
AFAIK, this bug is fixed, but since I don't have the hardware to reproduce the bug, I couldn't check...
In addition, Slackware is about 20% faster than Mandrake on the same machine, although memory usage was about the same.
You must have some other problems.
In fact, this machine running Mandrake is about as fast as my old 433 MHz Emachine w/192 Mb RAM running Red Hat 9.
You definitely have problems. I would guess your hostname resolution is stuffed, but 'time getent hosts `hostname`' will show that. If it's more than a second, it's your problem.
Anyway, while there were small niggles on some hardware, overall 9.1 was really good.
We run postfix/amavisd-new with a commercial virus scanner (why not just a commercial virus gateway? Well, most of them aren't as flexible).
So, first thing a virus find is our header checks for the common windows virus files (.vbs, etc etc). This catches *all* the Sobig.* stuff we have hitting the server, if the connecting client is Sobig itself, we save 100% of the traffic (ok, maybe 99.9%).
Then, we have the antivirus, which will catch anything embedded in the kind of files our users want to receive (.doc,.zip etc).
Then the antispam (spamassassin).
If a virus is found, we notify the intended recipient (if they are local), quarantine the whole original mail, and notify our postmaster, but we don't notify the (potentially forged) sender. If the recipient actually knows the sender, they can inform them if they think it's a real concern.
Now, I get a bounce from one of these ridiculous virus gateway implementations. Some of them return the *entire* original mail as an attachment. This breaks our header checks, and gets through to the AV, and gets me a notification. This is the *only* traffic I get as a result of Sobig.F, and is wasting my time due to the incompetence of other mail administrators (it's ok if it's a user, at least they can have an excuse).
What I need now is a header check that matches Norton, and returns a suitable message.
Anyway, it's nice to see at least one vendor agrees, but I need more ammunition to send with my complaints to the administrators of these broken mail virus solutions.
You were probably missing mod_php
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
·
· Score: 1
I don't remember being able to select PHP in the "Categories" screen, so did you select php in the "Custom selection" or whatever screen? If you did, you may have missed the fact that php comes in different flavours, since it is not only a web-based language, you can run php scripts on the CLI with php-cli.
You were probably missing the mod_php package: # urpmi mod_php This would probably give you a choice between a mod_php for apache 1 or apache 2, you just have to choose which one you want.
Of course, not all the php features are in one package, so for mysql you may also need to: # urpmi php-mysql
You could have done the same on Mandrake
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Just because a distro has KDE and 100 services, doens't mean you should start them all on your 166MMX.
In general, no distro is faster or more bloated than any other (some compile with fewer features, and thus may have a slight edge, until you need the feature..), you could have tried a minimal Mandrake install and done your configuration manually, and been up and running in under a day...
Re:Good news for Mandrake users.
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
·
· Score: 1
By the way, we dont let Mandrake install the LAMP stuff, we do that manually after the machine is up and running.
Well, I know at least one person who would be interested to know why you don't like the A and P parts of the LAMP, since the A part has more modules, all of which work out-the-box, than any other distro, and there's nothing wrong with the P part.
If you're interested, you could ensure that you don't have to roll your own (and maintain your own) LAMP stuff.
Not that I'm a fan of qmail, but I think most people would classify a DoS vulnerability as a "bug" not a "hole".
If it would result in a DOS under conditions where other MTAs would not suffer a DOS, IMHO it's certainly not just a 'bug', it's a serious bug, and most other authors issue bug fixes, and vendors provide patches for this.
I don't think DJB certifies his software as bug free
No, but people here are claiming he does ($500 reward etc etc).
If you count DoS as a vulnerability, then all MTAs have "holes".
Is Sendmail still used because it ships as the default mailer with almost every flavor of Unix?
Yes. Yes it is.
No, SuSE and Mandrake have been shipping Postfix by default for a few years (Mandrake at least since 7.1). Of course, sendmail is still available and supported (pity, otherwise there may be space for other secure mail servers...).
I think it's only the Redhat users who get an insecure MTA by default...
Well, it's pointless comparing any MTA to sendmail, so what is the point of your post?
Postfix implements many of the ideas in Qmail, but -is a drop-in replacement for sendmail (ie external commands are supported, many config files are common) -free software (DJBWare isn't free) -supported by most linux distros -scales well (with support for LDAP, SQL etc out-the-box) -doesn't unbundle mail
Just not a lot of demand, since the standard unix ownership/permissions bits work fine for 99.99% of the imaginable needed scenarios.
I don't quite agree, unless you think that group permissions and a limit of 32 groups total, and 15 over NFS is enough to have sufficiently fine-grained access controls. We don't, so we have been running Mandrake on XFS for 2 years.
Looks like the vendors finally decided to add it officially to satisfy bureaucratic checklists.
s/vendors/Red Hat/
SuSE and Mandrake have shipped supporting ACLs in an increasing number of filesystems for thier past 3-4 general releases (Mandrake for 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, kernel update for 8.1 supports ACLs).
Mistake number one. If you're going to use binary packages, use the tools your distro provides (in the case of Redhat you're a bit out of luck here) to install packages.
Downloading an arbitrary binary package from some arbitrary user is just as bad as using a binary build from someone else's Gentoo box.
And the vast majority of the time the packages doesn't need the new version, it just so happened that the developer was playing around with some CVS version of the library when he packaged the software.
It's not always that simple. It may be that a different package that requires the library *does* require the latest version of it. Anyway, if the developer took a CVS snapshot, it's his responsibility to test all the software that depends on it, and rebuild them if necessary.
It wasn't till recently that I realized gentoo's potential for easing the rpm-dependency hell that other distro's have.
You only have dependency hell if you don't use the tools provided by the distro. Many of the issues will affect source-based distros, but in most cases the source-based distros don't worry about it, since they're happy to have the user wait another day to rebuild all the dependant packages with different use flags to get one feature...
Anyway, regarding Mandrake (which has pretty decent package management tools, and I am pretty sure you didn't give it a fair run), in cooker and cooker contrib, of the 4000 packages, there are only about 30 packages that have dependencies not satisfied at present (maintainers get spammed by a bot about this weekly), and many of them are either obsolete packages, or the dependencies *are* met, but the bot doesn't like them (file-based dependencies are not preferred, but do work although you get warnings from the bot).
Dependencies will *never* go away, if you choose not to use the tools that you are provided with to deal with them, that's your problem, not a distro's problem.
I know (since I installed LM 9.2beta) how hard it was to select/unselect packages using mouse from hundreds of them.
When you could have taken the defaults, updated your drakxtools package, and been able to select again as usual.
Redhat uses a different beta cycle strategy (AFAIK, with only one beta release), and Mandrake uses multiple betas. This was just to get people up to speed with the changes in cooker (note the old kernel for example), especially to find the as yet unfound bugs in the mods they have made.
Anyway, since cooker is always in flux, *it* is considered alpha... and it hasn't been too bad this release cycle (it's been worse).
It's not that I couldn't find the package I wanted, it's that I was relegated to special level of hell where you must resolve dependencies for binary packages.
???
urpmi? Or were you trying to use rpm itself?
It could have been worse, you could have been trying to resolve source dependencies, having to rebuild a whole chain of software with new options to get one more feature that's just one package away on a binary dist like Debian or Mandrake.
Mandrake while my favorite choice, doesnt include the best pre-emptive kernels.
You mean like this one (from contrib for 9.1)?
Name : kernel-multimedia-2.4.21.0.16mdk Group : System/Kernel and hardware Source RPM: kernel-multimedia-2.4.21.0.16mdk-1-1mdk.src.rpm L icense: GPL Packager : Danny Tholen URL : http://www.kernel.org/ Summary : A preemptible Linux kernel, which reduces the latency of the kernel. Description: This kernel includes patches useful for multmedia purposes like: preemption, low-latency and the ability for processes to transfer their capabilities. The preemtion patches allow a task to be preempted anywhere within the kernel, using spinlocks as markers for non-preemptibility regions. The resulting system response is greatly increased, with measured average latencies under 1ms. Andrew Morton's low-latency patches fix the remaining points in the kernel that cause latency. The setpcap patch allows suid root processess to transfer capabilities to non-root processess, and so making it possible for user processes to run with realtime priority.
[some uninteresting fields removed in aid of the lameness filter]
The next one for 9.2 contrib will most likely have the O(1) scheduler also.
That is just somehting that I never found with Mandrake.
Then I take it you were running a stable release? Popular software in Mandrake is updated very quickly in cooker (unless there is a good reason not to, such as OpenOffice.org is a point-point release behind because the maintainers working on 1.1).
If you have a fast processor. My Duron 800 can keep itself busy for a weekend compiling OpenOffice.org...
Even with the compiling, it takes less time to install some stuff (eg nmap) than it would take to locate the relevant.rpm.
This is on my Thinkpad 600X, which is a 500 PIII/192MB, with a pretty slow disk: [root@bgmilne-thinkpad mnt]# rpm -q nmap package nmap is not installed [root@bgmilne-thinkpad mnt]# time urpmi nmap installing/var/cache/urpmi/rpms/nmap-3.00-2mdk.i586.rpm
Preparing... #some hashes replaced to fool the lameness filter#
1:nmap #some hashes replaced to fool the lameness filter# 5.34user 1.36system 0:26.76elapsed 25%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k 0inputs+0outputs (1712major+8394minor)pagefaults 0swaps
You would need quite a system to beat 26s I think.
Also, the kernel compile is unfair, because gentoo-sources includes a whole load of patches that Mandrake and Debian don't.
From the article:
"The same 2.4.21 source was copied to all machines and compiled using the same options. However, it should be noted that the Debian system used gcc 3.3.1 whilst the Mandrake and Gentoo installations used gcc 3.3.2."
I don't see the point of: -not using the default compiler on the system -if you don't use the default compiler on each machine, at least use the same compiler across them all
I also understand that Mandrake tends to gravitate toward the bleeding edge of the packages they include in their releases, but the kernel is one place I think shouldn't be included in this manner.
Ummm, you did notice that the 2.6 kernel we're talking about is in contrib? Most newbies won't even be able to find it! 9.2 Will most certainly default to a 2.4.22 kernel (since we are rapidly approaching version freeze time), but there are already a few alternative kernels in contrib, and this will be just another choice.
I even have a customer's server running Mandrake 9.0 for 7 months and they haven't had a single problem with it (they use it for Samba and DHCP primarily).
Same experience, on a clients Compaq Proliant (the software is more reliable than the hardare;-), one disk failure, no software failures), on our own Dell PowerEdge boxes, but then again I can't think of a recent release that had issues on server applications (and I have run everything since 7.0 on production servers... but 7.2 and 8.0 were a bit rough around the edges if you happened to use ReiserFS 2.x on a 2.2 kernel).
Otherwise stick to Slackware or Debian for more matured packages in a distribution release.
Would that be the Debain that lets you choose between samba-2.2.3a and 3.0.0alpha, with nothing in between? s/mature/obsolete/g (not that there's anything wrong with samba3, it's also available in Mandrake contribs since 9.1, and for a few other releases from my site).
I'd prefer they be started with something sensible that doesn't cause them to think 'Linux is slow and bloated' right off the bat, frankly.
Remember that the competition now isn't Windows 3.11, it's Windows XP. We don't need to worry about bloat too much by default, but we are behind on features and usability.
If speed was all that mattered, why don't we just give them twm, mutt, links and vi?
Sorry, but there is no way you can put ice up against WindowsXP for a newbie, but you can with KDE, and maybe the latest GNOME release.
I think it would give a better initial impression to most newbies.
Riiight. Why can't I drag and drop to the desktop? Where is my "My Documents?", "Where is my CD-ROM drive?", "Why is the text in the menus so ugly?. Maybe 7 years ago, before Windows 98 ice could have competed with Windows...
Instead, these things are left exclusively for those of us that know about them, know how to find them and how to configure them on our own time, while the newbies are being given a very bad impression of Linux
No, the people at mandrakeusers.org, mandrakeclub.com etc will quickly set them right.
if they try to install it on anything but a brand new box at least.
KDE plus OpenOffice.org plus Mozilla plus a few more utilities run just great on my 800 Duron which is now 3 years old (assuming you have about 192MB ram or more). My girlfriends 366 Celeron/128MB ram machine is a bit slow, but not noticably slower (except OpenOffice.org startup) than it was running Windows98.
In my reply, the context of "ever" was post-bankruptcy filing, due to this being the context of the post I was replying to. Sorry, I should have been more clear about that.
Maybe the people that ran Mandrake into the ground are gone now?
They were kicked out a good few months before the bankruptcy protection filing, but it was too late... to prevent the layoff of developers.
Slashdot Mirror
Our home network ran a samba-2.2.8a+LDAP domain controller (for me to test), but some of the machines are in their own workgroup, and can access the samba server (which is in another workgroup) with no problems.
...
On our business network (running samba-2.2.8a on LDAP etc), we often have consultants bring their own machines, some of which are joined to their own Windows domains, and they have no problems accessing our samba boxes.
Of course, it would help if you gave more detail, but it would be more appropriate for the samba list.
But, I don't think the problems you were seeing are common.
BTW, we have been running samba as a production DC since 2.0.7
Unless you are talking about domains, no, there is no reason you should be having any trouble to connect (besides the usual windows browsing problems, but you should use WINS to prevent that).
You could do this with 2.2.8a if your AD server allowed anonymous authentication. If not, you need 3.0.0.
See how we do it on Mandrake (since 9.0).
I run a Mandrake 8.2 box in production as a mail server in an AD domain, all authentication is via winbind.
I have Mandrake 9.1 and Slackware 9.0 dual-booted on one machine (cheap no-name 1.1 GHz with 224 Mb RAM).
...
/etc/X11/XF86Config* /tmp
...
For display problems, it would help if you mentioned what display card it was using
Mandrake had several problems, notably configuring X (no screen definitions) and not seeing my wheel-mouse. I had to copy my XF86config file from my Slack partition to get Mandrake to work.
Alternatively you could have done:
# mv
# XFdrake --expert --noauto
(do your configuration but don't test)
# service dm restart
There were some cards which caused a crash during the X test on 9.1, resulting in a corrupt config file. Removing it, running the configuration again, not testing (to avoid another possible crash), and restarting the display manager fixes this.
AFAIK, this bug is fixed, but since I don't have the hardware to reproduce the bug, I couldn't check
In addition, Slackware is about 20% faster than Mandrake on the same machine, although memory usage was about the same.
You must have some other problems.
In fact, this machine running Mandrake is about as fast as my old 433 MHz Emachine w/192 Mb RAM running Red Hat 9.
You definitely have problems. I would guess your hostname resolution is stuffed, but 'time getent hosts `hostname`' will show that. If it's more than a second, it's your problem.
Anyway, while there were small niggles on some hardware, overall 9.1 was really good.
Just:
...
# urpmi.setup
(add 9.2 source)
# urpmi urpmi
# urpmi --auto-select
# urpmi kernel
# reboot
No need do re-customise your system
We run postfix/amavisd-new with a commercial virus scanner (why not just a commercial virus gateway? Well, most of them aren't as flexible).
.zip etc).
So, first thing a virus find is our header checks for the common windows virus files (.vbs, etc etc). This catches *all* the Sobig.* stuff we have hitting the server, if the connecting client is Sobig itself, we save 100% of the traffic (ok, maybe 99.9%).
Then, we have the antivirus, which will catch anything embedded in the kind of files our users want to receive (.doc,
Then the antispam (spamassassin).
If a virus is found, we notify the intended recipient (if they are local), quarantine the whole original mail, and notify our postmaster, but we don't notify the (potentially forged) sender. If the recipient actually knows the sender, they can inform them if they think it's a real concern.
Now, I get a bounce from one of these ridiculous virus gateway implementations. Some of them return the *entire* original mail as an attachment. This breaks our header checks, and gets through to the AV, and gets me a notification. This is the *only* traffic I get as a result of Sobig.F, and is wasting my time due to the incompetence of other mail administrators (it's ok if it's a user, at least they can have an excuse).
What I need now is a header check that matches Norton, and returns a suitable message.
Anyway, it's nice to see at least one vendor agrees, but I need more ammunition to send with my complaints to the administrators of these broken mail virus solutions.
I don't remember being able to select PHP in the "Categories" screen, so did you select php in the "Custom selection" or whatever screen? If you did, you may have missed the fact that php comes in different flavours, since it is not only a web-based language, you can run php scripts on the CLI with php-cli.
You were probably missing the mod_php package:
# urpmi mod_php
This would probably give you a choice between a mod_php for apache 1 or apache 2, you just have to choose which one you want.
Of course, not all the php features are in one package, so for mysql you may also need to:
# urpmi php-mysql
Just because a distro has KDE and 100 services, doens't mean you should start them all on your 166MMX.
..), you could have tried a minimal Mandrake install and done your configuration manually, and been up and running in under a day ...
In general, no distro is faster or more bloated than any other (some compile with fewer features, and thus may have a slight edge, until you need the feature
By the way, we dont let Mandrake install the LAMP stuff, we do that manually after the machine is up and running.
Well, I know at least one person who would be interested to know why you don't like the A and P parts of the LAMP, since the A part has more modules, all of which work out-the-box, than any other distro, and there's nothing wrong with the P part.
If you're interested, you could ensure that you don't have to roll your own (and maintain your own) LAMP stuff.
Not that I'm a fan of qmail, but I think most people would classify a DoS vulnerability as a "bug" not a "hole".
If it would result in a DOS under conditions where other MTAs would not suffer a DOS, IMHO it's certainly not just a 'bug', it's a serious bug, and most other authors issue bug fixes, and vendors provide patches for this.
I don't think DJB certifies his software as bug free
No, but people here are claiming he does ($500 reward etc etc).
If you count DoS as a vulnerability, then all MTAs have "holes".
Well, that's one mine doesn't have.
Yes. Yes it is.
No, SuSE and Mandrake have been shipping Postfix by default for a few years (Mandrake at least since 7.1). Of course, sendmail is still available and supported (pity, otherwise there may be space for other secure mail servers
I think it's only the Redhat users who get an insecure MTA by default
It seems Debian may have also seen the light
The Qmail author offers money for any holes found. So far he hasn't had to pay a cent.
Not because his software is so good, but because he doesn't agree that DoS vulnerabilities qualify as "holes".
And there are a lot of other reasons not to use Qmail.
I can see that some ISPs have a need for sendmail due to legacy UUCP-customers (yes, someone still uses UUCP)
Postfix supports UUCP, no excuses! (yes, I have some boxes running Postfix/UUCP)
To be fair, I havent tried postfix
i l- bugs.html
Well, it's pointless comparing any MTA to sendmail, so what is the point of your post?
Postfix implements many of the ideas in Qmail, but
-is a drop-in replacement for sendmail (ie external commands are supported, many config files are common)
-free software (DJBWare isn't free)
-supported by most linux distros
-scales well (with support for LDAP, SQL etc out-the-box)
-doesn't unbundle mail
For information on why qmail is bad, see:
http://www-dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/qma
Just not a lot of demand, since the standard unix ownership/permissions bits work fine for 99.99% of the imaginable needed scenarios.
I don't quite agree, unless you think that group permissions and a limit of 32 groups total, and 15 over NFS is enough to have sufficiently fine-grained access controls. We don't, so we have been running Mandrake on XFS for 2 years.
Looks like the vendors finally decided to add it officially to satisfy bureaucratic checklists.
s/vendors/Red Hat/
SuSE and Mandrake have shipped supporting ACLs in an increasing number of filesystems for thier past 3-4 general releases (Mandrake for 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, kernel update for 8.1 supports ACLs).
But in my opinion, Mandrake 9.1 was such a dramatic change from 9.0 that it should have been called Mandrake 10.
Well, some people complained that it was too similar to 9.0, and that it should have been called 9.0.1!
RedHat seemed to have got away with it.
Well, they broke binary compatability with their premature inclusion of NPTL.
I don't know how many rpms I download
...
Mistake number one. If you're going to use binary packages, use the tools your distro provides (in the case of Redhat you're a bit out of luck here) to install packages.
Downloading an arbitrary binary package from some arbitrary user is just as bad as using a binary build from someone else's Gentoo box.
And the vast majority of the time the packages doesn't need the new version, it just so happened that the developer was playing around with some CVS version of the library when he packaged the software.
It's not always that simple. It may be that a different package that requires the library *does* require the latest version of it. Anyway, if the developer took a CVS snapshot, it's his responsibility to test all the software that depends on it, and rebuild them if necessary.
It wasn't till recently that I realized gentoo's potential for easing the rpm-dependency hell that other distro's have.
You only have dependency hell if you don't use the tools provided by the distro. Many of the issues will affect source-based distros, but in most cases the source-based distros don't worry about it, since they're happy to have the user wait another day to rebuild all the dependant packages with different use flags to get one feature
Anyway, regarding Mandrake (which has pretty decent package management tools, and I am pretty sure you didn't give it a fair run), in cooker and cooker contrib, of the 4000 packages, there are only about 30 packages that have dependencies not satisfied at present (maintainers get spammed by a bot about this weekly), and many of them are either obsolete packages, or the dependencies *are* met, but the bot doesn't like them (file-based dependencies are not preferred, but do work although you get warnings from the bot).
Dependencies will *never* go away, if you choose not to use the tools that you are provided with to deal with them, that's your problem, not a distro's problem.
I know (since I installed LM 9.2beta) how hard it was to select/unselect packages using mouse from hundreds of them.
... and it hasn't been too bad this release cycle (it's been worse).
When you could have taken the defaults, updated your drakxtools package, and been able to select again as usual.
Redhat uses a different beta cycle strategy (AFAIK, with only one beta release), and Mandrake uses multiple betas. This was just to get people up to speed with the changes in cooker (note the old kernel for example), especially to find the as yet unfound bugs in the mods they have made.
Anyway, since cooker is always in flux, *it* is considered alpha
It's not that I couldn't find the package I wanted, it's that I was relegated to special level of hell where you must resolve dependencies for binary packages.
???
urpmi? Or were you trying to use rpm itself?
It could have been worse, you could have been trying to resolve source dependencies, having to rebuild a whole chain of software with new options to get one more feature that's just one package away on a binary dist like Debian or Mandrake.
Mandrake while my favorite choice, doesnt include the best pre-emptive kernels.
L icense: GPL :
You mean like this one (from contrib for 9.1)?
Name : kernel-multimedia-2.4.21.0.16mdk
Group : System/Kernel and hardware Source RPM: kernel-multimedia-2.4.21.0.16mdk-1-1mdk.src.rpm
Packager : Danny Tholen
URL : http://www.kernel.org/
Summary : A preemptible Linux kernel, which reduces the latency of the kernel.
Description
This kernel includes patches useful for multmedia purposes like:
preemption, low-latency and the ability for processes to transfer their
capabilities.
The preemtion patches allow a task to be preempted anywhere within the kernel,
using spinlocks as markers for non-preemptibility regions. The resulting
system response is greatly increased, with measured average latencies under
1ms. Andrew Morton's low-latency patches fix the remaining points in the kernel
that cause latency. The setpcap patch allows suid root processess to transfer
capabilities to non-root processess, and so making it possible for user
processes to run with realtime priority.
[some uninteresting fields removed in aid of the lameness filter]
The next one for 9.2 contrib will most likely have the O(1) scheduler also.
That is just somehting that I never found with Mandrake.
Then I take it you were running a stable release? Popular software in Mandrake is updated very quickly in cooker (unless there is a good reason not to, such as OpenOffice.org is a point-point release behind because the maintainers working on 1.1).
Portage rocks.
...
.rpm.
/var/cache/urpmi/rpms/nmap-3.00-2mdk.i586.rpm
."
If you have a fast processor. My Duron 800 can keep itself busy for a weekend compiling OpenOffice.org
Even with the compiling, it takes less time to install some stuff (eg nmap) than it would take to locate the relevant
This is on my Thinkpad 600X, which is a 500 PIII/192MB, with a pretty slow disk:
[root@bgmilne-thinkpad mnt]# rpm -q nmap
package nmap is not installed
[root@bgmilne-thinkpad mnt]# time urpmi nmap
installing
Preparing...
#some hashes replaced to fool the lameness filter#
1:nmap
#some hashes replaced to fool the lameness filter#
5.34user 1.36system 0:26.76elapsed 25%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (1712major+8394minor)pagefaults 0swaps
You would need quite a system to beat 26s I think.
Also, the kernel compile is unfair, because gentoo-sources includes a whole load of patches that Mandrake and Debian don't.
From the article:
"The same 2.4.21 source was copied to all machines and compiled using the same options. However, it should be noted that the Debian system used gcc 3.3.1 whilst the Mandrake and Gentoo installations used gcc 3.3.2
I don't see the point of:
-not using the default compiler on the system
-if you don't use the default compiler on each machine, at least use the same compiler across them all
But, otherwise, the comparison looks pretty fair.
I also understand that Mandrake tends to gravitate toward the bleeding edge of the packages they include in their releases, but the kernel is one place I think shouldn't be included in this manner.
;-), one disk failure, no software failures), on our own Dell PowerEdge boxes, but then again I can't think of a recent release that had issues on server applications (and I have run everything since 7.0 on production servers ... but 7.2 and 8.0 were a bit rough around the edges if you happened to use ReiserFS 2.x on a 2.2 kernel).
Ummm, you did notice that the 2.6 kernel we're talking about is in contrib? Most newbies won't even be able to find it! 9.2 Will most certainly default to a 2.4.22 kernel (since we are rapidly approaching version freeze time), but there are already a few alternative kernels in contrib, and this will be just another choice.
I even have a customer's server running Mandrake 9.0 for 7 months and they haven't had a single problem with it (they use it for Samba and DHCP primarily).
Same experience, on a clients Compaq Proliant (the software is more reliable than the hardare
Otherwise stick to Slackware or Debian for more matured packages in a distribution release.
Would that be the Debain that lets you choose between samba-2.2.3a and 3.0.0alpha, with nothing in between? s/mature/obsolete/g (not that there's anything wrong with samba3, it's also available in Mandrake contribs since 9.1, and for a few other releases from my site).
I'd prefer they be started with something sensible that doesn't cause them to think 'Linux is slow and bloated' right off the bat, frankly.
...
Remember that the competition now isn't Windows 3.11, it's Windows XP. We don't need to worry about bloat too much by default, but we are behind on features and usability.
If speed was all that mattered, why don't we just give them twm, mutt, links and vi?
Sorry, but there is no way you can put ice up against WindowsXP for a newbie, but you can with KDE, and maybe the latest GNOME release.
I think it would give a better initial impression to most newbies.
Riiight. Why can't I drag and drop to the desktop? Where is my "My Documents?", "Where is my CD-ROM drive?", "Why is the text in the menus so ugly?. Maybe 7 years ago, before Windows 98 ice could have competed with Windows
Instead, these things are left exclusively for those of us that know about them, know how to find them and how to configure them on our own time, while the newbies are being given a very bad impression of Linux
No, the people at mandrakeusers.org, mandrakeclub.com etc will quickly set them right.
if they try to install it on anything but a brand new box at least.
KDE plus OpenOffice.org plus Mozilla plus a few more utilities run just great on my 800 Duron which is now 3 years old (assuming you have about 192MB ram or more). My girlfriends 366 Celeron/128MB ram machine is a bit slow, but not noticably slower (except OpenOffice.org startup) than it was running Windows98.
In my reply, the context of "ever" was post-bankruptcy filing, due to this being the context of the post I was replying to. Sorry, I should have been more clear about that.
... to prevent the layoff of developers.
Maybe the people that ran Mandrake into the ground are gone now?
They were kicked out a good few months before the bankruptcy protection filing, but it was too late
Former Mandrake user.
What changed?