I switched my attention from Mandrake to Red Hat when I read that Mandrake was doomed.
Isn't that like kicking people when they're down? Here I was buying stuff from them (since I do generate spare income using Mandrake), and contributing to the distro, when I should instead have dumped and run for a distro that doesn't pay attention to the features *I* want?
Now it looks like Mandrake is back on track
They weren't ever off-track... they have just had to cut down on cash-sapping activities, like expo-attendance etc
or are they releasing work that had already been done and this is going to be the last we hear?
Well, since they went into bankruptcy protection, they released 9.1, which was a pretty good release. And since 9.1, they have been making serious changes to allow greater community participation, to the extent that community contributors who know their stuff have commit rights into the main distro (although more recognition for the community work on maintaining the ports to alpha, hammer, sparc and ppc would be nice). But they have done a lot of work on GUI cleanups in the config tools etc, added more features in urpmi, and of course updated to the latest packages.
And they are still innovating more than Redhat ever did (unless the only thing you use linux for is an Oracle cluster - in which case you're probably better off with SuSE anyway...).
Now, imagine what they could do if they had enough resources to employ more hackers?
Sure, the default is KDE, usually with GNOME also (would you prefer newbies straight from Windows to be dumped into ion?), but you can uncheck KDE and GNOME during installation in the main package selection (this has been the case as long as I can remember, so at least since 7.0), and installing a different one is trivial. Plus, they all work out-the-box from whichever display manager you use, and most of them have the consistent Mandrake menus throughout.
If you don't want KDE, all you have to do is uncheck one pretty obvious checkbox...
OTOH, the only thing I dislike about mandrake is that they force KDE down your throat like it's the next best thing after bread and butter, I really wish they would include mode optinons at install like wm2, ion, openbox, icewm, but also install the qt and gtk libs in the background so you could run gnome/kde applications.
1)A Yahoo-compatible IM client There's not much you can do if you've tied your clients to a proprietary IM protocol, they should look at a different solution first, otherwise they have tied their data to the IM provider, and are permanently at their mercy
2)Windows network browsing.
They obviously don't know that you can set your username/password for kio_smb in KDE Control Center, which will then allow you access to authenticated shares on Windows/samba machines. I access our samba domain controller and our Windows 2000 Server member server with kio_smb without problems, authenticating so I can get to shares that are not accessible without authentication.
Also, you can use smb://user@server/share to use a different user account, and be prompted for your password.
IOW, the failure of this trial is due to incompetence of the admins administering the linux trial desktop, since they should have set this up.
But, there are still some issues with kio_smb, mainly due to problems with kio_smb, such as kio_lan generating url's to the hostname, and kio_smb using the hostname (instead of doing a netbios lookup, and using the netbios name in the connection), where it should be using the netbios name (otherwise windows9x clients won't respond).
Anyway, look out for better out-the-box support in Mandrake 9.2
Xandros has done this, but it's closed source. Kinda defeats the purpose, no?
I don't agree that Xandros can totally integrate into Active Directory domains. Mandrake since 9.0 can do all Xandros does. Choose "Windows Domain" as your authentication method during setup, and you should be able to log in with a domain account on first boot, assuming some settings on the Win2k DC.
9.2 may be able to do it without assuming some settings on the win2k DC (ie we may have full AD support on the client).
And I think having extensive "mapped shares" is a bad idea anyway, you should consolidate all mapped shares onto servers (where you control the backups). If this is already the case, samba3 should be able to migrate your whole domain (assuming it's not AD yet).
... you can follow the guidelines on their site, although it may also be helpful to post a link to an SRPM in your mail (which you should also cc to the cooker list, since the employee handling contribs is very busy, but there are a lot of non-employee contributors who will be able to add your package.
More and more development is being done by the community, so you may want to stop by the cooker wiki which may have more up-to-date documents than those on the Mandrakesoft website.
but Mandrake is diverging more and more from the Red Hat model
You say that like it's a bad thing to have decent package management software (urpmi[e,i,q,f] and rpmdrake), multiple 3rd-party software "media" available (plf.zarb.org, jpackage.org), a sane library naming convention (so you can happily have two versions of the same library installed), solid community involvement (yes, some contributors who know their stuff maintain packages in the main distribution), and an open development process (the cooker distribution itself, the mailing lists, cvs, wiki).
Actually, with their recent announcement, it seems more like RH is converging on the Mandrake model...
OK, we actually have only Linux/Samba/NFS boxes doing all fileserving, so we use rsync to replicate data to our hot-spare, but since rsync is available for windows (thanks to cygwin), it's no problem to use natively.
You will lose ACLs, but you can do what we do (we use ACLs on XFS), dump them to file just before you run your snapshot (we use getfacl, but you could use the cacls tool on NT), allowing your file dump of the ACLs to be synced also. You can then apply the ACLs either after you have restored.
The other option is unison, which also has a native version for windows, with the optional GTK GUI. It may be better for other environments where you need 2-way replication.
So, in the context of the user's post, you're telling me that Debian users don't have to mess with sources lists and the like?
urpmi is great, plus we have urpmi.setup, to graphically choose from lists of different mirrors.
And yes, urpmi can do the equivalent of apt-get distr-upgrade:
# urpmi --auto-select
And he was complaining about being asked about dependencies (ie whether to install them or not), not automatic resolution of dependencies (which all the Mandrake tools handle).
Maybe the clueless Debheads should read the article and stop assuming apt is the only tool that can handle dependencies.
BTW, does apt have support for sources accessed by ssh or rsync??
I can only speak for myself, but I'd much prefer the Samba team to pore over the code looking for more bugs like this, than adding catch-up-with-the-gateses features like NT Domain Controller support which are largely irrelevant.
Some of the recent features (BDC support via LDAP, good domain membership via winbind) are the only things that allow people to run a more secure SMB server than Windows. Without those features, we would have to cave in and run something that has them. If samba did not have domain controlling support, we would likely not be running any linux boxen now, whereas most of our servers do at present.
The Unix philosophy is to do one thing, and do it well, and Samba already does this. If we want central authentication, we have a host of packages we can already choose from.
Anything that can *really* compete with AD and NDS? I think not (and yes, we run LDAP, including samba backended on LDAP, and are implementing kerberos).
Gnome2 was rebuilt from cooker/9.0 for 8.2 a while back. It was available in the MandrakeClub at the time, but may be available in the MandrakeClub directory under unsupported on the Mandrake-devel mirrors.
There would be more complications with Gnome2.2 for 9.0, since AFAIK 2.2. requires fontconfig, which can (via Xft1/Xft2 etc) break fonts in some ways in OpenOffice.org... as the people running Tex's freetype2 on 9.0 found out...
I'd like to know why Mandrake is behind in an area that is *very* important to the desktop user.
Make that "was" instead of "is". And it was only Redhat that was ahead (really), the proprietary distros (Lindows etc) apparently just licensed the Apple patent, which shouldn't bother you if you are not in the US, since you could just get a better freetype from the PLF.
But that is no longer the case, fonts on 9.1 rock, although it might have been nice to be able to include freetype2.1.4...
And yes, I did look in contrib. I'm not going to mirror internally. That's too much data for my little hard disc.
And you were complaining about too few packages? Anyway, 4GB is enough to mirror main and contrib for 1 release, hardly an unmanageable amount of data if you *really* care about ensuring you do not lose access to it.
If I can't get the packages to compile, I can't make an RPM, can I?
Well, that is the part I don't understand. I have been running Mandrake since 7.1, and have *never* had problems compiling any package using *only* RPMs in Mandrake (or extras which I made myself if they were not packaged).
Besides, I don't *want* to have to make an rpm to include it in my package management system.
Whichever package management system you use, you kind of have to use it for everything if you do not want to break it. There isn't really a way around that AFAIK.
I want it to be easy (not necessarily easy to learn - easy to use).
You could try checkinstall, but really, rpm is pretty simple, you could learn have a new package made from scratch in under an hour.
The thing that finally worked was "upgrading" the version of gcc using an rpm from redhat
Maybe you didn't have a compiler installed? How do you thing the Mandrake kernel maintainers compile the kernel? With RH compilers?
Hint: [bgmilne@bgmilne bgmilne]$ cat/proc/version Linux version 2.4.19-16mdk (root@ttla) (gcc version 3.2 (Mandrake Linux 9.0 3.2-1mdk)) #1 Wed Sep 24 12:02:09 EDT 2003
Mandrake has not been a developer's distro in the past. Perhaps it is now, but that's why I switched.
Oh well, I wander what I have been doing then since Mandrake 7.1? And what did you switch to? Can not possibly be Redhat, since they also use RPM? Debain? Gentoo? LFS?
I personally don't use Mandrake because of all of the problems I had getting it to install new versions of stuff that wasn't part of Mandrake's distribution page.
Did you try using contrib or PLF?
Moreover, I noticed that you can't use the repositories for the previous version when the next version comes out
Wrong, many mirrors keep old versions, otherwise you can mirror internally (as we do). Try ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz
Obviously, this isn't going to be a problem for anyone that thinks that Mandrake has every package they will ever need
Either that, or you are competent enough to package software properly (rpm is good at enforcing discipline in software management), and if suiteable, submit it to contribs.
I couldn't even get the kernel to compile with the default options that Mandrake had on it
# urpmi kernel-source # cd/usr/src/linux # make mrproper # make config # make bzImage modules install modules_install
(you probably left out the mrpoper target, which is documented in the readme...)
I switched because I wanted a distro that was flexible when it came to changing the dependencies, and which I could easily add take advantage of the package system to add my own very quickly.
Mandrake used to have this (IIRC in 7.x), but they took it out since users installed too much software and never configured it, then complained when (after not keeping up with updates, which were more frequent than necessary since they installed all the servers) they were hacked.
Better to know which software you need, and install it. Both (knowing which softare to install, and installing it) are trivial.
I even tryed out Mandrake Server,... well it sucks major. If admin is not smart enough to control (and choose) firewall, mail, web and other services. There's a little to be expected of him. Some baasic predefault settings are not enough to make a (really) trusted environment.
Sure, but by the time you have got your Debian server booting, I would have a pretty secure box by choosing security level 4 or 5, and all updates installed during installation.
msec will be setup by defualt, and will mail me daily with a summary of suspicious activity, and will maintain good permissions, unless I tell it not to, or configure other permissions.
Plus, all the config tools I would want will run without X, but diskdrake is better if you run it remotely via X (only need X libs installed).
Plus, for file-serving, I get ACLs working out-the-box since Mandrake 8.1 (RH 8.1 will be the first other distro after Mandrake and SuSE to have this, but only on ext2/3).
Plus, Mandrakes apache is the best out-the-box, with the most available modules etc.
You should consider trying Mandrake on a server, but do not come with preconceived ideas of what it should be... because it is much better than that.
Slashdot Mirror
I switched my attention from Mandrake to Red Hat when I read that Mandrake was doomed.
... they have just had to cut down on cash-sapping activities, like expo-attendance etc
...).
Isn't that like kicking people when they're down? Here I was buying stuff from them (since I do generate spare income using Mandrake), and contributing to the distro, when I should instead have dumped and run for a distro that doesn't pay attention to the features *I* want?
Now it looks like Mandrake is back on track
They weren't ever off-track
or are they releasing work that had already been done and this is going to be the last we hear?
Well, since they went into bankruptcy protection, they released 9.1, which was a pretty good release. And since 9.1, they have been making serious changes to allow greater community participation, to the extent that community contributors who know their stuff have commit rights into the main distro (although more recognition for the community work on maintaining the ports to alpha, hammer, sparc and ppc would be nice). But they have done a lot of work on GUI cleanups in the config tools etc, added more features in urpmi, and of course updated to the latest packages.
And they are still innovating more than Redhat ever did (unless the only thing you use linux for is an Oracle cluster - in which case you're probably better off with SuSE anyway
Now, imagine what they could do if they had enough resources to employ more hackers?
Sure, the default is KDE, usually with GNOME also (would you prefer newbies straight from Windows to be dumped into ion?), but you can uncheck KDE and GNOME during installation in the main package selection (this has been the case as long as I can remember, so at least since 7.0), and installing a different one is trivial. Plus, they all work out-the-box from whichever display manager you use, and most of them have the consistent Mandrake menus throughout.
...
If you don't want KDE, all you have to do is uncheck one pretty obvious checkbox
OTOH, the only thing I dislike about mandrake is that they force KDE down your throat like it's the next best thing after bread and butter, I really wish they would include mode optinons at install like wm2, ion, openbox, icewm, but also install the qt and gtk libs in the background so you could run gnome/kde applications.
/etc/mandrake-release/ Mandr ake/RPMS/enlightenment-0.16.5-13mdk.i586.rpm: //ftp.cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS/WindowMaker-0.80.2-4mdk.i586.rpmf tp.cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS/blackbox-0.65.0-1mdk.i586.rpm. cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS/xfce-3.8.18-1mdk.i586.rpm. co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/swm-1.2.5-3mdk.i586.rpmc o.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/fvwm2-2.4.16-2mdk.i586.rpma e.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/amiwm-0.20.48-6mdk.i586.rpmc ae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/waimea-0.4.0-3mdk.i586.rpma e.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/olvwm-4.4-14mdk.i586.rpm. co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/AfterStep-1.8.11-3mdk.i586.rpmt p.cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/ratpoison-1.2.2-2mdk.i586.rpmp .cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/fluxbox-0.9.4-2mdk.i586.rpmc ae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/pwm-1.0-11mdk.i586.rpmo .za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/ion-metadome-20020605-3mdk.i586.rpmp ://ftp.cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/evilwm-0.99.14-1mdk.i586.rpm. cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/fvwm-1.24r-23mdk.i586.rpme .co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/ion-20030627-3mdk.i586.rpma e.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586/Mandr ake/RPMS2/rox-session-0.1.20-1mdk.i586.rpm
$ cat
Mandrake Linux release 9.2 (Cooker) for i586
$ urpmq --sources enlightenment windowmaker blackbox xfce olvwm waimea AfterStep amiwm evilwm fluxbox fvwm fvwm2 ion ion-metadome pwm ratpoison rox-session swm
ftp://ftp.cae.co.za/pub/mandrake/cooker/i586
ftp
ftp://
ftp://ftp
ftp://ftp.cae
ftp://ftp.cae.
ftp://ftp.c
ftp://ftp.
ftp://ftp.c
ftp://ftp.cae
ftp://f
ftp://ft
ftp://ftp.
ftp://ftp.cae.c
ft
ftp://ftp
ftp://ftp.ca
ftp://ftp.c
(this is our internal mirror, find your own)
Is that enough? (oh, there's still qvwm in PLF, since it looks too similar to some other desktop we know).
Mandrake has never forced a desktop on anyone, and all you need to enjoy the Mandrake configuration tools is gtk+2 and perl.
Sure, not all the window managers are in the main distro, but without contrib, you're missing half of the distro anyway!
1)A Yahoo-compatible IM client
There's not much you can do if you've tied your clients to a proprietary IM protocol, they should look at a different solution first, otherwise they have tied their data to the IM provider, and are permanently at their mercy
2)Windows network browsing.
They obviously don't know that you can set your username/password for kio_smb in KDE Control Center, which will then allow you access to authenticated shares on Windows/samba machines. I access our samba domain controller and our Windows 2000 Server member server with kio_smb without problems, authenticating so I can get to shares that are not accessible without authentication.
Also, you can use smb://user@server/share to use a different user account, and be prompted for your password.
IOW, the failure of this trial is due to incompetence of the admins administering the linux trial desktop, since they should have set this up.
But, there are still some issues with kio_smb, mainly due to problems with kio_smb, such as kio_lan generating url's to the hostname, and kio_smb using the hostname (instead of doing a netbios lookup, and using the netbios name in the connection), where it should be using the netbios name (otherwise windows9x clients won't respond).
Anyway, look out for better out-the-box support in Mandrake 9.2
Xandros has done this, but it's closed source. Kinda defeats the purpose, no?
I don't agree that Xandros can totally integrate into Active Directory domains. Mandrake since 9.0 can do all Xandros does. Choose "Windows Domain" as your authentication method during setup, and you should be able to log in with a domain account on first boot, assuming some settings on the Win2k DC.
9.2 may be able to do it without assuming some settings on the win2k DC (ie we may have full AD support on the client).
And I think having extensive "mapped shares" is a bad idea anyway, you should consolidate all mapped shares onto servers (where you control the backups). If this is already the case, samba3 should be able to migrate your whole domain (assuming it's not AD yet).
... you can follow the guidelines on their site, although it may also be helpful to post a link to an SRPM in your mail (which you should also cc to the cooker list, since the employee handling contribs is very busy, but there are a lot of non-employee contributors who will be able to add your package.
More and more development is being done by the community, so you may want to stop by the cooker wiki which may have more up-to-date documents than those on the Mandrakesoft website.
but Mandrake is diverging more and more from the Red Hat model
...
You say that like it's a bad thing to have decent package management software (urpmi[e,i,q,f] and rpmdrake), multiple 3rd-party software "media" available (plf.zarb.org, jpackage.org), a sane library naming convention (so you can happily have two versions of the same library installed), solid community involvement (yes, some contributors who know their stuff maintain packages in the main distribution), and an open development process (the cooker distribution itself, the mailing lists, cvs, wiki).
Actually, with their recent announcement, it seems more like RH is converging on the Mandrake model
OK, we actually have only Linux/Samba/NFS boxes doing all fileserving, so we use rsync to replicate data to our hot-spare, but since rsync is available for windows (thanks to cygwin), it's no problem to use natively.
You will lose ACLs, but you can do what we do (we use ACLs on XFS), dump them to file just before you run your snapshot (we use getfacl, but you could use the cacls tool on NT), allowing your file dump of the ACLs to be synced also. You can then apply the ACLs either after you have restored.
The other option is unison, which also has a native version for windows, with the optional GTK GUI. It may be better for other environments where you need 2-way replication.
Some organizations management might not allow them to set up PXE.
So you think someone is going to setup a high performance cluster on the same network segment as the rest of the corporate network?
Spend a fortune on high performance compute nodes, and not buy a seperate switch?
I use a handy package called apt-spy, it runs around and builds a sources.list for me. I haven't seen anyone say urpmi could do that yet.
You did in the post you are replying to, since that is what urpmi.setup is for.
debian's better
mandrake's just as good
you're dumb
you're dumb
who cares? it's all GNU/Linux
I wasn't the one dissing another distro for features I hadn't found in it because I hadn't looked (that was the person I was replying to).
oh, how I love apt-get
So, in the context of the user's post, you're telling me that Debian users don't have to mess with sources lists and the like?
urpmi is great, plus we have urpmi.setup, to graphically choose from lists of different mirrors.
And yes, urpmi can do the equivalent of apt-get distr-upgrade:
# urpmi --auto-select
And he was complaining about being asked about dependencies (ie whether to install them or not), not automatic resolution of dependencies (which all the Mandrake tools handle).
Maybe the clueless Debheads should read the article and stop assuming apt is the only tool that can handle dependencies.
BTW, does apt have support for sources accessed by ssh or rsync??
My experience with Debian has been that "sudo apt-get install " will reliably install just about all of the programs I've tried
So will 'sudo urpmi'
RPM is a nice idea, but you have to actually find RPMs, which is a pain.
You're confusing the package format and the tool used by Redhat to manage RPMs.
Don't diss the RPM package format until you've tried a real packaging frontend (urpmi/yum/apt-rpm).
And don't make the mistake all Debian users make in comparing rpm to apt, you should be comparing rpm to dpkg.
When an application wants a web browser, it should run "web-browser [url]"
What about using $BROWSER, which has been in use for over 5 years?
One KDE:
$ echo $BROWSER
kfmclient openProfile webbrowsing
$
but you left out many features.
Try it, benchmark it to Gentoo for normal use (for scientific clustering etc you would want to rebuild key libraries, with rpm).
You won't find a better free distro for your requirements.
If your desktops are XP, disable the firewall (which by default blocks ports 137-139). This affects you even with WinNT4.0 on the server-side
If this problem is not specific to XP machines, then either
1)Your authentication is stuffed
2)Your print commands in your smb.conf file are wrong.
samba+cups rock for serving printers!
I can only speak for myself, but I'd much prefer the Samba team to pore over the code looking for more bugs like this, than adding catch-up-with-the-gateses features like NT Domain Controller support which are largely irrelevant.
Some of the recent features (BDC support via LDAP, good domain membership via winbind) are the only things that allow people to run a more secure SMB server than Windows. Without those features, we would have to cave in and run something that has them. If samba did not have domain controlling support, we would likely not be running any linux boxen now, whereas most of our servers do at present.
The Unix philosophy is to do one thing, and do it well, and Samba already does this. If we want central authentication, we have a host of packages we can already choose from.
Anything that can *really* compete with AD and NDS? I think not (and yes, we run LDAP, including samba backended on LDAP, and are implementing kerberos).
Gnome2 was rebuilt from cooker/9.0 for 8.2 a while back. It was available in the MandrakeClub at the time, but may be available in the MandrakeClub directory under unsupported on the Mandrake-devel mirrors.
... as the people running Tex's freetype2 on 9.0 found out ...
There would be more complications with Gnome2.2 for 9.0, since AFAIK 2.2. requires fontconfig, which can (via Xft1/Xft2 etc) break fonts in some ways in OpenOffice.org
Magical is having it work out-the-box, which all the boxed sets have done since about 8.1.
...
...
First boot you will see the NVidia logo as X starts.
Even easier than having to actually *download* a driver, like in windows
Guess I shuold also get around to updating http://ranger.dnsalias.com/nvidia_me for 9.1
I'd like to know why Mandrake is behind in an area that is *very* important to the desktop user.
...
Make that "was" instead of "is". And it was only Redhat that was ahead (really), the proprietary distros (Lindows etc) apparently just licensed the Apple patent, which shouldn't bother you if you are not in the US, since you could just get a better freetype from the PLF.
But that is no longer the case, fonts on 9.1 rock, although it might have been nice to be able to include freetype2.1.4
I spent about three hours back when I had 8.2 looking for one. If they're that hard to find, I'd rather switch distros.
/proc/version
It takes you 3 hours to run a simple google search?
And yes, I did look in contrib. I'm not going to mirror internally. That's too much data for my little hard disc.
And you were complaining about too few packages? Anyway, 4GB is enough to mirror main and contrib for 1 release, hardly an unmanageable amount of data if you *really* care about ensuring you do not lose access to it.
If I can't get the packages to compile, I can't make an RPM, can I?
Well, that is the part I don't understand. I have been running Mandrake since 7.1, and have *never* had problems compiling any package using *only* RPMs in Mandrake (or extras which I made myself if they were not packaged).
Besides, I don't *want* to have to make an rpm to include it in my package management system.
Whichever package management system you use, you kind of have to use it for everything if you do not want to break it. There isn't really a way around that AFAIK.
I want it to be easy (not necessarily easy to learn - easy to use).
You could try checkinstall, but really, rpm is pretty simple, you could learn have a new package made from scratch in under an hour.
The thing that finally worked was "upgrading" the version of gcc using an rpm from redhat
Maybe you didn't have a compiler installed? How do you thing the Mandrake kernel maintainers compile the kernel? With RH compilers?
Hint:
[bgmilne@bgmilne bgmilne]$ cat
Linux version 2.4.19-16mdk (root@ttla) (gcc version 3.2 (Mandrake Linux 9.0 3.2-1mdk)) #1 Wed Sep 24 12:02:09 EDT 2003
Mandrake has not been a developer's distro in the past. Perhaps it is now, but that's why I switched.
Oh well, I wander what I have been doing then since Mandrake 7.1? And what did you switch to? Can not possibly be Redhat, since they also use RPM? Debain? Gentoo? LFS?
[bgmilne@printserver mandrake]$ du -sh cooker \
contrib
2.2G cooker
1.7G contrib
And I am not even including all the extras (such as Tomcat) on the CDs, or the software in PLF,rpmhelp etc.
Hello??? This is a users screenshot. Maybe he has IE running (legally, if he has windows) under Wine.
Mandrake most certainly does not include the IE icon or the aqua theme the user is using.
Try one of the other screenshots (the Galaxy ones) to see Mandrake 9.1rc1 out-the-box.
I personally don't use Mandrake because of all of the problems I had getting it to install new versions of stuff that wasn't part of Mandrake's distribution page.
/usr/src/linux
...)
Did you try using contrib or PLF?
Moreover, I noticed that you can't use the repositories for the previous version when the next version comes out
Wrong, many mirrors keep old versions, otherwise you can mirror internally (as we do). Try ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz
Obviously, this isn't going to be a problem for anyone that thinks that Mandrake has every package they will ever need
Either that, or you are competent enough to package software properly (rpm is good at enforcing discipline in software management), and if suiteable, submit it to contribs.
I couldn't even get the kernel to compile with the default options that Mandrake had on it
# urpmi kernel-source
# cd
# make mrproper
# make config
# make bzImage modules install modules_install
(you probably left out the mrpoper target, which is documented in the readme
I switched because I wanted a distro that was flexible when it came to changing the dependencies, and which I could easily add take advantage of the package system to add my own very quickly.
$ genhdlist .
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Mandrake Linux, because they tend to ship unstable software
I guess that is why you went for a distro with a cvs snapshot of glibc2.3, instead of Mandrake 9.0 with glibc2.2??
Now, you have a broken glibc (problems with mysql development and large groups via nss, for example winbind).
Mandrake being unstable is a myth. Redhat is less stable.
Mandrake used to have this (IIRC in 7.x), but they took it out since users installed too much software and never configured it, then complained when (after not keeping up with updates, which were more frequent than necessary since they installed all the servers) they were hacked.
Better to know which software you need, and install it. Both (knowing which softare to install, and installing it) are trivial.
I even tryed out Mandrake Server,... well it sucks major. If admin is not smart enough to control (and choose) firewall, mail, web and other services. There's a little to be expected of him. Some baasic predefault settings are not enough to make a (really) trusted environment.
... because it is much better than that.
Sure, but by the time you have got your Debian server booting, I would have a pretty secure box by choosing security level 4 or 5, and all updates installed during installation.
msec will be setup by defualt, and will mail me daily with a summary of suspicious activity, and will maintain good permissions, unless I tell it not to, or configure other permissions.
Plus, all the config tools I would want will run without X, but diskdrake is better if you run it remotely via X (only need X libs installed).
Plus, for file-serving, I get ACLs working out-the-box since Mandrake 8.1 (RH 8.1 will be the first other distro after Mandrake and SuSE to have this, but only on ext2/3).
Plus, Mandrakes apache is the best out-the-box, with the most available modules etc.
You should consider trying Mandrake on a server, but do not come with preconceived ideas of what it should be
Mandrake is not just a desktop distro!