MandrakeSoft today announced the availability of boxed versions of Mandrake Linux 9.0 — the latest evolution of its popular operating system designed for both home and professional computing. Customers are provided with three packaged versions from which to choose: the Mandrake Linux PowerPack and Standard editions are designed for individual users, and the ProSuite Edition is created for small and medium-sized enterprises. Mandrake Linux 9.0 packs are available through a number of retail outlets worldwide and online.
Mandrake Linux 9.0 Packs Now Available
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Eugenia Loli
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It has been 1.5 months from the day Mandrake 9.0 was released in the FTP servers, and for me this release has been buggy (as I mentioned in my review of the system). I know that having a master to duplicate and make boxes, you need to send the golden master about 20-25 days before the release of the box-set. I was wondering if the final boxed release has any bug fixes in it, or is it the same codebase as in the FTP version of September.
Also, this 1.5 months of a gap between the release and the boxed version might create problems on Mandrake, as Red Hat and SuSE has been available for full boxed purchased for a month now. The craze of “let’s buy this quarter’s Linux release” is over and SuSE and Red Hat were there to sell, Mandrake was not. I hope that the company won’t do that again (release the full OS 1.5 months before the boxed version. That was a bad financial decision to make, even if the OS was ready to ship (it wasn’t in my opinion)).
I’m running mandrake 9 and it is great. And
I will buy the box anyway. I always buy it.
I think it is great they release it on ftp when it is ready
If they don’t I had to wait 1,5 months to get it.
that is called service to your users
And that is not bad for a company that lives from service.
The message here is delivering good service and the people will come.
Maybe it is something different than what we used to but a new distibution model is in the making.
Is it the best strategie? the future will tell us.
But I think they doing great so far.
why, if Mandrake has such a large amount of time between announcment of release and actual retail release, do they release the ISO files on-line so far in advance of their boxes? RedHat ships their boxes at the same time it is available on-line.
why does mandrake not?
they have been making strides, but they just seem to miss the small details that make a system nice. things like bugs that should be squashed becasue they pop-up so often, or their installer which freezes sometimes, fails sometimes, and works sometimes.
they did A LOT of good stuff for the Linux community, infact, I think that they brought in the first real bigflood of new and curious users. but since 8.0, rather than fine tuning the 7.x code that was so ground breaking, they just mush more features in, throw the lattest and greatest in whith out extensive testing, they consentrate a lot on the UI of there Drake apps, but fail to make them look like the rest of the desktop, makeing it feal clunky, their drake configuration center should take over from the kcontrol center but it does not so they have 2 control centers that have some overlaping functions.
I used mandrake 7.0 when I jumped on to linux, and I bought 7.1, 7.2 and regratably, 8.0.
even when I jumped on, I thought that the mandrake UI was not put together well. SUSE does what Mandrake needs to do. and Lycoris and Xandros have taken it to the extream(a good thing, though I do not like how Lycoris criples Linux for the desktop lx version.)
anyway, I hope that 9.x is a better serise for them (from what I have seen it looks like they are moving to integrate the control centers and are making there icons more KDEish)
and I hope they don’t make a stupid disision again on the release times of the ISO and box.
1) It didn’t want to work with my brand-new USRobotics modem, which I’d bought so I wouldn’t have to compile experimental drivers to use this computer’s original modem. I was triple-boot at the time (Mandrake 9.0, Red Hat 8.0, and WinXP) and Red Hat had no problem with my modem, so Mandrake lost points pretty fast.
2) The basic UNIX command “finger” doesn’t exist. I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong. *wry grin* Anyone else notice this?
Overall, I just wasn’t as impressed. Red Hat is much better.
I dove into the world of Linux with Mandrake 8.2 and loved it. I felt it was buggy at times but I cared for it much more than Red Hat 7.2 or 7.3. I really like that fact the Mandrake automatically mounts my FAT 32 partition so that I can access necessary files that I share between Win XP and Linux. Along come 9.0 and I’m not so much of a newbie anymore. I have to say that I was disappointed with 9.0. The online update process hung at times. I couldn’t get the demo of Crossover Plugin to work properly at all (At least Mandrake put in on the menu unlike Red Hat 8.0). With regret I try Red Hat 8.0, manually configure the /etc/fstab file to mount my FAT 32 partition, install Crossover Plugin with success, install apt-get and synaptic, and type this comment with happiness. It’s going to take some work on Mandrake’s part to convince me to try them again. I’m jsut anxious to try XandrOS now.
if it contains the same mouse and graphics bugs i was having with the ISO i downloaded a week or so ago, it won’t be worth getting at all.
It is in there, you just need to include it when selecting your packages to install. it is not installed by default (as you are painfully aware)
Same as with 8.2, which I like quite a bit.
Mandrake for me personally peaked at 7.2. I really really want to like and recommend it, but the QA just always lets me down. I’ve tried almost every release, but I always come across things like apps that don’t launch or or broken by default. In every release I would find things that I was appalled made it past QA testing. It also didn’t help that one release wiped my whole windows partition because of a bug in the install. Since then I still try it out now and then, but I stick to other distros for the rest of the time.
I do have to say if they ever do get their QA down the rest of the distros better watch out.
I downloaded the ISOs (over a 56.6!), and I will be buying 9.0. I decided it was time to learn a little about Samba, so I started reading up on it, editing config files, etc. When I didn’t have a huge amount of success at the command line, I took a look at the mount points in the config section. Duh, it was all done for me. All I had to do was supply user names and passwords, and suddenly I could access my entire 4 machine Windows network, plus the 98 partition on the MAndrake machine. Maybe Mandrake has been like that for a while, but I never checked, before.
The problem I have with all of that is, the geek factor is severely limited, now. ; ) I could teach a monkey to do that.
SuSE (SuSe? SusE? Siouxsie?) had a few non-standard things about it that I didn’t like. The new Red Hat looks nice, but I am not interested in a standardized corporate desktop. Mandrake is a bit more user/media oriented.
Even after I get a new Amiga (!) or a finished BeOS clone (!!) OS, I will continue to use Mandrake Linux on some of my machines, I think. I’ve just never had a problem with it, ever.
And I’m still miffed I can’t say m**********r on here. ; )
AFAIK, MandrakeSoft has always been slow in releasing the boxed version of their distribution. I noticed the same problem when I first used Mandrake 8.0, and I still notice it now … Here in Singapore I think the boxed versions are typically few months (!) late behind the online ones. I think Mandrake really needs to improve their distribution channel urgently.
I never really favoured Mandrake, I stopped using it from version 7.0 till 8.2 because things didn’t work for me. I was disappointed. I installed this version 9.0 for fun only just because it came on a cover disk and I have to say, “Well done” to them, It really impressed me. KDE runs very fast, I setup my internet dial up using KPPP with no problems, I setup my email, I’ve got everything running smoothly. I am spending more time on Mandrake Linux then on Windows. I am very happy with Mandrake 9.0
“I decided it was time to learn a little about Samba, so I started reading up on it, editing config files, etc. When I didn’t have a huge amount of success at the command line, I took a look at the mount points in the config section. Duh, it was all done for me. All I had to do was supply user names and passwords, and suddenly I could access my entire 4 machine Windows network, plus the 98 partition on the MAndrake machine. Maybe Mandrake has been like that for a while, but I never checked, before.”
have you tried Komba2 or Gnomba?
BTW, Is it normal for a normal user to be able to shut down the workstation? When I type “halt” with my normal user account, Linux starts shutting down and the whose system shuts down. It It’s a normal user, it doesnt have admin rights…
I downloaded and tried installing the 9.0 ISO images that I burned onto CDs, and after going through the install the system hung when I chose to ftp update bug fixes– how ironic. I will wait for 9.2 or something like that to be released in boxes, and keep using my 8.2 for now. I am also going to research RedHat or other flavors as alternatives. I love latest versions of Linux– no matter what flavor, Linux has come SOOOOooooo far in the past few years Microsoft must be getting a nervous. (Let’s just be grateful Linux is not owned by any one company or M$ would have bought them out just to eliminate linux)
Randall, try to update Mandrake after the installation.
It is normal for halt to shutdown your computer, even when in a user account. I find that perfectly acceptable since my 2 year old daughter can hit the off switch on my PC while laughing, AND SHE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A USER ACCOUNT!! Allowing user accounts to reboot a single workstation (as they can not reboot a network) seems reasonable since some programs that run under X can be buggy and crash and XKill options can be confusing to nontech-savvy end users. Typing halt is an easy escape hatch for bleeding edge unstable programs.
On the subject of the new Mandrake release, I would like to say “congrads!” It is an excellent GNU/Linux distro; whereas I disagree with SuSE’s unwillingness to supply ISO images (to name only one issue), and the latest Redhat has managed to cripple both KDE and to a lesser extent GNOME. I like to try out ISO images before making purchases from my favorite distros, but I always purchase discs to support them, if I like what they did (this means I did not purchase Redhat 8.0).
I think everyone should purchase discs because of all the benefits (an opportunity to financially support GNU/Linux, and to have a product that you can eventually donate to charity to help a good cause and provide yourself with a tax write off).
Well, I am a fan of Mandrake, but here is my comment
I started out with 7.2 which I bought. Then I tried 8.0 8.1 which felft quite crappy. Then I installed 8.2. I was quite hqppy with it, except some lockouts with xmms, and some urpmi front-ends crashes. Then I read all the reveiws about 9.0 and I thought…ohh damn, it’s not good. But i installed it, and really : IT WORKS LIKE HELL. everything works just fine, all programs run..from e-mail to ogle, nvidia drivers, wine, licq etc etc to only name some. I don not understand people claiming that mdk 9.0 had a little bug (which i never found out), because a little program didn’t work out of the box. Just recompile and it runs.
I am very happy with it, and will stick with it.
downloaded and tried installing the 9.0 ISO images that I burned onto CDs, and after going through the install the system hung when I chose to ftp update bug fixes– how ironic. I will wait for 9.2 or something like that to be released in boxes, and keep using my 8.2 for now.
I was also disappointed with 9.0. I had problems similar to yours, and I didn’t see it as being a substatial improvement over 8.2.
That being said, I’ve now downloaded the 9.1 cooker. MUCH NICER! The cooker desktop is gorgeous, what they’ve done with the KDE 3.1 beta desktop is great! It’s simply and sanely laid out, and much less buggy than 9.0.
The sad part is, this was released so close to the official release of 9.0. If it only took them 6 weeks to come up with what promises to be a vastly superior product, they would probably have been better off simply waiting until this version ready, rather than shipping the mediocre 9.0. I don’t think I’m going to be coughing up any bucks for 9.0, but if 9.1 lives up to it’s promise, I certainly won’t have any qualms forking over some cash for it.
I also tried out RedHat 8.0. I can see that it’s a solidly built product, but as a desktop I had a hard time warming up to it. It only lasted a couple of days before I deleted it and went back to Mandrake.
It is completely normal. BTW, in 7.x, a normal user can’t do that. But if you please, IIRC, it is quite easy to remove such privilegdes from the user.