MandrakeSoft has recently released the latest version of their desktop operating system. Mandrake Linux 9.2 Download Edition is available on their web site across three ISO files for the Club members. The first disk is about 650megs and the following two are ~700.Installation:
The system in question is a Dell Latitude CPx laptop. Hardware setup was completely automated. Mandrake successfully detected and configured everything it could (as no current linux drivers exist for my D-Link DWL-650+ or ATI Rage Mobile card).
The installation procedure hasn’t changed a bit since 9.1. Aside from the new splash screen as you boot from the CDs, the only visible differences are the choices of packages (which you only notice when doing a detailed install) and the ads in the package installation step. The ads really aren’t worth complaining about since they are interweaved with their standard ads for GNU and their own operating system. It’ll also generate a little extra revenue to allow Mandrake to survive (Which has been in financial danger for quite some time now).
Using the new OS:
Unfortunately, there really isn’t much that’s new. They changed the graphical LILO to their newest theme. Also changed is the default desktop wallpaper and the setup of the application menus in KDE and Gnome.
Most user-end changes are superficial. The new menus are changed only in what they lack. In KDE, gone is the ‘most frequently used programs’ list, ‘what to do’, ‘quick browser’, and ‘run command’. This leaves you with the standard logout/lock screen buttons, your home directory, and Mandrake’s standard set of application categories. I don’t know about other users, but I never really used those features anyway. It’s also worth noting that the only terminal I have available from the menu in KDE is Konsole.
Gnome isn’t quite as lacking in the menu. By default, it also includes ‘Run application’, ‘Search for files’, ‘Open recent’, and ‘Take Screenshot’. I’m left to wonder why they left these features on by default in Gnome but not their in the default desktop (KDE). When I go to look at the available terminals, all I see is the GNOME Terminal. Personally, I’d rather have the ability to select from both.
The default package selection also seems lacking. The only games installed when I selected ‘games’ durring setup were LBreakout2 and Frozen Bubble. Not even the huge set of simple KDE games is installed by default. When I go into the ‘Game Station’ category of Mandrake’s rpmdrake tool, I see armagetron, chromium, csmash, tuxracer. I assume these would also have been installed by default were it able to detect and install 3D drivers for my laptop. What’s with the preferance for 3D games over KDE’s set? I find myself in Ksirtet and Ktron quite often. The full KDE set doesn’t take much more room than tuxracer.
In the area of networking, the default set gets you gFTP, Gaim, XChat, KMail, Evolution, KNode, Pan, some remote access tools (LinNeighborhood, TightVNC, etc), and the standard set of browsers (Galeon, Konqueror, and Mozilla).
Beyond that, hardly anything in the package selection has changed. Worthy of mention is that they swapped out Xine’s own GUI in favor of the Totem GUI. I for one am in favor of the change, as I like media players where the video is embedded in with the GUI, something lacking in most Linux media players. Even so, I think it would have been a better move to make MPlayer the default media player because of its better codec support. Though when it comes to computers without XV drivers (such as my laptop) Xine is prefered for its ability to display zoomed video (Which MPlayer can’t do except throught methods such as GL, which require 3D drivers to be at all watchable).
From what I can tell, Mandrake’s Control Center hasn’t changed at all. For some reason, the icon for “Set where your CD/DVD Burner is mounted” is displayed seven times. I’m assuming most of the changes are behind the scenes. I wouldn’t belive Mandrake would release a new OS without some new code in their Control Center.
I remember hearing sometime back about ads set to appear in Mandrake’s default set of screensavers. I went to check this out in KDE, but to my amazement, KDE came with no screensavers at all! Gnome, on the other hand, came with a plethora. Once again, questions about why all the extras were put into the desktop that isn’t the default came to mind. Even in Gnome’s screensaver menu I couldn’t find the screensavers containing ads. I’ll just leave it on my favorite BSOD screensavers which gets more realistic with every release.
Most of the real improvements are in the induvidual programs. Frozen Bubble would play fine on my laptop with Mandrake 9.1, but it would massively drop frames when many balls would fall. The version that came with 9.2 ran fine in spite of my mere 600mhz of Pentium power. Also noteworthy was that Totem played my Divx movies off CD just fine. Usually, Xine would drop many many frames when playing off the CD as it endlessly seeked. Now it plays smoothly.
Conclusion:
As I said, most of the changes are merely superficial or security and performance tweaks. Mandrake Linux 9.2 Download Edition is a worthy OS, but beyond perfomance and security tweaks, it just doesn’t offer much of an incentive to upgrade from 9.1. It’s a bit sad in a way. I’ve been using Mandrake since I first got into Linux with 7.0 and each new release of Mandrake was exciting, but now we’re left with a release which looks and feels much the same as the previous version and users are left to wonder where all the innovation has gone. Sure, we get newer kernel releases and a bigger version number when we do ‘gcc -v’, but I just don’t get that feeling that I got when I could get an MPEG to play properly and smoothly for the first time in Mandrake 8.1 or the wealth of codec support when Mandrake included MPlayer with 9.1. Mandrake is a good Linux for someone moving over from Windows, but the newer releases just seem like more of the same.
Screenshots available?
No. There is not much different than 9.1 anyway.
If there were, I’m pretty sure there would have been some links
Good review, but what about ads in Mandrake? I heard something about that.
And also is it kernel 2.6 ready?
I’m also writing a review for 9.2, but I’m not sure if it is nescesary now, since James Smyth kind of said it all (altough I must say I only have it installed for like three hours now, and I’ve only actively used it for 10 minutes, had some other stuff to do
)
As I said in the contributors mailing list, we accept multiple reviews for the same products. This is not a problem at all, in fact is a good thing.
I bought 9.1 and liked it for the urpmi tools for package installation. It was pretty easy to use, but lacked a lot of polish. The wizards (like ftp server wizard) were superficial and did practically nothing, for instance. I had high hopes for 9.2 because it was supposed to be such a big feature fix from 9.1. But 9.2 has turned out to be 9.1 with a handful of changes to the desktop. Most of the system configuration tools are worthless, the idea being that if there are many the system at least looks polished. Mandrake as a company has a great base distro but they just don’t know how to make it really shine and make it really slick and great. Every time I’ve tried to send suggestions and bug reports their web form has just spit errors out. I used to be a big Mandrake supporter but I think they will never get their act together and will continue to hang on and never quite die. They’ll continue diddling with the Gnome and KDE desktops and the installation software without really improving on the distro’s feature set.
It’s hard to expect a major change from 9.1 to 9.2. Just because Apple is adding a huge feature list with every point release doesn’t make that the industry standard. As far as Gnome getting all the upgrades, I think that is good. KDE IMHO is raidly losing ground to KDE. The Ximian Desktop2 has proven to me that Gnome has the potential to become a desktop that is both unique, appealing, and easy to use.
They numbered it 9.2 because there aren’t big changes noticable to the user. If there were big changes it would be v10.
I’ve used Mandrake since 8.0, including beta testing 9.2. I switched to Gentoo last week and found a huge performance gain. One big difference for desktop users, though, is Mandrake’s kernel is compiled with the preemptive patch. This keeps user responsiveness high. Gentoo’s default is not (although I think their “game” kernel is). I think if Mandrake really wants to stand out they should move up from Pentium compilation to PIII. Their market share is so small why not differentiate by only supporting PIII and above, but with a nice performance gain?
There are almost no differences between 9.1 and 9.2. I noticed that in 9.2 the fonts were a bit better than 9.1. Also the system reponds a notch better than 9.1.
I added the cooker repository and installed kernel 2.6test5, when booting up it reconfigured my mouse (I have the Logitech MX-700 USB). Other than that it was painless
I have an ATI Radeon 8500LE with TV-Out. MDK 9.2 comes with the binary driver from ATI –> fglrx. My problem is that I still can’t get TV-Out to work and also if my video card is connected to my TV while booting, the X Server does not start
I heard that this was an issue with the video cards’ bios, can anyone confirm this?
I downloaded the latest ATI drivers (from the ATI website), ran the config util, but it put garbage on my XF86Config-4 file, did anyone else experience this?
After restoring my XF86Config-4 file I installed the gatos rpm but I am not sure how to use it? Basicaly my question is how do I get TV-Out working with a ATI Radeon 8500LE?
Athlon XP 2100+
EPOX 8KHA+
WD 200GB SE 8MB CACHE 7200 RPM IDE
The installer categorical package selection is really tedious to use, especially since they squeezed it into the center of the screen unlike RedHat who lets you hide the ‘side panel’ so you can devote the full screen to package selection.
The Mandrake 9.2 installer recognized my ATi Radeon 9800 Pro, and installed the fglrx module for it, but upon booting it failed apparently unable to support the 9800. The screen flashed three times and then just sat there at a standard login prompt. Unlike RedHat it did not prompt me to run the XFree86 Configuration program or offer to let me view the XFree86 log to see any relevant messages from XFree. This is supposed to be the ‘newbie’ distribution? Pffttt.
This lead me to go grab the latest RPM from ATi, which while installing said it would have to rebuild the kernel source for the module but it couldn’t find them on my system. (I remember trying to find the kernel source during installation in the package selection but I guess I missed it).
So I figured, “I’ll just the much touted urpmi to install the kernel source, surely that will work.” WRONG. urpmi kernel, kernel-source, kernel-src, and everthing else I could try turned up nothing. I also discovered to my dismay that urpmi only seems to work for packages that are included with Mandrake 9.2, there wasn’t any obvious way to have it fetch things from online, although I’m sure if I read a bunch of urpmi documentation or sites I would eventually find that out.
Finally I went out to an FTP mirror and manually downloaded and installed the kernel-source RPM I managed to find after an hour of searching.
So, I did that and finally I was able to get into X.
During installation I had selected IceWM, Blackbox, WindowMaker and a few other desktops to be installed, just to amuse myself by trying them out.
The first thing I noted upon it bringing up the graphical login screen was the ‘face browser’ basically a list of non-root users on my system with a picture next to the username. I selected my username and then was prompted again this time to enter my password. Why bother with the face browser and make me go through two dialogs? I would rather begin at a username and password prompt than click through 3 things. (At least with RedHat I could type my username, tab, password, and hit enter and login).
I selected KDE for my session and logged in. What did I find? The same old KDE. Nothing astounding, the default Galaxy theme didn’t really jump out at me, but things were fairly polished and I liked the Configuration-> Configure my Computer, Configuration -> Configure my desktop options I found right away.
The first thing I noticed was KDE took a long time to load (a minute or so to fully get rid of the startup dialog). I thought maybe it was just a fluke so I logged back in and out a few times. The same. *shrug*. I don’t use KDE anyway…
The next thing I noticed? Cluttered menus, the same thing almost every Linux distribution (including RedHat although less somewhat IMO in RH9 and above (fedora)…). My menus filled with two or three programs that do basically the same thing with their lovely programmer names that mean nothing to me and I wouldn’t have known what they did except for the menu categorization or because I’ve used Linux distributions so long (since 1994). Can’t someone please make a distribution the picks the ‘cream of the crop’ in functionality for each desktop and then name them intelligent things like ‘Email Client’, ‘Web Browser’, etc? If they want to use that application’s specific icon and it’s aeshetically pleasing then go right ahead!
The next thing that stood out is after my initial disappointments, I noticed that every game (including TuxRacer) and others just plain worked, no problems at all. (TuxRacer has no sound at all for some inexplicable reason under RedHat 8/9?)
Afterwards I decided I would try IceWM as a login session, selected it, logged in and it threw me right back to the login prompt. Oooookkkk….
Next.
I decided I would try Gnome out and see how polished it was in comparison to Ximian’s Gnome or RedHat’s version of Gnome. What an abysmal disappointment, all of the graphical polish and tweaks that I had grown fond of where almost nowhere to be found. The Galaxy theme looked alright here (although not to me in KDE for some reason), but the default fugly gnome foot icon was still in place and the menus were a mess. In edition they didn’t bother to have a ‘Configure my desktop’ link like they did for KDE (which they could have). So I had to dig around for Gnome’s Control Center.
I toyed around awhile longer, but finally was disgusted and left.
As far as the much vaunted speediness by having everything be i586/i686 compiled? I didn’t see it. Maybe I’m missing something…
Just my 2 pence…
Gentoo’s gentoo-sources include the pre-emptive patch. Its up to you whether you turn it on or not. More importantly, however, is that Gentoo works extremely well with mm-souces (2.6-test kernels). Ive had my Gentoo on 2.6-test5 from andrew morton for months without issue.
Some important things are missing from this and most reviews. How about a security check at Gibson research Corps Shields Up port probe http://www.grc.com . Mandrake 9.1 at the highest setting leaves all ports visible, and two ports open. None are stealth. This is unacceptable. I would like to know if this non stealth firewall setting persists in 9.2.
Also the installer installs LILO in the MBR master boot record of the hard drive. Only after it has been installed does the installer allow you to choose the boot sector. By that time the MBR has allready been altered and must be reinstalled from a windows boot disk (fdisk /mbr).
“As I said in the contributors mailing list, we accept multiple reviews for the same products. This is not a problem at all, in fact is a good thing.”
It was more that I ment that I’m not sure whether 9.2 deserves 2 reviews… Still finding that out!
I never knew that mdk9.1 had mplayer included… I thought they took the whole thing out to avoid any litigation. Has the ‘squashed font’ problem been fixed yet? Or is that entirely on the Mozilla Dev side to correct?
Besides that I hope that RPMdrake (whatever its called) is no longer segmented. For example there’s a seperate application for installing, for updating, and for removing in 9.1.
This is a huge problem–if you want to install as a dual boot system, the installer wipes out the MBR without asking, forcing you to have to restore it. Even the expert install wipes the MBR. Give me the choice before you do it!!
>> I wouldn’t belive Mandrake would release a new OS without some new code in their Control Center.
>>
Actually, this can only be a good thing. In terms of items and features, the control center for 9.1 was pretty much complete. But most of the tools did not function properly. That was the big point. Most of the tools were incomplete.
So, I expect 9.2 to complete functionality in the tools and fix the annoying bugs. What I want to know is: Did these things get fixed?? Is 9.2 rock stable? If yes, I’d say they’ve got a winner. Apart from the gross incompleteness, 9.1 was great.
Every time I’ve tried to send suggestions and bug reports their web form has just spit errors out.
Funny, the bugzilla list gets at least 100 mails a day, everyone else seems to manage.
They’ll continue diddling with the Gnome and KDE desktops and the installation software without really improving on the distro’s feature set.
I guess you haven’t looked deep enough, and this is a “stabilisation” release anyway. 10.0 will have the new features.
“Besides that I hope that RPMdrake (whatever its called) is no longer segmented. For example there’s a seperate application for installing, for updating, and for removing in 9.1.”
Well, it still is, but IMO that is a good thing; and, all these segments are started from one window anyway (namely the Control Center) so it isn’t that of a pain in the behind.
release in March 2004 that I am eargly awaiting.
(kde 3.2, 2.6 kernel & other updates)
This review was superficial. Did you actually take the trouble to use Mandrake 9.2 for more than a few minutes.
Konqueror, both the file manager and the web browser, have made huge leap forwards in stability and speed. OpenOffice is much more polished and very fast, unlike its predecessor.Totem is awesome. It plays CDs, mp3s, mpgs, and DVDs if you install the following rpms:
libdvdcss-1.2.8-1.fr.i386.rpm
libdvdread-0.9.4-fr3.i386.rpm
Both of them can be at freshrpms or here:
http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/redhat.shtm
K3b is just beautiful for CD burning. Right click on an ISO file, click on action, burn. Done. Same for any folder that you want to back up to CD.
The speed improvements are fantastic. The amount of software available for it unrivalled. The Mandrake Control Center tools are solid and reliable and have been tweaked to perform very well.
The only shortcoming I can find is that you will have to download AMSN (http://amsn.sourceforge.net) or udpate GAIM or Kopete if you intend to connect to the MSN Messenger network and that is due to changes made by Microsoft to its proprietary protocol.AMSN is nice as it allows you to not only send and receive both files and messages from people that use MSN Messenger. By the way, you may want to consider giving Jabber a try. Very good and open source, so you will never have to worry about being locked out in the future.
The fact that people cannot appreciate the huge improvements is a testament to how good Linux already is. The response of the system is also much improved and the graphical boot-up is gorgeous. Only trouble is that if you have 1GB or more of RAM,you will not see the graphical boot as it will load the enterprise kernel, which does not use it by default.
Talking of which, there are huge improvements to be had by using the kernel that comes with Mandrake 9.2. Multi-tasking has never been so smooth and a sleuth of new devices are now supported. I finally was able to make full use of my Maxtor USB2 PCI card and my external USB2 hard drive.
If you have not tried Mandrake yet, hurry up and do so. You won’t regret it.
Ps: By the way, the ‘most frequently used programs’ list, ‘what to do’, ‘quick browser’, and ‘run command’can all be quickly re-enabled if you need those.
I think renaming “Mandrake Control Center” to “Configure My Computer” and renaming “KDE Control Center” to “Configure My Desktop” is probably the most counter-intuitive change I have ever encountered in a point release. Especially since you can right-click on the desktop and choose “Configure Desktop” and get something completely different than the other two! I think this is going to be very confusing for new users. The difference between “Configure My Computer” “Configure My Desktop” and “Configure Desktop” is not at all obvious even to me.
I hope MPlayer and Xine are taking notes. SuSe switched to Kaffeine as the default media player front end and now Mandrake switched to Totem for the default Xine front end. It seems obvious to everybody but the Xine and MPlayer project teams that the DVD player style of graphical user interfaces are garbage. If they don’t change their default front ends, people will only know their work by Kplayer, Totem, Kaffeine, or some such. Relegating all their hard work to some obscure back end library project.So as Linux Distro’s become mainstream the Xine and Mplayer names fade away because their default front ends suck. At least offer a choice of the two basic styles.
There are no ads in the screensavers, only during install.
Install ads debuted in Mandrake 9.1. Most of the ads are for
FSF, GNU, or Mandrake sites. I always press ESC anyways to see what packages are being installed.
In your article you mentioned that the Dlink DWL 650+ drivers don’t exist …. I thought you might want to know that you can get the drivers for linux at this page:
http://www.ivor.it/wireless/acx.html
This is the kind of review that smacks of someone who had made up their mind very early, and was just writing for effect. It’s a security and bug release. Chill out.
I tend to compile a new version of KDE anyway. MCC and urpmi are great. Being standard with Red Hat gets me the documentation I need.
If Mandrake didn’t have the slickness, I would probably continue to use Knoppix-installed debian, like I do at work.
Stop your whining.
“Mandrake 9.1 at the highest setting leaves all ports visible, and two ports open. None are stealth. This is unacceptable. I would like to know if this non stealth firewall setting persists in 9.2.”
Hmmm…, maybe not a too severe security threat, but interesting nevertheless as Mandrake has often advertised that they pay special attention to security.
Generally speaking, at these times of ever increasing security threats it would be nice if reviewers of operating systems/Linux distros would start to pay more attention to security level & settings too. Maybe ultra security is not needed on a normal desktop/work station – but why give crackers a helping hand if you could alternatively & easily have a much more secure system too?
This just goes to show you that you can’t please everyone. Eugenia says that linux distros put too many menu entries in by default. This person installs their sytem and says there are not enough menu entries by default.
Another person installs their system, does individual package selection, then says the menus are too cluttered.
Looks like a distro maker can’t win.
smeat!
Actually, the next generation of mplayer (mplayer G2) will have no front end at all, it will pretty much just be a lib. So they are working towards what you are telling them to avoid.
I think this is good, firstly as it’s ‘the unix way’ of letting their code be easily used by any number of media players (with better integration then there is at present), and also it means they no longer put effort into a making a gui that no-one likes anyway.
IMHO, it’s not about having your name in big letters, it’s about making the very best software, so their plan makes sense.
I don’t get the negative line in the review.
What’s wrong with a upgrade release which aims for better stability and more completeness?
Mandrake 9.2 is great. There’s a lot of extra RPMs in contrib. This is the first distribution that I’ve gotten the music-applications (midi-sequencers and so) to work out of the box. The included 2.6.x kernel behaves strange on my system, but it does boot and run. Apart from the my only problem is that the content of the Gnome-menu seems pretty random and changes on a daily basis.
There’s also plenty of important upgrades. OpenOffice 1.1 to name one.
Before I begin, Everybody likes screenshots 😉
They are on Mandrake’s website http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/9.2/features/
Yes, there is no revolution in this release.
It is a bad thing ? KDE is just 7 years old. In France, it is the “Age de Raison”, when your beautiful baby becomes also reasonable. Well, I think it is the same for Mandrake, and Linux.
So no revolution, but now a constant evolution.
For example, most of Mandrake’s users have upgraded without burning the ISOs and using the installer.
urpmi makes the redhat rpm format usable, and for the first time, I just upgraded with
urpmi –auto-select, Mandrake’s equivalent of the so loved debian feature apt-get updage ; apt-get dist-upgrade
With these commands, you realise the equivalent of an upgrade between Windows ME and Windows XP.
The first time, you are a little reluctant, but !
Yeah ! It works !
In the same spirit, much distros review complain a lot of
“Good, it includes that” versus “Where is MY software ?”
This is a bit pointless : a little visit to http://plf.zarb.og/~nanardon/
and you can install it in a few seconds your software
For example, if you want a graphical front-end for top :
$ urpmi hot-babe
Oh and a last thing. It’s interesting to see what you Mandrake can do for you, but you can also ask yourself what you can do for Mandrake. (Thanks, John K. 😉
I belong to the people who believes that “free as in speech” is more important as “free as in beer”. The mandrake’s guys trully believes in free sofware ( ALL software in Mandrake are free (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html ). There is no need for the debian vrms package)
So, I’m proud to contribute to the life of FOSS software which are important for me. In this spirit, I gave bucks to the Perl Foundation, and I’m a prout member of the
Mandrake Club ( http://www.mandrakeclub.com/ )
(Anyway, in the FOSS domain, not free as in beer is cheap)
Now, I can try to answer a few questions
@SMEAT
This just goes to show you that you can’t please everyone. Eugenia says that linux distros put too many menu entries in by default. This person installs their sytem and says there are not enough menu entries by default.
That’s why Mandrake has two menus :
* one “What To Do ?” menu with a few entries named like
“Read my mails”, “Browse the internet”, …
* one well-organized by category where you can find all programs with their name (It’s just me or it’s very better than the crap of the disorder of the windows start menu) and one menu “What To Do ?” for people like Eugenia with a few selected prograls
Just run menudrake and choose what you prefer
@Crawling Mushroom Syndicate
Well, what to say ?
Right Click>>Rename
Unlike Lindows, Mandrake is not a distro for newbies.
To say it better, it is not ONLY for newbies. It is a good
distro if you begin with Linux, but I also used for the servers of my little company. For such a company, the time spared installing Mandrake is very interesting.
It answer one of your points @Shawn, I think ?
@Metic
I agree with your idea about a comparaison of level of security between distros.
@chad
No, rpmdrake is no longer segmented (ie: install/remove)
The guy from Mandrake loved it so, but they recieved many negative feedback. The users decide…
@Mike about the Dual boot
if you want to install as a dual boot system, the installer wipes out the MBR without asking, forcing you to have to restore it.
Is it a problem ? When Mandrake installs Lilo on the MBR, it adds an entry for each OS you have on your computer. In my experience with Debian and Windows[1], it worked well.
But perhaps your dual boot is with another more exotic OS (OpenBeOS, … ) ? If it’s the case, you can fill a very interesting entry on bugzilla.
[1] Now removed
I use 9.2 on my workstation and on web/ftp/mail server. As a desktop / workstation, the most notable improvements are:
1. Totem media player. It plays beautifully anything you throw at it including wma, wmv, asf, mpeg2, svcd. XMMS plays shoutcast ( http://www.winamp.com ) radio.
2. Stability and performance improvements. This alone is a good reason to upgrade. X in 9.1 would lock up sometimes( ACPI ?).
3. Support for WiFi network. The wizards identified and automagically configured my linksys wireless card. Orinico_cs ,hermes, prism drivers come standard now and work well.
4. Konqueror web browser. It now renders pages faster than Mozilla and feels snappier.
Most of the improvements are under the hood. As a whole, 9.2 looks and feels more polished…a perfect point release.
Well, all I know about this dist is its the first one that recognised the conexant lan card on my compaq presario laptop, out of the box. I’m very happy!
Nice one Mandrake.
Here are the corrected ones
http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/ is a central place along with http://urpmi.org to install software for Mandrake
@SMEAT
This just goes to show you that you can’t please everyone. Eugenia says that linux distros put too many menu entries in by default. This person installs their sytem and says there are not enough menu entries by default.
That’s why Mandrake has two menus :
* one “What To Do ?” menu with a few entries named like
“Read my mails”, “Browse the internet”, …
* one well-organized by category where you can find all programs with their name (It’s just me or it’s very better than the crap of the disorder of the windows start menu) and one menu “What To Do ?” for people like Eugenia with a few selected prograls
Just run menudrake and choose what you prefer
I know that. 🙂 I was reffering to two conflicting opinions from users who wrote reviews.
Thank you for your very well thought out response though.
smeat!
I for one am extremely happy with this release. 9.1 was crashing often on my dual P3 system, Gentoo even more… Using 9.2 for the last few days intensively I can tell the difference. I’m not bashing Gentoo, I still have a Gentoo installation. Will I still use it? Not for the time being. In 2 days i had a better setup with 9.2 than with Gentoo after weeks of compiling… compiling… more compilation zZZZZZZZZ
The Gentoo community is great though.
X.2 == Updated software + stability fixes + Security fixes
X.0 or X.1 == Massive changes, new Features etc.
I just want something clarified. Is Totem media player able to play wmv and divx files “out of box” without having to download any rpms? The reason I am asking is because I am looking for a linux distribution that can play wmv, divx, and real media files without me having to download the needed codecs, rpm files, off the internet. Almost all the linux distributions I looked at comes with real player, but either did not support dixx files or wmv files.
all of the stuff that u dont find in the download edition
is in the power pack. the power pack comes with 7 cd’s.
because KDE and Gnome have both grown there are some
extras taken out of the download edition.
the powerpack has it all.
i am using the powerpack and my radeon 9700 pro works
out of the box.
the radeon driver is another piece not including in the
download version.
hope this helps.
Mike said,
This is a huge problem–if you want to install as a dual boot system, the installer wipes out the MBR without asking, forcing you to have to restore it. Even the expert install wipes the MBR. Give me the choice before you do it!!
Damn does it still do this? This deserves a Mandrake what the hell are you doing? Fix this before anything else you knitwits.
Sorry they deserve that.
Seriously all I like about Mandrake is the Galaxy Widgets for KDE where can I get these for redhat/fedora?
Other things that sound good is the stuff they do with prelinking and the preemptive kernel.
But IMHO about desktop polish they should take the approach Lindows has by having a minimal KDE desktop install for disc1 only with a minimum set of apps that make it a complete desktop, possibly have GNOME as an alternative. That it, nothing more.
Disc2 and Disc3 is the rest if someone choooses to install it.
They don’t do this because they are trying to make the DVD set look more attractive to people who don’t want to change CD’s.
I don’t know if this is offtopic, hope it isn’t…
Well, once i tried Mandrake 9.1, and i found out that mandrake’s console has different way of doing the tab-completion (and also a different way of showing the files through ‘ls’). I’m sure anyone who’s used Mandrake and some other distro has noticed it. Well, how to i make Mandrake’s console work just like the others distros do? I hate the Mandrake-way of doing tab-completion.
Thanks,
Victor.
C’mon Eugenia … stop posting these reader-submitted operating system reviews that don’t come with pictures.
Anyone know when they are releasing their isos to the non-members?
should be the end of October.
@John Blink
They don’t do this because they are trying to make the DVD set look more attractive to people who don’t want to change CD’s.
The business model to sell CDs or DVDs is dead ( one word : ADSL). So, I honestly think you’re wrong 😉
@Victor
You’re right. It’s a new feature of bash :
Try this :
$ alias hello=”echo Hello ”
$ complete -W “dad mam” hello
$ hello <TAB>
dad mam
In the real life, it’s very useful and cool thanks to this guy ==]] http://www.caliban.org/bash/index.shtml
Basically, you have a file /etc/bash_compleion which did a lot of clever things like mine above
For example :
$ ssh <TAB>
and bash propose you the last machines you visited with ssh
Don’t wait for the ISO release! Rsync up with the 9.2 release and do a network install, it’s the only way to go.
“Don’t wait for the ISO release! Rsync up with the 9.2 release and do a network install, it’s the only way to go.
”
hmmmm…you wouldnt have a tutorial on how to do that would you? I just started using linux about 1 1/2 months ago and dont know these kinds of things.
Some important things are missing from this and most reviews. How about a security check at Gibson research Corps Shields Up port probe http://www.grc.com . Mandrake 9.1 at the highest setting leaves all ports visible, and two ports open. None are stealth. This is unacceptable. I would like to know if this non stealth firewall setting persists in 9.2.
Sometimes, stealthing ports does little for security. It does something to help reduce the bandwidth going out in case of a DOS by not sending rejection packets, but it doesn’t completely hide your box from a portscanner. There is a reason why stealthing was not included in any RFC–it can increase the incoming bandwidth when clients try to connect to your box without receiving a reject notice. With a stealthed port, the client knows the box exists, it just wonders why the port does not exist and keeps sending requests for longer than needed. If you need to help prevent a DOS, then the rate limit module (-m limit) works well.
If one wishes to look through config files, the firewall script might be in
/etc/init.d/??? <-firewall.rc?
or
/usr/sbin/BastilleSomething
/usr/bin/BastilleSomething
.
Then, you can replace instances of REJECT with instances of DROP.
Some important things are missing from this and most reviews. How about a security check at Gibson research Corps Shields Up port probe http://www.grc.com . Mandrake 9.1 at the highest setting leaves all ports visible, and two ports open. None are stealth. This is unacceptable. I would like to know if this non stealth firewall setting persists in 9.2.
Also the installer installs LILO in the MBR master boot record of the hard drive. Only after it has been installed does the installer allow you to choose the boot sector. By that time the MBR has allready been altered and must be reinstalled from a windows boot disk (fdisk /mbr).
i am using mandrake 9.2 and i have only one port that
is not stealthed but it is closed.
sorry to disappoint u.
I installed 9.2 yesterday and I had a weird issue. The NumLock is enabled by default after login but not during the install. This made it rather interesting trying to enter the root password…
When I started the terminal though I noticed what was going on. Is there any way to stop this? I hate having to turn it off everytime I start my laptop.
Also the install was a no-go on my wife’s Vaio. It could not configure her ATI Rage Mobility M 1. Then it just stoppped booting when it tried to configure ALSA. I had to remove the battery after about 10 when it was stuck during boot.
Yes, run drakxservices (as root) and uncheck the start at boot box for numlock.
i am using mandrake 9.2 and i have only one port that
is not stealthed but it is closed.
sorry to disappoint u.
Who is disapointed? I think that’s great that 9.2 fixed that security problem. I was simply pointing out that few if any reviewers address the security settings of the distro’s they review, and that they probably should.
LILO is still a problem that needs to be addressed however.I use partition images as a primary install back up for the systems I build. By putting LILO in the boot sector the part image works even if its tranfered to a new (replacement)hard drive. If its put into the master boot record, its adds a level of complexity I don’t want to pass on to the end user.
To my knowledge, no Linux Distro’s make provisions for a complete system back up of the newly installed, and more importantly, completely set up with the end users preferences set, to a hard drive partition or CDROM. By doing this, the end user can screw around with the settings with confidence that they can get back to the original system in less than ten minutes.
I been running 9.2 RC2 since it was released and I got to say it is quite stable. I have been a Mandrake user since 6.0 and I have to say IMHO version 8 through 9.1 had some strange issues ranging from nfs lock to autofs trying to mount remote volumes that are non-existance. Sometimes application crashes for no apparent reason or something missing/broken.
However, 9.2 seems to be more stable than the rest at least with my RC2. Having tested beta through rc2, I have to say a lot of work has been put into stability. Nevertheless, I have to say there are still quite a few rough edges on RC2 but I am sure this would have been fixed in release version. There has been a few new things in MCC particularly with printer installation and management.
There’s a few things I don’t like though, since 9.1 the installation asked user to add new user before setting up networking. This can be a problem if you are only installing a individual workstation and get your userlist from LDAP or NIS. One thing I dislike with 9.2 installation is, there’s lack of control or chice by the user to steer things or go back to change something midstream.
I don’t experience problem with kde as James mentioned because I keep my old home directory mounted from the network. All my old KDE settings remain. One problem that I never really understood is why Mandrake don’t install jdk or most of the browser plugin by default.
The locale setting and UTF-8 settings is still a problem. I still can’t get chinese language display properly with most of the application except mozilla. Acrobat Reader still can’t be installed but I heard there are similar issue with redhat.
9.2-RC2 also runs slightly faster on older machine such as K6-2. At least quite noticeable on one of the K6-2-500 I tested.
Overall, I really think this one is kind of cool in terms of stability. I have even installed the RC-2 on my boss’ desktop and he likes it.
i am using mandrake 9.2 and i have only one port that
is not stealthed but it is closed.
sorry to disappoint u.
Who is disapointed? I think that’s great that 9.2 fixed that security problem. I was simply pointing out that few if any reviewers address the security settings of the distro’s they review, and that they probably should.
i have also used 9.1 and 9.0 and i got the same results
i am getting now.
i dont know anything about your lilo problem.
LILO is still a problem that needs to be addressed however.I use partition images as a primary install back up for the systems I build. By putting LILO in the boot sector the part image works even if its tranfered to a new (replacement)hard drive. If its put into the master boot record, its adds a level of complexity I don’t want to pass on to the end user.
To my knowledge, no Linux Distro’s make provisions for a complete system back up of the newly installed, and more importantly, completely set up with the end users preferences set, to a hard drive partition or CDROM. By doing this, the end user can screw around with the settings with confidence that they can get back to the original system in less than ten minutes.
“Even so, I think it would have been a better move to make MPlayer the default media player because of its better codec support.”
This is totally wrong. Xine plays every format that mplayer does. Your view is a sadly common misunderstading among mplayer users.
“This is totally wrong. Xine plays every format that mplayer does. Your view is a sadly common misunderstading among mplayer users.”
But you cant stream video inside a browser(mozilla) using xine, I think.
It would be great if mdk had the stream plugin+ mplayer + all codecs( WMP, QT, RM) installed by default.
Hello all,
What about the MPEG playback problem mentioned in the article? Is there any good solution?
Neo
A quick look at xinehq.de will reveal that there is a mozilla-plugin.
http://xinehq.de/images/releases/mozilla-plugin.jpg
“It would be great if mdk had the stream plugin+ mplayer + all codecs( WMP, QT, RM) installed by default.”
Because of their legal status that would be impossible however they are available in plf.
I think renaming “Mandrake Control Center” to “Configure My Computer” and renaming “KDE Control Center” to “Configure My Desktop” is probably the most counter-intuitive change I have ever encountered in a point release. Especially since you can right-click on the desktop and choose “Configure Desktop” and get something completely different than the other two! I think this is going to be very confusing for new users. The difference between “Configure My Computer” “Configure My Desktop” and “Configure Desktop” is not at all obvious even to me.
Agreed. Why did they change it? If they are going to improve the ease of use, why not call “Configure My Desktop” to “Personalise Desktop”, and “Configure My Computer” to “Change System Settings”.
For a new person, they would get confused which they should use to configure their desktop background. If they see a work like “system” they’ll instantly think, “something that has something to do with the computer itself”, however, when someone sees “personalise”, they’ll assume that it must mean changing the background, screensaver and so-forth.
I believe that the bootloader installation only re-writes the bootloader without asking if you have an insane bootloader installed, in other words the Windows bootloader. During the install on my box, it asked me where I wanted to install the bootloader or if I wanted to skip that step. This is because I already had Grub installed.
With respect to the re-installation of the windows bootloader after install, you can just boot from Mandrake CD1, hit F1 at the prompt, type rescue and then select restore windows Bootloader from the menu that will come up.
I don’t really know why anybody that multi-boots windows and linux wouldn’t want to use a bootloader to boot both. I mean, what’s the point of multi-booting if you have to fiddle with floppies and stuff to get booted. And why do you need to spend $50 on a fancy proprietary gui bootloader that you see for all of two seconds anyway. I personally use Grub and have a list of three different Linux distros as well as 2 versions of windows that I can select from at boot. I wouldn’t do it any other way.
/g
Lilo only write to the mbr if you do not choose the advance option on the first screen of the install. From there on you get more options to configure everything. I’d suggest to anyone installing MDK 9.1 or 9.2 to click on the “advance” button when the language selection screen comes up. This will then the install up to give you more options including where to put lilo or grub.
P.S. ATI drivers SUCK !! Appereantly they have issues with certian MB chipsets like KT400 chipset, which I happen to have. ATI should learn from Nvidia and work on putting out quality drivers instead of half-baked ones they are putting for Linux once a year.
Well I got the Power Pack version off their website via BitTorrent and I got Totem going and playing .wmv’s, .divx, .xvid, .mpegs, .avi’s etc.. If this does not work for you then download MPlayer from PLF’s urpmi site and install it with all the codecs they supply.
http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/urpmiweb.php
“A quick look at xinehq.de will reveal that there is a mozilla-plugin. ”
Do you know where I can d/l it? I took a look at their website but it says that it hasent been released yet.
http://xinehq.de/index.php/releases (mid of page)
I’ve recently Downloaded the 9.2 Mandrake.Since im a Mandrake Club member..instead i’ve downloaded the 2.5 gig files ( No ISO).
Now my question, how do i make bootdisk out of this stuff
or what are the needed files for the disc1. Am using Nero 6.
if you have any links, sites about this stuff. im kinda disappointed burning files when the system say: there is no bootable disk.. pls help
reply to my email: rsentino at operamail dot com
im sorry if im posting for a wrong topic but i guess still related to Mandrake 9.2
thanks people!
[ Since im a Mandrake Club member ]
im sorry for that: I am not a Mandrake Club Member so i download from Raw Tree
🙂
“Do you know where I can d/l it? I took a look at their website but it says that it hasent been released yet.”
Probably cvs
yup
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ftp.php3#586
on ftp:
ftp://ftp.tugraz.at/mirror/Mandrake-linux/Mandrake/9.2/i586/
took me two days to download. do you have idea of my post above?
Try the Mkcd script (the complete distribution generation script, never used myself) or directly gendistrib (generates indexes and checks dependencies: gendistrib –distrib <base dir>).
They should be somewhere in misc/, I believe (and you can install the mkcd rpm during install to have them on hand).
Note that once all files are on hard drive, you can just make a boot floppy with the images/hd.img file, much faster and no CD to change.
(cyberCFO)
“I don’t really know why anybody that multi-boots windows and linux wouldn’t want to use a bootloader to boot both. I mean, what’s the point of multi-booting if you have to fiddle with floppies and stuff to get booted.”
I use Loadlin to boot linux from my win98 installation, no floppies, mbr not overwritten. I certainly don’t want another bootloader installed.
Gues that’s not an option for winXP tho.
Mandrake was rolling along pretty good up to 8.0,that is when it turned to shit,when they went bankrupt they should have stayed down for the count.
Haven’t tried Mandrake 9.2 on my Compaq Presario 725 yet. I heard the new kernel has better ACPI support (my computer is 100% acpi so this is good new!)
Any experiences with the new mandrake on laptops?? (Especially Compaq Presarios:-)
The Gentoo sources have the low latency and premptive patches, you just have to select them when you compile the kernel.
I upgraded my Mandrake 9.1 install to 9.2 and the upgrade went smoothly.
The Mandrake *.2 releases are generally the best ones and this time the fonts are even better looking than with 9.1.
So, for people that doesn’t bother updating every week I definitely recommend to upgrade to 9.2 and get the freshest software in one go. For those who want to try out Mandrake (or Linux) for the first time, 9.2 is also a good choice.
/Kenneth
Can someone says to me if it gives success?
I want to know if 9.2 uses he new thread library…
Thanks!!!
#include <semaphore.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <errno.h>
int main()
{
sem_t sem;
if (sem_init(&sem, 1, 0) == 0) {
fprintf(stdout, “SUCESSO
“);
}
fprintf(stdout, “errno = %d
“, errno);
fprintf(stdout, “HOSTNAME = %s
“, getenv(“HOSTNAME”));
return 0;
}
On my system at home, Mandrake 9.1 comes up as completely stealthed on grc.com’s “shields up” test. I was surprised to see this cited as an issue with Mandrake, because I have been pleased to see specifically that it was *not* an issue on my system.
(BTW, as for LILO, I use GRUB – really easy multibooting with several distros and Windows. If I use the boot manager, it always tells me I am using LILO, even though I am using GRUB. I haven’t looked at 9.2 – I hope this was fixed.)
Why does every review make such a big deal about the “default” applications. Who cares. There’s no way they are going to please everybody. Hell, I just installed a non-Mandrake Linux for the first time in over 2 years….it’s Lindows. It doesn’t install crap except an e-mail client and browser….which are not KMail and Konqueror which I prefer. But who cares, I just changed it in like 10 seconds. I also installed all the software I wanted without a care about what the defaults are. As long as installing software is one-click easy, who cares what the default is. I want to heat about the consistency and dependability about Mandrake features like the “auto icons” for the desktop, the Mandrake Control Center, and URPMI. Why was it not mentioned that the Package Installer now lets you insert PGP keys?
On another note, I agree with some of the posts that Mandrake hasn’t really done much. There are alot of problems that I think Mandrake could solve. Like for example, putting an icon on the desktop for your web cam is nice, unless your web cam isn’t a webcam, but a TV card. In that case, it creates an XawTV icon, but it uses the “-c” option which doesn’t allow full screen. You can’t change the nasty icon either…so perhaps somehow giving the user write access to his own icon would be nice(I can change “auto” icons in Lindows). When I plug in my Memory Card reader or Digital Camera, I only get an icon on the desktop after a reboot, although it comes up other times occassionally(in other words its sporadic). Works every time in Lindows. They could perhaps add cleaner support for advanced sound options, like SPDIF. The KMixer is ridiculous the way you’ll get over 30 sliders for some sound cards….although most of the sliders should only be on/off switches. If they don’t want to change KMix, maybe they could add some configuration for this in their Control Panel…but then again if the Control Panel worked more consistently(many of the tools work sporadically). Anyways, the Mandrake Control Panel was impressive when it first came out although it was buggy, but after a few releases it doesn’t seem to improve in dependability.
Sorry if I sound like a Mandrake hater. Completely opposite, but you gotta be critical if you want it to improve.
Peter:
“the music-applications (midi-sequencers and so) to work out of the box. The included 2.6.x kernel behaves strange on my system, but it does boot and run”.
Peter, where is the 2.6 kernel located (which of the 3 disks)?
I have installed Mandrake 9.2 on 1 server and 5 desktops on my work. I was hoping kernel 2.6 would be included, but I was surprised and happy that even though it didnt make it, mdk 9.2 is the best upgrade ive seen for any distro. The one and only reason for this is performance. I used the multimedia kernel on 9.1 before, but the improvements are really noticeable. Even the slowest desktop (350mzh, 128mb) is quite usable, I would say around the same as the faster (1.2ghz) were before. The machines are a joy to work with. I think this was the final update to make people not miss windows anymore.
-TN
kenneth,
thanks for posting that your upgrade went smoothly as i have 4 computers currently on 9.1 and would have tried the upgrade on a computer i use for testing such things before “trying and frying” my prod servers 😉
Can someone tell me what version of Shorewall is included in 9.2?
One thing no-one (unless i missed) has mentioned is the Gnome version. Doesnt 9.2 now use Gnome 2.4? And if so i thought there were major improvements there.
While i’m here, if there’s anyone from Sun reading this, where’s the official Sun Gnome 2.4 for Solaris? It’s not much fun running Solaris 9 and Gnome 2.0 and encountering bugs that i know were fixed even in Gnome 2.2.
cheers
peter
1) VCD playing did not work (with none of the players: totem, xine, mplayer). maybe this has to do with automount/supermount?
2) Xine crashed when pressing the right mouse button.
3) A bad driver (making all kind of noises) was installed for the onboard C-Media CMI9738; AC’97. When i changed it to i810 (i think) in control-center it worked.
4) XMMS did not like the alsa driver.
5) the worst problem was: the broken start-menu system.
Hey peoples. I noticed that many of you were disappointed with Mandrake and it’s lack of “shinyness”. I understand what you mean by that. When I first got into Linux almost a year ago, my friend (who got me going in Linux) helped me install Mandrake 9.1. I thought it looked kind of ugly, but my friend helped me configure everything so it looked nice (I’m such a sucker for a nice GUI). Anyway, I had a lot of trouble while using Mandrake 9.1, and I was pretty disappointed in Linux as an OS. Then another friend introduced me to SuSE 8.1 Pro. I was very impressed. The default look of KDE was pretty nice, and it was very easy to make beautiful. But this is not a place to talk about SuSE, so if you want to know what I’m talking about, get SuSE 9.0. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
P.S. Even the friend who got me using Mandrake decided to switch to SuSE, because he thought it was so nice.
Yep, Mandrake 9.1 was my first distro too, and the first thing I thought was “damn, that’s butt ugly”. The HOME icon in particular, but all of it looked so primitive, especially on Gnome. I also switched to Suse after trying Lindows first.
There’s a few things I don’t like though, since 9.1 the installation asked user to add new user before setting up networking. This can be a problem if you are only installing a individual workstation and get your userlist from LDAP or NIS.
This is largely irrelevant, since authentication setup is done in the previous step (the one where you enter the root password), only problem is it’s hidden behind the “Advanced” button.
The Gentoo sources have the low latency and premptive patches, you just have to select them when you compile the kernel.
Why, when I can just:
# urpmi kernel-multimedia
I just switched to Linux about a month ago and I’m using Mandrake 9.1. I’ve been really dissappointed in it’s performance so far, which is especially disheartening because I do movie editing on my computer. I have an Athlon XP 2600+, brand new Gigabyte mobo w/ nForce II chipset, 512MB of Corsair twin RAM, a Nvidia 5200 FX video card, and a Hercules Fortissimmo sound card. I updated to the Nvidia drivers, got my sound card working, and made sure my hard drives are using DMA. I also re-installed and switched to the Reiser FS – my performance increased slightly after switching file systems.
Anyway, I’m thinking about upgrading to 9.2 if it will improve performance, and I’m especially interested in this multimedia kernel someone mentioned. Is the performance gain really significant with 9.2, or only slight? Also, what is this multimedia kernel, what does it do, and will it improve my performance? Right now, my old Windows 2000 machine that had half the processor speed and a worse video card runs faster than my new linux setup. Any info you could provide would be much appreciated.
-Brad
The Shoewall version is 1.4.6c-2mdk
And Natilus has some bad memory leak in the version with 9.2