Mandrakelinux 10.2 Beta is available and it includes Linux kernel 2.6.10, Glibc 2.3.4 and gcc 3.4.3, new KDE 3.3.2 is compiled with the ‘-fvisibility=hidden’ option of gcc to accelerate the linkage step at the program start, Gnome 2.8.1, as well as GTK 2.6.1. New features during the installation procedure, including a new package-processing algorithm. Installation may boot from a USB key. Mozilla-firefox replaces Mozilla, Gimp 2.2, cdrecord 2.01.01a21 with DVD+R Dual Layers support, OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, Postgresql 8.0, MySQL 4.1.9.
Mandrakelinux 10.2 Beta 1 Available
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Is Mandrake migrating to freedesktop standards like HAL, D-Bus and others. I have read before that they adhere to LSB specs but missing out on FD.org technologies would be a the story of Unix versions all over again
I can’0t see in the news :/
The answer is yes.
I’ve been without linux for almost a year now due to the total lack of support for most onboard SATA chipsets utilizing RAID, other than as a single drive configuration. Will this new version address this or am I doomed to wait longer for linux to catch up to my year old motherboard?
hal and dbus are in there and are actually used by Mandrake stuff, so yes.
verbat – get kernel-multimedia-2.6.10 from Cooker contrib. It has reiser4 (along with a lot of other good stuff over the stock MDK kernel).
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I’ve been without linux for almost a year now due to the total lack of support for most onboard SATA chipsets utilizing RAID, other than as a single drive configuration. Will this new version address this or am I doomed to wait longer for linux to catch up to my year old motherboard?
”
Contacting the vendor of your motherboard and telling them the situation probably does more good than “waiting longer for Linux to catch up”. Those drivers don’t write themselves.
The catching up is not on the part of the Linux kernel writers.
You need to understand that you don’t have real hardware Raid support, but rather a dummy driver that does in software what a real card would do by offloading the calculations to the CPU.
Linux has had great software Raid support for ages and you are welcome to use it. It is the exact thing you are doing now anyway, even if you don’t realize it. Of course, if you are trying to dual boot, Linux will not see your Windows “Raid” partitions as one drive. If you just use Linux, you can create a software Raid 1 and all will be well.
The advantages of Software RAID 1 is that if your motherboard failed, you wouldn’t lose your data. Just load the drives on a separate motherboard and off you go.
If you really want a dummy driver written for linux, bug the manufacturer and if you want real hardware raid, get a 3ware card. There is a reason why real RAID cards cost more than your motherboard with built-in RAID.
btw, seems there’s some kinda mirror problem at the moment and the version of kernel-multimedia-2.6 on the mirrors is stuck at 2.6.7, which is a really old version. No point getting that, hang tight till 2.6.10 gets up there.
So, how do I upgrade my existing Mandrake 10.1 (Release/ßeta) – last time I tried to use urpmi but that was a total mess. I’d like not to waste my current installation and packages.
(Not to be flamming, but with Windows I just select Windows Update and it does all of it for me…)
Well I’ve had 2 friends install Mandrake 10.1, and both have had lots of problems with it. One downgraded back to 10.0 because 10.1 was just unusable for him.
I’ve decided to just skip 10.1 altogether, it seemed to just include bugs rather than new features. I reckon I might migrate to Ubuntu at some stage, once they have a few more “system configuration” utilities and Gnome is a bit more complete (I use KDE currently, but like Gnomes direction and focus). I installed Warty, and it was damn sweet. Very smooth and easy to use.
But for now I’m sticking with 10.0, and may upgrade to 10.2 if others do so sucessfully.
(Not to be flamming, but with Windows I just select Windows Update and it does all of it for me…)
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no it doesnt. try upgrading between versions thru windows update
You can run the CDs and select an upgrade install. You never know, it might even work! But really, it’s not a good idea to update a stable box to the first beta of 10.2. There’s probably still lots of stuff broken (though my box works quite well). Unless you’re very confident, I’d keep your stable system and install this on a small test partition to check it out.
azazel – 10.1 had lots of new features, that’s where the bugs came from
. Just most of them were on the back-end, so the bugs were a lot more visible than the features. 10.1 seemed a bit of an odd release, worked great for some people, worse for others. I wouldn’t rely on this beta to be any better, frankly, though the new kernel might help; 2.6.10 is a lot less of a crappy kernel release than the 2.6.8 series was, and may fix a lot of irritating hardware issues. But some of the big 10.1 problems, like USB keys with no proper partitioning, aren’t dealt with yet, though they should be by final. This beta’s definitely only for testing, I wouldn’t recommend anyone update a stable system with it.
I tired the 10.1 but IMHO it is total unuseable. I used Mandrake from 7.x to 9.2, all versions was buggy, but the 10.1 is a total tragedy on my machine. And all devel packages are missing from the downloadable version…
what ?
I used the download version of 10.1 on a few machines and there was no devel packages missing !
are you sure you ticked the box to install them ?
“no it doesnt. try upgrading between versions thru windows update”
Thats what I did… XP -> SP1 -> SP2 Worked like a charm…
Never done a 95 -> 98 -> XP though – but I imagine that 10.1 -> 10.2 would be like a service pack. Otherwose they should probably be a 10.1 -> 11.0 ?
Mandrake has a lot of English language typos — the situation was like this in Mandrake 8.0 I first used, and continues with 10.1 that I last tried to use. What is more, the typos are not simple misspellings, but are glaring mistakes giving evidence that the persons do not know English well. It’s a crying shame for a corporation like Mandrake, that tries to compete with Microsoft, and which, in the past, tried to belittle Microsoft by spelling it Micro$oft on their home page. I mean, if you are going to be better than someone else, don’t belittle him, just be better and remove those typos, for one. Fedora, being a US distro, doesn’t have those typos, thankfully. I’ve reported my concern to Mandrake. I don’t know how 10.2 fares in this regard.
This beta version is allready near exellent,can’t give any drawbacks.Mandrake 10.2-beta seems to react snappier than 10.1. I like the progress bar when the partitons are being made.The insert CD message doesn’t paint to screen anymore.
Only 1 minor remark,the stuff you enter in the post configuration screen starts at the right like a OO spreadsheet,chinese hacker ? 🙂
Very good job!
well 10.1 was excellent, actually made me think about switching to linux, but unfortunately i can’t get my bluetooth to transfer files between my pc and my cellphone. back to the land where everything works and never hangs.. hehe windows xp
Well, it’s not so difficult to do BT file exchange…what phone do you own?
a sony ericsson k700i, this BT thing in linux baffles me all the time hehe i also can’t get it to work in slackware
I’ve got the same phone and it’s pretty simple. I’m not running Mandrake but it can’t be too much different.
You need Bluetooth support in the kernel; the modules are bluetooth, rfcomm, l2cap and some sort of driver for your bluetooth hardware; I’m using hci_usb for a USB dongle.
Presumably Mandrake should take care of that side of things pretty well – possibly even load them automagically for you?
I installed bluez-libs and bluez-utils, and started the bluetooth service. Installed kdebluetooth. It suggested changing my pin helper, which I did – not that it’s necessary for sending files to the phone, only receiving from.
Then Konqueror grows a “Send with Bluetooth” context menu, which opens an Obex (object exchange) client, and upon pressing “send” the file goes.
I’m surprised you’re having a lot of trouble to be honest – I found it pretty straightforward (okay, the kernel stuff is a bit interesting, but I’d expect an ‘easier’ distro to take care of it for me) but Windows has been a total nightmare. So much so I simply haven’t bothered trying any further with it; repeated hardlocks were really a bit much.
funny that just yesterday i tryed bluetooth under mdk 10.1. what i did was type urpmi bluetooth, then it gives you the option to use kdebluetooth or gnome-bluetooth, i chose kde.
after install, do a “service bluetooth start” as root and of you go.
in kde after the install, look for a K inside a blue circle (a variation on the bluetooth logo). this is the bluetooth controller. to access any device within range (make sure your phone is set as visible in its bluetooth settings). then fire up konqueror and type “bluetooth:/” in the addressbar. you should then give its a bit of time as the bluetooth is scanning for devices. after the scan it should show your phone and if you open it you will find the phones files under obex file transfers or something similar.
as for bugs in 10.1, cant say i have ran into any. and i did a update, useing cds, from 10.0. but if one is after stability, jumping on the community or betas are not a good idea. those are for people that want to do something for the development of mandrake. betas for coders and official testers, community releases for people that want the bleeding edge but allso makes sure to report problems back useing proper channels. and no, complaining about bugs and errors in osnews comments are not proper channels. if you want stability, do like i do, use offical. it takes a bit more time before its out but it worth it.
and to mr. peev. you can allways correct the errors in the english files and send them to mandrake, or atleast point them out to the people that to the writeing. but given that both desktops have english as the primary language and then is translated over im wondering about markeing your comment as a flame.
can someone explain what “compiled with the ‘-fvisibility=hidden’ option” means. if its make stuff faster why doesnt everyone do it?
thanks
man gcc:
A good explanation of the benefits offered by ensuring ELF symbols have the correct visibility is given by “How To Write Libraries” by Ulrich Drepper (which can be found at http://people.redhat.com/~drepper/) – however a superior solution made possible by this option to marking things hidden when the default is public is to make the default hidden and mark things public. This is the norm with DLL’s on Windows and with -fvisibility=hidden and “__attribute__ ((visibility(“default”)))” instead of “__declspec(dllexport)” you get almost identical semantics with identical syntax. This is a great boon to those working with crossplatform projects.
I have been using Linux for two years now and, from my experience and from what I have read, it seems that many of the complains people have about this OS derive from hardware incompatibilities. I build my systems using industry-standard, “orthodox” components, and I have never had major issues. I have no experience with notebooks though. My current desktop computer consists of a Pentium IV, 3.0 GHz, an Intel D875PBZ motherboard with the latest BIOS, and 1 GB of Intel-certified Kingston memory. Other components are an ATI Radeon 9600XT, a Sounblaster Audigy 2, two Seagate SATA hard drives, a Sony 52X CD-writer, and an external US Robotics Courier serial modem. About two months ago I installed Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official, which is kept up-to-date with most of the patches from Mandrakesoft, and, with KDE as the desktop environment, it has been working flawlessly on the aforementioned hardware. Also, I use a Kingston USB-2 drive intensively, I download photos from my Canon digital camera, I burn data and audio CDs and print to an HP LaserJet printer.
Do anyone know if 10.2 supports packet writing of CDRW/DVDs out of the box?
With the 2.6.10 kernel I think this is finally possible without additional patches, but I don’t know if Mandrake has it enabled.
most likely it will either be enabled or compiled as a module (if possible). i cant see a reason for them disabling it…
thanks for the useful information, but I was really wondering if MDK would support it out of the box.
BTW, I’d also love to see mdk running with gcc 4.0 since I’m told it has great optimization enhancements especially for c++ (apart from -fvisibility-hidden).
But I think it is definitely too late :/
gcc 4 is not stable.
However, it is included in the distribution, in the “contribs”, as well as gcc2.96, gcc3.3.
gcc 3.4.3 is the official compiler.
$ urpmq -y gcc4
gcc4.0
gcc4.0-c++
gcc4.0-cpp
gcc4.0-doc
gcc4.0-doc-pdf
$ urpmq -y gcc4
I think you meant urpmi -y gcc4
hey, haven’t tried that kdebluetooth yet, am gonna try that thanks hehe was too preoccupied with the terminal i guess.
Irrelevant. Even most geeks don’t purchase hardware based on linux specifications. Once linux grows up, we might see more register-level specs or hardware manufac. support, but until then you might as well be preaching to the BeOS crowd who is told that you have these 5 hardware items that will work with BeOS. Nobody cares about your silly “orthodox” components.
My first mandrake install was 9.1. I had some problems upgrading to 10.0 (only 128 MB RAM; OpenOffice, doesn´t work fine). When I bought more RAM (now, 384 MB), I tried again. No problems at all. Upgrade to 10.1 was almost perfect!
I usually update burning the new official-download-isos.
(Sorry for my limited english proficient)
It was hard to upgrade MDK 10.0 to 10.1 cause 10.0 used XFree but 10.1 uses XOrg packages and there was/is problem fith fonts. But 10.2 allso uses XOrg so no problem there. Actually it is so easy to upgrade from 10.1 to 10.2 beta. Go to this site http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/. It’s 10.2b is cooker in the list. Remove current package listings urpmi.removemedia -a and add new ones then urpmi –auto-select –auto –force 2 hours and viola
you have 10.2 cooker (beta)
>most likely it will either be enabled or compiled as a module (if possible).
>i cant see a reason for them disabling it…
It’s usually compiled as a module, but I think it’s labeled as experimental so inclusion in the standard packages is not certain. And it requires a little more than just compiling, some setup in the infrastructure is needed(fstab etc.)
Since I don’t have time to play with the beta right now, I hoped someone already running it would test:-)
hobgoblin wrote:
“and to mr. peev. you can allways correct the errors in the english files and send them to mandrake, or atleast point them out to the people that to the writeing. but given that both desktops have english as the primary language and then is translated over im wondering about markeing your comment as a flame.”
I’m not flaming. That’s right, I can always correct their errors, but my choice is not to do so, because I have better use for my time at the moment. I have, however, informed Mandrake politely of the gripes I have. Also, while it is true that both desktops have English as the primary language, Mandrake is a French company, and I’ve seen many misspelt English words in the distro seem more French, than English.
Does it include Thunderbird ?? Since they switched from Mozilla to Mozilla-firefox, I presume that they should have included Thunderbird 🙂
Did like Mandrake 10.1, _on average_ found it to be the most stable, polished version yet, not suprising really…. and looking forward to 10.2, no doubt will receive excellent reviews as ever – we’ll see, as they say
As I suspected…you have to upgrade to latest kdebluetooth, K700 file transfer problem is known (and fixed)
I think you meant urpmi -y gcc4
No, urpmq is a query. I checked if these packages were available, I did not install them. urpmi is used to install then.
“Thats what I did… XP -> SP1 -> SP2 Worked like a charm…
Never done a 95 -> 98 -> XP though – but I imagine that 10.1 -> 10.2 would be like a service pack. Otherwose they should probably be a 10.1 -> 11.0 ?”
Actually Windows 2000 == Windows NT 5.0, Windows XP == Windows NT 5.1
“no it doesnt. try upgrading between versions thru windows update”
Thats what I did… XP -> SP1 -> SP2 Worked like a charm…
Never done a 95 -> 98 -> XP though – but I imagine that 10.1 -> 10.2 would be like a service pack. Otherwose they should probably be a 10.1 -> 11.0 ?
Nope –
urpmi between Linux versions would be comparible to an update from win 98 thru to win me or win 98 thru to win xp
in fact a really old mandrake like say 6 can be urpmi upgraded to 10.1 with just a urpmi –auto-select
windows users just WISH they had something like that !!!!
//windows users just WISH they had something like that !!!! //
Not really, since most Windows users can afford US $99 for the CD-based upgrade to XP. It’s really not that expensive for many folks. It should be assumed that investment in PCs isn’t a one-time expense, either with hardware or software.
Will 10.2B1 now work with X800 ATI Graphiccards?
Was greatest pain in MDK 10.1. Nice dialog for dual screen set up but unusable with X800 cards
There’s no space. People complain that Mandrake is ‘bloated’ already because it’s three CDs; if they shipped two extra CDs full of devel packages it’d be worse. The devel packages are on the mirrors, just set up an urpmi source.
The point isn’t expense but convenience; when it works, an urpmi-based update is much more convenient than running through the CD install. Actually, the actual *urpmi* part of going from 10.1 to current Cooker should work pretty well, nothing that’s changed between the two should throw urpmi any curveballs (unlike the 10.0 -> 10.1 changes, like devfs -> udev in particular). It’s just the quality of the resulting system that causes me not to recommend it to everyone
. Bluetooth from PC to phone works great for me with no tweaking (just install the relevant packages, either start the services manually or reboot, then use the GNOME or KDE file send tools), but I can’t get phone to PC working. It seems to be some kind of bug in the MDK config which means it’s not identifying the computer as *capable* of receiving files, but I can’t track it down close enough to fix it. Argh. Everything else works nice though, including Bluemote ( http://www.geocities.com/saravkrish/progs/bluemote/ ) – lovely little app, might have to get it packaged soon.
BTW, the stock kernel might be patched with Reiser 4 before release. It’s hard to say, to be honest, as Mandrake’s new kernel maintainer (Arnaud Patard) appears to be competent but spectacularly uncommunicative, so it’s hard to know what changes are planned to main kernel before release. Install the contrib kernel-multimedia is easy, though, and it’s an excellent kernel with a lot of useful improvements on the main kernel.
No english man pages.
Great Job guys!!!
Majority of users are english speaking and
no man pages for this language…
Oh well…
It’s just an installer bug, the package is there, go ahead and install it. man-pages-en or something like that.
There’s no space. People complain that Mandrake is ‘bloated’ already because it’s three CDs
I downloaded the DVD version.
he devel packages are on the mirrors, just set up an urpmi source.
Yes, I know, but it isn’t help if the internet connection of the destination machine is very slow.
But it is not the biggest problem. I have too many hardware problems with 10.1 (screen glitches after I close the X (NVidia GF FX card), the init 0 can’t shut down my machine (P4 + intel based motherboard, any other linux /Fedora Core3, SuSE 9.1/ can do it), the automount produce strange effect if I change the CD/DVD media while the shell current directory on the media subdirectory. And the OS seems slower then FC3 or Suse9.1, but it is only a subjective opinion.
the downloadable DVD is just the CD images combined together. making a whole new set would be too much additional work – all this release stuff is done by one guy, Warly, he’s a busy bunny.
screen glitches i cant comment on, are you useing the official nvidia drivers?
the shutdown thing, do a dmsg dump and look for anything related to acpi. i know that i have to force acpi on my box to have it shut down proper (found out by reading a message in dmsg if all places
)
and about supermount, if your in the dir that acts as the mountpoint for the removeable drive or any sub-dir of that then supermount should lock the cd/dvd tray so you cant eject the disk. if it does not do so, report a bug.
screen glitches i cant comment on, are you useing the official nvidia drivers?
Yes. The 3D acceleration is work without any problem.
the shutdown thing, do a dmsg dump and look for anything related to acpi. i know that i have to force acpi on my box to have it shut down proper (found out by reading a message in dmsg if all places
)
Now I replaced the MDK10.1 with Fedora Core 3 and I’am relative happy with this distro…
and about supermount, if your in the dir that acts as the mountpoint for the removeable drive or any sub-dir of that then supermount should lock the cd/dvd tray so you cant eject the disk.
It is doesn’t locked for me, but if I changed the media the filenames replaced with many “?” characters. I tired to change back the media, manual mount/umount, etc, but this little tricks can’t repair the system, only the reboot.