From our friends at DistroWatch: Your last chance to test things out and report bugs — if you miss it, you have no right to complain that some things don’t work in Mandrake 9.0! Links to the three ISO images: CD 1 (695MB), CD 2 (700MB), CD 3 (549MB) or try a more convenient mirror. Report bugs on the cooker mailing list. Also don’t forget this excellent offer to all beta testers: Mandrake 9.0 DVD (as soon as it’s available) + Mandrake cap for US$55! Great value compared to regular pricing — click here if you’d like to take advantage of the offer coupled with free shipping within EU, USA and Canada and 50% off shipping cost for the rest of the world. Things just don’t get much better that this, do they? Mandrake Linux 9.0 final should be out in about two-week’s time.
Mandrake 9.0 First Release Candidate Available
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Is it going to be The lll world war?
(betwen Red Hat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.0)
might as well throw in lycoris as another contender for the desktop os. gonna be a good fall to play with linux i suppose.
isn’t competition grand?
Including this Mandrake 9 RC, there were already 5 releases all together with the new generation (Mandrake 9 beta 1-4, RC1). My only worry is the ABI transistion from that of gcc 2.96 to 3.2. Hopefully the packages available on CD will free me from re-compiling a lot.
SuSE 8.1 is also expected out this fall. I *think* I read somewhere to expect maybe an October release. But from following the Red Hat and Mandrake lists, it’s looking like Red Hat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.0 might come out within a day or so of each other.
I just switched from the latest Null (Red Hat) beta to Mandrake’s RC1. Both are very sweet. At this point however, Red Hat is certainly ahead in looks. The font rendering in Null is beautiful. It looks better on my laptop by default than XP does. With a little tweaking (Mandrake ALWAYS take a little tweaking
Mandrake also renders beautifully.
And now Red Hat has introduced a whole list of GUI config tools, some of which even surpass Mandrake’s! It’s definitely going to be interesting. Red Hat even has a GUI package manager now, but still nothing that comes close to RPMDrake and URPMI. You can’t really count UP2Date since it’s a for-pay service. Sure, you can use it withOUT paying, but you get shoved to the bottom of the bandwidth ladder and that “We’re sorry, the server is currently busy” serving our paying customers thing gets a bit old. But the servers being busy is a GOOD thing, since it means Red Hat DOES have a lot of paying customers. =) I just certainly wouldn’t join to use a beta (otherwise, I don’t use RH) when I might decide to bail before the final version.
Judging from what I see of Mandrake’s release candidate, I think it’s safe to say Mandrake is going to hold their own …
Anonymous: Is it going to be The lll world war?
(betwen Red Hat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.0)
I don’t know, RH 9.0 would be released early next year. As soon it is release, I’m buying a pack (heck, i’m gonna preorder) and kick Mandrake out of my system. Then maybe I would also install Gentoo for good measure. :-).
Rob: I just switched from the latest Null (Red Hat) beta to Mandrake’s RC1. Both are very sweet. At this point however, Red Hat is certainly ahead in looks. The font rendering in Null is beautiful. It looks better on my laptop by default than XP does. With a little tweaking (Mandrake ALWAYS take a little tweaking
Mandrake also renders beautifully.
Yeah, it looks so smooth, and finally, I can read *long* books and tutorials without getting an headache. Plus, you forgot the consitentcy between GTK+ and Qt apps, both fonts look great, and the buttons/menus/etc. look great. Heck, they even made a great looking XMMS skin.
But since they are pushing OpenOffice.org and Mozilla, they should make themes (or frontend for OOo) to make it look consistent with the OS. the fonts in OOo is ugly and small, and totally rugged.
Rob: I just certainly wouldn’t join to use a beta (otherwise, I don’t use RH) when I might decide to bail before the final version.
Yeah, I’m buying the pack when RH is released, which comes with a one year subscription of RHN. Null got a lot of bugs for me to use it for my main machine, but I’m quite certain the final version would be ready.
“the fonts in OOo is ugly and small, and totally rugged.”
They arn’t so bad if you have AA working but they do tend to smush together at smaller sizes.
The Xandros release date is supposedly September 30.
I’m using beta4 now, and KDE seems kind of slugish (compared to running KDE 3 in Mandrake 8.2). Heres to hopeing that get that fixed by the final version.
I love KDE, but GNOME is looking better and better. Espcially with what RedHat did to it for NULL. It would be nice to see a company take KDE under their wing and focus on it the way RedHat focuses on GNOME.
After successfully installing and configuring Gentoo 1.2, all the others seem like so much fluff. Gentoo gives you only what you want, and usually does it right the first time. The Portage system is a godsend to the linux world (thank you BSD/debian folks). I’d try this distro if you’re tired of the others.
Does anyone else have a problem with Cooker mailing list? I don’t get any messages from it.
Every beta release is announced as a headline. Besides the fact it’s a distribution and not an operating system, these trivial releases really just aren’t significant. I mean who has the time to download, rip, and install all these versions. It’s been something like 5 in the past 5 weeks.
Pffff.
even on broadband, having a fast burner, and a spare HDD?
nope, i don’t go all out for every new update to each distro, i may try the next rh final, mdk9 final, and lycoris if it adds kde3.
i’m somewhat bored with linux anything, tinkered too long to get it to do the typical home user functions.
there’s been a bigger fuss on the new rh betas anyways. probably because of their new philosophy. and again, i don’t care. my heart doesn’t skip a beat over it.
It seems the most immediate solution to your problem is twofold:
1) skip over the beta release announcements
2) don’t download them
Everyone’s a winner.
I’m bored too with this “5 release in 5 weeks” distros started to do.
I said that here some time ago but people just criticised saying that KDE3 and the new gcc?.? justified it very much.
My credit for Linux is really low these days.
Maybe I will buy FreeBSD 5 official CDs (November/December) and forget about Linux.
> Maybe I will buy FreeBSD 5 official CDs >(November/December) and forget about Linux.
I’am (and I think I speak in this for most OSNews readers) really happy to hear of your plans and about how you like Linux. Thank you very much for tellung us this. You know, your opinion really matters to us all and is more than important.
BTW, your arguments are just stunning!
“BTW,”Your arguments are just stunning!”
I din’t knew I had expressed any arguments …
Next time just ignore my opinion.
I’ll do the same with yours.
Puff.
I tried beta 1 and beta 3 and it was ok, but then I tried Libranet 2.7 beta 2 and this is very nice distro, so meanwhile I’m staying with Libranet.
Here is an idea. Don’t read the news item if you do not like it. It really is pretty simple. I know this may be hard to believe, but OSNews is not here just for you.
-G
OS News has been a worthwhile read for the past year for me and I’m grateful to Eugenia and the crew for their efforts.
However if I wanted to track the every release candidate of linux distributions (notably NOT operating systems) then I really would read distrowatch.com daily.
What’s it gonna be next? “Exclusive! Mandrake fixes bug 1992256!” Uh… it’s just not newsworthy. Community feedback, sorry!
Don’t read the news item if you do not like it. It really is pretty simple. I know this may be hard to believe, but OSNews is not here just for you.
I knew that already, thanks.
Why shouldn’t I read a particular news if I don’t like what is on it ?
Of course, OSNews is for everybody who likes to read it, including me and all others who don’t agree with the content of a particular subject.
(as in: I wasn’t alone here on that opinion but that Anonymous coward attacked only me, does it ring a bell ?)
I like that fact that OSNews lets you know when knew betas are released. I just check OSNews for links and summaries of all new thigs in the OS World. Why would you want to have to go to every site to find out.
(as in: I wasn’t alone here on that opinion but that Anonymous coward attacked only me, does it ring a bell ?)
Please don’t get personal he was hardly ‘attacking’ you. You have managed to attack anonymous however.
I agree OSNews let us know that new betas of Linux distros have been made available; just as much as new betas of BeOS, Cosmos, etc.
What I don’t agree is that a new mdk, RH, betas is launched almost every week, it’s booring and pathetic and will not be a positive remark to make to those distros. That’s all.
Clear ?
Please don’t get personal he was hardly ‘attacking’ you. You have managed to attack anonymous however.
Sorry, but I feel attacked when somebody says that my opinion is as irrelevant as no opinion at all. If you don’t that’s up to you. I respect the opinion of everyone else and I expect that my comments be respected too or otherwise simply left over. I don’t hide my comments behind an Anonymous ID.
I get personal when I intend to and only when someone is directing bullsh?t to me. Here it’s.
>>Thank you very much for tellung us this. You know, your opinion really matters to us all and is more than important.<<
(That’s personal enough for me.
And the fact that it’s not the first time (again, as in: a repetitive and sad attitude from a person hidding behind an Anonymous ID) really pisses me off.
I read the comments again. You are right their comments were a little aggressive and condescending.
I personally do not mind once a week announcements on this site when a new RH or MDK beta has been released. I assume that they will stop when the next versions are released at least until the next upgrade cycle.
I think that Linux on the desktop is really starting to get peoples attention and RH is making a big move to improve Linux on the Desktop, Mandrake has been in my opinion the best Desktop distro for a while now. Maybe it is for these reasons that they have been getting attention.
Andrew:
My experience is MDK always need some tweak while RedHat doesn’t need much.
I use SuSE Professional but wouldn’t recomend it for a beginer; and it has a DVD included on Professional.
If Mandrake 9 turns out to be a good (read “stable”) release I will buy the DVD version for sure (let’s see if all this beta testing non-sense pays off).
On desktop side I think Linux is just too annoying for an average user, even if it’s getting closer for day-to-day use; but it will stay like that for too long.
RedHat might launch an unprecedent desktop version but I think it will be only a “Mandrake clone” 😉
(RedHat is changing the icons and “dumbbing down” KDE3 but Mandrake already has unified icons on previous versons for a Mandrakised environment, with the options of using KDE icons on the kde control panel! — We’ll see).
chicobaud:
I think that Linux has a chance on the desktop in the workplace. My reasons are as follows.
1. Preinstalled software. No need for users to worry about libraries etc.
2. IT controls versioning and updates are made via network. Linux / Unix is great for this.
3. Cost – saves corporations a considerable amount, home users do not have much reason to change, but business has a real incentive. New MS licensing adds fuel to this fire.
4. The basic web/email/calendar and task management apps are very useable. Office applications are perfect for most users.
Thats my 2 cents, we’ll see.
Preinstalled software. No need for users to worry about libraries etc.
Dependencies are still a big problem, unless everything has static libs.
—
But you are right, Microsoft licensing is getting worst and worst for corporations.
That’s the market RedHat (and maybe United Linux) is aiming at. But there’s no real functional alternative to Windows desktop yet (MacOS isn’t a corporate option for $$ many reasons).
If a Corporation changes all their desktop to Linux/KDE their employes will hit the big learning curve of the desktop environment of Linux unless they have IT people to spare to back them up on config and day-to-day usage problems. We are talking about secretaries, accounting staff (and software), front-door receptionists, etc. It would be a chaos for at least a mounth.
Mangement would prefer to pay Microsoft licensing just to be on the safe side.
Do not forget that Microsoft has a good (or bad
Marketing departement, if they change licensing they are backed up by marketing studies which say that MS can rise the licensing price as much as they want, that’s their bussiness and the hard realitty.
Governement could to be another place for Linux; but unless you have the chinese discipline to open the employes’s mind to adapt to new situations there’s nothing you can do against Microsoft licensing on desktop and applications; this rocks on desktops. On western countries it’ll take too long; not that people are stupid but they sure are dorment and narrowed towards change.
Hush. Stop. We don’t care. STOP.
Speak for your self.
“Stop. We don’t care. STOP.”
This is the favourite sentence of the Linux Comunity, what’s new ?
You only really care about yourselves and your ego.
RedHat might launch an unprecedent desktop version but I think it will be only a “Mandrake clone” 😉
I have used both, not the same, I assure you. The difference
– Previously Mandrake had ugly icons with corporate colours. Now they have a little bit colourful icons that are 2D that seem to be done in a week or so because of Null.
– Mandrake is not integrated into any enviroment. It has two control centers, one for KDE/GNOME/whatever window manager you use, and another for Mandrake. (Believe me, for the new user, this is confusing). Not so for Red Hat.
– Red Hat had modified Qt to use Xft2. Yeah, smoother looking fonts, especially if you are using an LCD monitor. Plus, I notice less resources used that in Qfonts Qt in Mandrake.
– By default, Red Hat doesn’t install 5 text editors, 4 terminals, etc. It chooses the best of the breed and install it.
Personally, i have never seen any huge improvement between two releases from Red Hat or any other distro company for all that matters this huge. It is not there, a lot of things aren’t there (like no GUI PPPoE configs 🙂
And to the rest: Leave chicobaud alone. You guys aren’t mods here. Don’t agree with his opinion? Big deal. Everybody here in one form or another at least once disagreed with another. Live with it, we are Homo sapiens…. at least the last I checked.