MandrakeSoft released Linux Mandrake 9.0 about three weeks ago. How does this version compares to the also recent SuSE and Red Hat releases? MandrakeSoft sent us the Download Edition over for a review and here is what we think about it.
NOTE: MandrakeSoft had access to this article before publication (something that I do not normally do, but this time was at least the… moral thing to do) and they have confirmed or reproduced several of the bugs I am mentioning here.
Installation
Installation is very similar to what it used to be, not much has changed since the last time I tried version 8.0 last year and 9.0-Cooker last summer. It is pretty easy to install Mandrake, but I encountered problems (I used the expert mode, as Mandrake is installed on a PC with 8 more operating systems and I needed flexibility). Except that the actual UI in some of the installation modules is not great (e.g. the terribly un-intuitive partitioning tool, dated layout and UI), I had three main problems.
When the installation started it asked me what mouse I have, and it had automatically picked up the PS/2 model. But it did not pick up the wheel mouse option, because all my mice have a wheel. Clicking in the right option, it would make my mouse jumping like crazy all over the screen making the installation impossible to continue. I don’t see the point of providing such a mouse panel in the installation if Mandrake and Red Hat (yes, Red Hat has the same problem in their Gnome2 admin mouse panel, I tried 3 different mice, all have the same effect) and all the other distros are not able to fix the damned re-initialization code of the mice on the fly. I tried with three of my PS/2 mice I had around: 1 Logitech Cordless mouseman optical, a no-name optical and a normal Keytronic. Same effect.
(UPDATE: Please don’t send me emails that this can be tweaked afterwards. I very well know about how to allow wheel operations on my mice, back in the day I used to do it by directly editing my XF86Config file. This was not the point of my paragraph about the mice. The point is that the driver does something *unexpected* for the user, and from the usability point of view, is just not right.)
The second problem was that the installation wouldn’t tell me that the XFS option does not support booting. While I know that an XFS (root) / partition would require a /boot in ext2/3, most people don’t know this. MandrakeSoft replied that there should have been some warning messages, but I saw none. Even if they were there, the fact that they went completely unnoticed, should say something to their UI designer.
(UPDATE: Please note that I needed to put LILO on hdc4 and not on MBR, as I don’t want my BeOS bootman bootmanger to get overwritten by LILO. Apparently, XFS can boot a Linux only the bootmanager is installed on the MBR, some OSNews readers replied.)
But this is just a small detail, as I find the whole partitioning application terrible GUI-wise. I have talked about it here.
At the end of the installation, the Installer would ask me if I want to download some available patches. I said “yes” and it tried to contact some FTP site to download the updates. The update never took place because the operation timed out about 5 minutes later. Needless to say, I was not impressed.
The rest of the installation went well though, Mandrake successfully found and supported all my hardware (except later I found out that my 2-years old digital camera is not supported). One thing I like in the Mandrake installer is that you can configure your card to support 3D (as long there is DRI support for it).
The First Time Booting
Linux Mandrake 9 features a graphical LILO screen and it had successfully placed as default an SMP kernel for my dual Celeron 533 Mhz. Loading the OS takes a while, because Mandrake is loading by default a number of things (that I don’t necessarily need). You can always remove these startup entries from the Mandrake Control Center.
Something that I find annoying with this distribution is that authenticating is slow. Why the heck it takes a whole 3-4 seconds to authenticate my password in the command line (I don’t use any *DM), when loging in either as eugenia or as root? Mandrake Cooker also did the same. Mandrake 8.0 didn’t (on the same machine) and other distros I have here don’t do so either.
The Desktop
Mandrake uses KDE 3.0.3 as its default Desktop Environment, running on top of XFree86 4.2.1. Mandrake is using pretty much the default themes and colors of KDE 3.0.3, which looks dated and ugly at best. Even the default Gnome2 looks better than the default KDE. MandrakeSoft should realize that their two main competitors have made strides in making their desktops more delightful and nicer to the eye and the usability (while RH and SuSE are not even trying to compete to the desktop as straightful as MandrakeSoft is), while Mandrake is still the same old, same old. I had to change a lot of things to my desktop to make it look something that can moderately please me. The fact that you can change a lot of KDE’s aspects with some downloads is not the answer. Mandrake should have worked on the looks and the UI. I wonder if they do employ a UI designer, and if they do, if their developers actually listen to him/her.
MandrakeSoft replied to me that their customer research showed that businesses favor their default grey-ish UI, while home users customize everything on their own. Personally, I find hard to believe that businesses would not favor a better UI, while the home users won’t have to tweak everything after installation.
GNOME 2.0.2 is also installed and works well, ICEwm, BlackBox, Enlightenment and WindowMaker are also available. Unfortunately, WindowMaker is broken. It can’t find the file that includes its context desktop menu. After fixing a missing symlink in the /etc/ directory fixed WindowMaker too..
A number of other applications are broken on Mandrake 9. I found that a few apps just wouldn’t load (i.e. Everybuddy would segfault). Except these few apps, the rest of the applications do seem to work fine. In fact, I was happy from the overall stability of X and KDE.
The only thing MandrakeSoft has pretty much done in the desktop area is to re-arrange the Kmenu and add some Mandrake-specific options like this arcane “-> What to do?” menu. The idea of the “What to do” menu is good (similar to SuSE’s “work” menu), but the execution is absolutely poor (the option is “drowning” among other KDE menus and at the end of the day it just duplicates a bunch of options that are easier to find via the KMenu rather than the “-> What to do”).
Also, Mandrake has under the root menu an option called “Terminals”, which is a submenu where you can select from… 7 different terminals. Choice is good, but this is hardly a desktop-oriented design decision to have so many different terminals waiting for you to a root submenu.
Another potential problem is that the default Mandrake’s Kicker does not fit on a 800×600 screen, which is what most Internet users still use these days. KDE has the same problem, I asked for this to be fixed months ago, but it has yet to be considered by the KDE Project.
The Mandrake Control Center
First of all, why all the Mandrake utilities are written in GTK+ 1.x when the company ships KDE as the default DE? All their utilities look ugly and out of place on the default KDE environment. This Control Center is what mostly differentiates Mandrake from its competition and it should have received more care. The control center just doesn’t “blend” to the rest of the default Qt-based environment.
The control center includes tools for the booting process, monitor and graphics, TVCard, keyboard, mouse, printer and scanner. Also, Mandrake comes with a feature named “supermount” and you can define mount points for WebDAV, Samba, NFS and other local media (removable or not). I haven’t used most of the networking mount points as I don’t have any such need or facilities here to test them.
The “Network and Internet” center includes Networking setup wizard, proxy configuration and Internet Sharing. But the latter is as buggy and incomprehensible as most of the modules over there. Why the “Internet Sharing” utility never asked me to enter any CDs, but rather it said “installing – please wait” and it kept reading my empty DVD-drive? After killing the buggy module, I had to force umount on the DVD drive to free it from spinning itself to death.
The Security modules seem to work ok, and it is handy to find an easy to use Firewall application there.
MenuDrake seems to work without any easily visible bugs, and it allows you to edit the menus of KDE, Gnome, IceWM and Blackbox. However, updating the menu configuration (that is to delete or add a new item) can take up to 30-40 seconds. On Windows and BeOS this is instantenous. [MandrakeSoft says that it takes them only 4 seconds to do so, but it isn’t the case over here. And I got a fast IDE drive.]
Oh, wait, I take that back. I tried to add my /usr/bin/nano application to the KDE’s editors menu and I checked the “Open in a Terminal” option and nano just doesn’t load, neither any terminals are loading. The graphical apps I added worked fine, but this terminal-based one doesn’t.
I picked my timezone with the Mandrake’s tool, but KDE’s timezone doesn’t pick it up. Great integration. Not.
There is another option on the “System” panels called “Terminal”. I clicked it and it loads a full XTerm window. And then it removes the window manager from that xterm and 2 seconds later, it “embeds” it in the Control Center window. The way this is done, is just that: gross. An ugly hack, UI-wise and integration-wise.
The “Configure Users” module seems to work well.
My first attempt to use the Mandrake control Center ended in failure when the Font application tried to “leach” the fonts off my FAT32 partition. It obviously got confused because I have two Windows partitions, one FAT32 and one WinXP NTFS. Tried another approach (I used its “Advanced” button to specify from where to get the fonts exactly) and at last had my fonts installed on Mandrake. But the worst had yet to come.
Why, oh, why, does it take a full 1 to 2 minutes to load the following modules:
Graphics card detection, monitor, resolution, XServer configuration, RPMdrake (install/remove apps) and Mandrake Update. In fact, now that I am writing this, the Install Software module is also trying to read the empty DVD rom for available packages (never prompted me to put any CDs in the drive). It just feels that these modules are just frozen. They don’t even load a window to tell you that they are at least working on the background. The Software Sources Manager, is also whipping my poor empty DVD drive before it loads its small window after 3 minutes. The Installer for online updates also tried to read my empty DVD.
Two days later, after more than 20 emails back and forth with MandrakeSoft, we were able to find the problem about the CD-reading that resulted in many of the Drake utilities to take a long time to load. In fact, they found that this bug was submitted to their bug database by a number of other users. (Too bad that I was one of them, because I am among those who have to publish my experience online for people to read.)
After we fixed all these issues with the CD-reading, I was able to fully appreciate the Mandrake Control Center. It is not the best control center/panel in the world, but it does what most people will want it for. What I liked mostly is the fact that you can add sources to an app called “Sofrware Manager Sources” from other FTP, HTTP or internal network addresses and be able to download and automatically install additional software.
Other applications
Mandrake comes with quite a number of recent applications, OpenOffice.org (modified to look prettier), KOffice 1.2, a number of games (Frozen Bubble is so addictive – I’ve finished it :), Mozilla (much uglier and much slower because MandrakeSoft has enabled AA by default (not through XFT2 unfortunately)), PostgreSQL, mySQL, PHP, Apache, Gnumeric, Sketch and lots more. The choice is pretty good and it should be satisfying for most users.
If there are two good things to say about Mandrake 9 that would be its speed and stability. The choice of GCC 3.2 helps the overall speed of the system. I found Mandrake 9 to be faster than my Gentoo Linux 1.2 (which was specifically compiled for -march=i686 but with GCC 2.95.x).
Mandrake comes with kernel 2.4.19 and stability has been exceptional for me, for the most part. I generally have problems with X and KDE, but for the 1.5 weeks I am running Mandrake 9, I haven’t seen any major stability problems at all.
Conclusion
Mandrake 9 seems to be a bit out of focus. The OS itself has no clear focus of what it wants to operate as. A Server? Desktop? Workstation? All? No one really knows what the actual market of Mandrake is. The fact that is loading a lot of (useless for me) server stuff by default and also the fact that it tries to pinch itself as a desktop system at the same time, just doesn’t go well together.
Update: MandrakeSoft sent me the following:
“Our approach is very clear: although we know many “power” Linux users use Mandrake as a desktop machine (for replacing Windows), our target is clearly to provide a system that is a great choice to install Linux in enterprises.
For servers and desktops. Nowadays, when you install a server, you like it to be easy to configure graphically, you don’t want to learn all these configuration files. Mandrake is targeted to these people. Also, it’s very good to implement multiple desktop machines (workstations), with excellent networking capabilities. We want to provide the best Linux swiss-knife ever.”
So, Mandrake is trying to compete mostly at Red Hat’s and SuSE’s playground. However, Mandrake is regarded by most people as a desktop distribution for the home user, “my first Linux” kind of thing. The fact that the distribution includes so many games (with automatic support for 3D rendering), edutainment and a large number of multimedia apps, it really does not make it as clear as MandrakeSoft claims to be that they are aiming for the enterprise. To me, it mostly looks like MandrakeSoft wants to sell to the enterprise, but at the same time they seem to want to keep the community (and resulted free marketing) of the home users.
Overall, Mandrake 9.0 is an interesting distribution. But it is not the best out there, neither trouble-free. While Mandrake includes some GUI tools to help you with configuration, as a whole, I was more satisfied by the fresh offer and looks of Red Hat 8 and SuSE 8.1 than those of Mandrake 9.0. This is mostly because of Mandrake’s dated UI, problematic (for me) Control Center, while at times it just feels amateurish (e.g. when the control center’s modules are loading and you momentarily put another window on top of your module’s window, they don’t refresh their windows).
I truly hope that Mandrake 9.1 has all these issues fixed and bring a new, stronger Mandrake to compete with SuSE and Red Hat’s offerings. Mandrake has a strong community and some great developers behind it. I used Mandrake for years, on and off on this very machine, but for me, this hasn’t been the best release ever. In fact, not a lot have changed to Mandrake except the Control Center (which is nothing more but a “placeholder” for the GTK+ modules to “mount” under a common window. Most of these GTK+ modules exist from previous versions of Mandrake).
Times are changing, and Mandrake hasn’t changed much. Having an installer than is better than Slackware’s doesn’t automatically make you the killer distribution anymore. Heck, having a Control Center doesn’t make you the best either these days. It is the overall experience you get when you put all the pieces together. And this is what Mandrake 9.0 lacks today.
Installation: 7/10
Hardware Support: 8/10
Ease of use: 8/10
Features: 7/10
Credibility: 6/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 8/10 (UI responsiveness, latency, throughput)
Overall: 7.3 / 10
My machine: Celeron 500 (Mendocino) on Chaintech 6BTM (440BX), 320 MB RAM, 2 HDD (20 GB and 3.2 GB), GeForce 2 GTS, SB Live Value, monitor: LG Flatron 17 inches.
Total installation time: 39 mins.
I chose KDE just because I like it (admit that choice of DE is pure matter of personal taste, hardware limitations being the second).
Mozilla and Galeon are UNBELIEVABLY slow, take 50-70 secs to start, removed them and stick with Konqueror.
It is overall usable (I am talking about graphical environment), but the abundant choice of similar-purposed apps can be confusing for average user. I mean eg there are more than five text processors to choose from – you tell me is it good or not?
To some of OSNews posters: can you guys accept the fact that Eugenia expresse HER opinion which of course will differ from what some of you tend to think/believe in? The only thing more stupid than UI wars is the flamefest regarding mice/trackballs usability.
Keep it up, Eugenia.
> your obviously nonstandard configuration.
So ? Let’s see. You are going to be so corrupted by obviously being a
Mandrake-Fan, that you prefer implying, that an OS only has to support
standard-configurations than accepting the critics it may get by power-users ?
The big problem with Mandrake is, that as soon it comes out, a lot of “Heh,
look I run LINUX now!” folks publish Mandrake reviews on different sites.
Mandrake-Linux has been the only Linux I used ever. I use it since version 7.2
and I even bought the Power-Packs 8.0 and 8.1. I got myself the complete
Mandrake-ftp stuff after it became clear, that they did some big hazard at
packaging the distro, leaving off stuff like ‘hdparm’ from the PowerPack, while
including it in the download edition. They tried to cover that as ‘we considered
this in order to have enough place on the CDs’. Sorry, but I won’t pay that much
money and then miss hdparm. No, download is not an option for the purchaser of a
boxed solution.
But let’s see. Each time Mandrake gets reviewed the review is like: Oh, it
worked fine, cool, it detected my hardware. Well…and if someone has more
critics it is ‘due to non standard configs’ and becuase he wanted to ‘install
too much software’. Let’s face it: Power users have a higher demand, they use
more stuff, find more bugs.
Here is my road of pain with Mandrake:
Installed 7.2 – Soundcard was not supported, in contrary to their information on
the WWW page. But I got 8.0 a few weeks later… Tried to do an update over 7.2.
Installation failed.
Soundcard now would play sound, heavily distorted. It was a pain in the ass. It
was due to lacking support in kernel, still, card was being named as fully
supported. A 3/4 year without sound… Overall 7.2 and 8.0 were okay.
Then 8.1 ! Wholy shit ! Tried update. Same errors as with 7.2->8.0. Broken RPMs.
I installed it from scratch. Chose LDAP as AUTH. With server=localhost. LDAP
servers got NOT installed !!!!! Can you believe this ?! I could not login for
23 hours because I did not even dare to dream about such a mistake.
Several servers needed minutes to come up druing boot. So boot took
approx. 10 minutes each time. X would not start. “respawning too fast”.
Noone, even not on #Mandrake would be able to help me. Finally ‘dams’
(an employee) had a good idea. I disabled all security stuff (well, one needs
to know how to do this at first).I installed LDAP servers. But – no avail. So I
chose /etc/passwd. Now, if I had my NIC up each login would take minutes. Same
for auth at server start. If the NIC was down, all fine. If I was online ppp0
same problems. I tried so many things. Fresh install, GetHostByName() bug
hunting, installed different DNS. No luck ! I was wihtout LAN for 6 months.
I could be without in my case but still…..this sucks. I tried registering at
their bug-database, at Mandrake-Expert, my account got accepted but never
activated, for several times I tried.
Then I got 8.2 I wanted to install it. It would not at all ! I have two HDD. One
has a corrupt FAT32 in it and several Linux partitions, of which one is a
corrupt /usr (ReiserFS!), plus a BeOS and a QNX partition.
It would not write the parition table for the empty 2nd HDD. But I needed to do some
tricks with PartMagic in oderer to have the installer _not_ loop in an error-dialog,
that I could not step out.
Wow, I am tired, do not want to write more. The only reason I stay with Mandrake
is for the many RPMs I get on the Internet. This is really the only reason.
I do not want to register at RedHat. I wanted to join the Mandrake-Club, but the
company is too worthless for me, Deno, their Forum-Webmaster too arrogant and
nosey for being an official voice of a company.
> negative about are personal opinions and shouldn’t enter into a review. The
Yes, personal stuff indeed belongs into a review. However, it should not be
based on them. And the review was not being _based_ on them.
> fact that you, personaly, don’t care for Mandrakes choice of theme shouldn’t
> enter into this review unless you found that you were unable to change it. Your
Why not ? Like it or don’t. That is what a review is about. Criticism is often
subjectiv.
> blasting Mandrakes configuration modules is pretty peculiar as Mandrakes tools
> all start with Drak* and the tool your using is linuxconfig. Maybe you should do
> a review of linuxconfig instead of Mandrake as that’s what seems ore important
So what ? If the DrakTools are buggy for her, why wait for Mandrake 9.1 ?
> I guess anyone who chooses expert intall mode needs to be an expert, which
> obviously your not. You like how I keep using the word obviously? I’m doing it
She *HAD* to choose it, due to too little options for the User-mode. I have the
same problem here.
> lilo, or that said expert is too selfabsorbed to read the instructions at the
> bottom of the mouseconfig page.I really think asking any OS to contend with 8
I agree. People who install by “click-through” do not deserve better. The
instructions NEED to be read, this is why they are there. Don’t read the EULA,
though ;-))
> operating systems being intalled on a machine is a little much, maybe it’s time
> to invest in a test machine that has room room for the OS your installing. How
> can any OS compete fairly when it has to make concessions for 7 others. Your
> review is faulty, biased, skewed and plain wrong. Oh and whats with bashing
> slackwares installer, it’s my favorite of all of them, fast and efficient. /dTd
No, the review is _NOT_ plain wrong at all. YOUR assumptions to a review are
plain wrong. Why not have an OS install on a HDD with that many systems ? I have
5 OS installed on my Workstation (addmittedly one has a seperate HDD), that I use
daily. I do not have installed them because I am a ‘reviewer’ but because I need
three of them daily and two of them are for my personal enyojment to have some fun.
(Windows, Mandrake-Linux, AmigaOS (Amithlon), BeOS and QNX)
I wanted to add to the previous post:
The Mandrake Menu system is a nice idea, badly impleneted.
Whenever I want to arrange the menus as *I* want them it won’t
stay like this.
Whenever I install stuff as root it won’t go to my users menus.
So I use roots menu for all users (well, it’s me (root) and me (jon))
However, as soon I change a slight point in jon’s menu all (!)
is jons menu and roots menu is a seperate menu.
Hate it.
I also hated, that some of the Mdk-Wizards would not work
after I replaced the Kaffe Java with IBM’s. Which was the
only way to get Java really work.
Mandrake is a loud company not living up to their standards.
As a customer of two boxed and a 2CD special offer set I was
disappointed by their customer support. Howeverm they seem to
help out fine any ‘downloader’ of their distro.
That customer support is bad has been confirmed to me by my local
Linux reseller, maybe the most cabable computer-shop in this city
(its big, its the capitol ;-))
I have been an avid Red Hat user and have also used Debian a lot recently including Debian 3 rev0 release. But I was bowled over by Mandrake 9.0. The ISO images were downloaded with considerable ease thanks to my DSL connection and I burned them easily on 700 MB CDs. The install on my Compaq Presario laptop was a breeze.
Now for the real news : even my wife who is an avid Windoze XP fan, is now switching over to Mandrake Linux as she likes the awesome interface. This was using Gnome 2.
I do a lot kernel mode work so don’t really bother about the distro. But mdk 9.0 is AWESOME guys. I think it is the most sophisticated linux distro I have seen to date, as goes the ease of use, the attractive look and the applications.(using ISO images 1 & 2).
Generally, I think your reviews are insightful and interesting. However, I think you should consider taking steps towards improving the professionalism of your articles. In particular, poor spelling is often perceived as an indication of laziness, apathy or ignorance (or some unfortunate combination thereof). It is especially difficult to overlook when you could easily leverage the many spell-checkers and dictionaries available to the modern computer user.
Also, it is rather disingenuous to respond to criticism of your spelling with “I DON’T care”. You should care; you are selling advertising, and a sense of professional responsibility would dictate that you serve your clients as best you can. Not to mention that if Mandrake or RedHat responded to YOUR complaints about their products with “We DON’T care”, you would rake them over the coals!
Anyway, keep up the good work, and strive for excellent work!
>poor spelling is often perceived as an indication of laziness, apathy or ignorance
I already fixed 4 spelling mistakes I found earlier. I can’t find any more, and it is late, I am tired, and to be honest, I _really_ don’t care about spelling and grammar. What matters is the MEAT of the issue. Not the candies.
— posted by Anonymous —-
Nope… Why the earth, would Mandrake include the bug apps in their product? Mandrake is supposed to choice the stable apps to be part of their product. Also, if they can fix then do it. The users will call/email to the Mandrake’s support ticket area for this problem. Therefore, it’s Mandrake’s fault to include the bug apps. I suggest you to re-read what’s Mandrake’s goal, which they still haven’t meet this goal yet.
—————————–
If Mandrake thorougly tested each and every app that came with their distro, it would take them years to get every release out the door, and would also impact the release quality negatively. The linuxconf issue is a small cosmetic bug, and does not affect the functionality at all. Besides, Linuxconf is not a part of the default install and is on the CDs for people who want to use it for some obscure reason. Fixing non-critical bugs like this is very low priority, considering that they have a myriad of other issues to resolve (such as the same supermount problems). You should try subscribing to the mailing list sometime and seeing how difficult it is to make everything work well.
Also, I will bet money that I can find about several similar bugs in the software bundled with Redhat or Suse. I doubt that they do any more checking than mandrake does. But then, Mandrake is a much smaller operation compared to redhat or suse and actually makes money instead of flushing it down the toilet.
>If Mandrake thorougly tested each and every app that came with their distro
You do not understand. THIS is their added value. To make sure that everything works fine on the packages they include. This _is_ the job of the packager/OS.
>Also, I will bet money that I can find about several similar bugs in the software bundled with Redhat or Suse.
Who said that they do any better? They probably don’t. I did find problems with SuSE as well. I couldn’t load nethack for example.
But the fact that neither RH and SuSE don’t do it perfectly either, is not to say that someone shouldn’t do testing. From the moment they include these apps on their OS, it *becomes* their responsibility. If they find bugs, their devs should track down their problems and send over the diffs to the developer and include the fixed version on their OS. _That’s_ how it should work. And if it is way too much work, they should consider that do not include 3 or 7 CDs full of software. Less is better. Just do it right. According on the resources of each company.
Igor,
Just like I said to re-read about Mandrake’s main goal? If you re-read and our answers/points are already covered, which you have failed to understand.
Eugenia: First of all, why all the Mandrake utilities are written in GTK+ 1.x when the company ships KDE as the default DE?
IIRC, it is in GTK+ 2. But anyway, it is so because there isn’t any QT bindings for Perl.
jetexas: More importantly, is there something any Linux distro does that Windows does *not*?
Well, if you want to have something you can brag about, you can recompile your entire OS…..
Anonymous: * doesn’t use Mandrake’s default background
* use a mix of Mandrake’s icons and Crystal icons. This is ugly and doesn’t show the real desktop
Oh right, you aren’t suppose to theme the OS, even though that was one of the features it claimed to have… (Besides, Eugenia’s desktop looks a thousand times better than Mandrake’s default).
Anonymous: * show linuxconf which is not installed by default and says that the stupid Linuxconf window is a Mandrake bug. This untrue. It is a Linuxconf bug.
I never tried Linuxconf on Mandrake 9.0 yet, but it was problem free on Red Hat Linux 8.0. Same compiler, almost same kernel. Mandrake bug? Yeah.
Taras Glek: Well mdk has a weak & somewhat buggy apt-get like thing called urpmi. But i preffer mdk cos it was my first distro that got me hooked
..and after 3 years of defiance in debian/gentoo..i’m back to mdk9 
He/she isn’t comparing on that part. He/she says he couldn’t install the distro because of the size, therefore picked Red Hat and was happy ever since.
Anonymous: I can tell you what Linxu doesn’t do. It doesn’t require that you submit a cryptic cd key, it doesn’t require you to register the machine with the company from where it came. It doesn’t lock you into on company’s vision of standards.
Most Windows XP users would have never seen the Activation thing, it is done by the OEM. However, it is actually quite easy and fast with a Internet connection, while a hard if you do it by telephone (it is a 50 digit number).
Registering is optional, and since when Linux doesn’t lock you into the community’s vision of standards?
Anonymous: Once again, they allowing the individual to make the choice instead of some marketing rep. at the corporate office.
Okay, AdminA wants to move the Windows installation to Linux. He chooses Mandrake. He gets 5 CDs with software he has no idea what they are about. To make matters worse, there is no easy way to install them, nor are most of the software decriptively named (ask you non-Linux using mum what’s Everybuddy).
Eugenia: It is my design decision to not support threading. I wanted to add it, and lots of people emailed me asking me to NOT to. So, I will leave it as is.
I actually much prefer threading. However, I notice people agianst threading don’t like its complexity. Unfortunately, with what we have now, and the amount of post we have, threading would be a better choice.
When I first came, threading would sound insane, but as of now, with the amount of hits and posts it gets, threading would be a good idea. Plus, a database for registaring users (would be much much better).
Eugenia: Our only server (serving as a gateway) here is a lowly AMD K6 running FreeBSD.
Which explains a lot of problems……..
Jules Verne: The laptop came with Windows XP, which I was glad to get rid of; it might be pretty, but it won’t let me upgrade my hardware without being branded a software pirate and having to plead with Bill Gates minions
Actually no. I haven’t seen one laptop that is able to do enough upgrades so that you would need to do the Activation again. Gawd, talk about stupid customers. Unless you change your CPU (unlikely), motherboard (very unlikely), hard disk and any other component of your choice, you get to speak with Gates’ minions.
—
Can’t… read…. further…..
Nice review, BTW
>> Eugenia: Our only server (serving as a gateway) here is a lowly AMD K6 running FreeBSD.
>Which explains a lot of problems……..
What problems? We never had any problems with our server… Ah… you are being sarcastic… hehe… 😉
I Switched from RedHat to Mandrake9 because to me RedHat8 was very dissapointing.
I never knew a distro could be so cool as Mandrake 9 is.
Keep up the good work Mandrake.
I think Redhat has lost contact with the average linux-user, Mandrake has not.
First off in order to dual boot you have to use an expert install, period. Otherwise Mandrake (along with some other distro’s I’ve tried) will hose windows. That doesn’t make you want to use an os a lot, having it wipe your system clean. In some ways its worse then windows (if I have linux installed on a second partition windows won’t see it, it’ll just slide into the first partition).
Mandrake did some things better then rh8 (at least for me). Redhat used grub, even though I specifically chose lilo (I don’t care which one is technologically better, I know lilo a little and it works fine on my 98se, 2kpro, linux machine). Redhat defaulted to gnome, thats fine, but I couldn’t find a way to change the default to kde (I switch between them along with all the window managers a lot). Normally theres a box on the login where you can select which de (or wm) but I had none. So in order for me to run kde I’d have to log into gnome, then switchdesk. Not ease of use if you ask me. Redhat didn’t make mountpoints for my fat32 partitions. Yes I did expert install but I shouldn’t have to make mount points.
To be honest the easiest distro I’ve tried, to this day is Caldera 2.4. I’m sure 3.1 was great, but its settings were so high my poor old celeron ~450 couldn’t even open the kmenu to turn them down. It integrated wine, ran smoothly and while it didn’t just shove you into anything it didn’t make you feel like an idiot by holding your hand like you’re a toddler who needs to pee (like some of the mandrake stuff does). If your asking why I didn’t stick with it there are 3 reasons; 1.) Sound didn’t work (this was before I found a driver), 2.) I was on dial up then and I couldn’t use my modem, 3.) nothing to do. Once I played every game and dinked with every app I was done, i couldn’t get more stuff to do.
Sweet mother of god linux needs more people like you. Seriously when all windows users hear is rtfm or m$ is evil all it does is make us want to ignore linux even more. And when we try linux and are told our questions are stupid and we’re too used to doing it the “wrong” way, we begin to wish we had never heard of linux. Then to come across someone who instead of bashing everyone else’s choice, and insisting your’s is the only correct one you admit its only best for you and people should use what is best for them. Oh my god that woke me up. I was reading this thread, dozing a little since its a quarter to two and I’ve got a five hour drive tomorrow afternoon, and your post actually woke me up. None of that your review sucked ’cause you didn’t like mdk, or you don’t know what you’re doing ’cause you don’t know linux. You made valid constructive critiscims of her review and made valid observations about computing in general (hell about life, do what is best for you is a damn fine motto).
btw I know there are many more linux users like Mike on this site and other places, but sometimes its nice to be reminded of them. Mike you and your kind of tolerant, helpful, insightful linux users are the only thing thats kept linux alive this long. And the only hope it has of continuing to survive this age of slashdot zealotry and “enthusiasts” who use linux and bash ms and ms users because its geek chic. If your ever in Minneapolis drop me an email and I’ll buy you a beer, well if I’m not at school anyway.
I’m sure I misspelled a bunch of stuff but I’m too lazy to spell check it and I’m too sleepy to spell well.
Why use perl? Redhat creates a good selection of configuration tools using Python 2.2 and GTK2 without any problems.
I forgot to say good review. Ignore the grammer nazis, the misspellings aren’t that bad (I had an english professor who said if the word is spelled well enough to understand what its supposed to be, its spelled correctly). Besides some great writers are bad at using correct technics (ee cummings hardly ever wrote sentences or use capitalization). I can’t believe some of the modded down comments went out of their way to “mock” you because english is a second language for you (hell it could be a tenth language for you, we don’t know). I guess some people have to resort to petty name calling and down right racism.
There is no right way to spell words in the english language, there are only currently accepted ways to spell them. If you don’t believe that read Shakespear, he “misspelled” a ton of stuff (if today’s accepted spellings are the “correct” ones). Its called a “live” language, it evolves, only dead languages stop evolving.
I’d have to agree with the author, i’ve come accross most of the same problems, and I agree that the tools look out of place and mandrake just looks unprofessional.
I am a Debian user and I installed Md 9.0 out of curiosity some weeks ago. I cannot agree with this review. First of all I had no problems booting Md 9.0 from an xfs partition, using both lilo and grub. In addition, I think, the installer and the control center look and feel pretty slick and professionel. There are people out there, that do not need all the SUSE & RedHat bloat. Third, if you want to have a nice KDE Theme, just go to the control center and chose one. And there are a lot more of them on http://www.kde-look.org. Linux is about choice and I think it is o.k. to let users chose how the desktop should look like. And, in addition, this has the advantage, that it easy to install e.g. KDE3.1. I wonder how I get KDE3.1 working on RedHat8.0 without messing up the hole system. I like OSNews, there are a lot of nice stories on the site. But lately the Distributions reviews are really becoming more and more cynic and subjective. It seems to me, that everything that is not RedHat is bad anyways.
> seems to me, that everything that is not RedHat is bad anyways
If you read my review of Red Hat, you won’t think that anymore. This is not a red hat chirleader site.
Eugenia is pretty negative reviewer… but that’s ok! As others have said, it’s a welcome change from the rah-rah reviews we usually get. I do think that if she was to review Volvo security she’d be pissed you can’t drop it from a plane, ram it into a wall at 100MPH or drive over a mine. “I don’t care the others cannot do so either. I’m reviewing the Volvo!!”
Some of my measely remarks:
It’s written from a normal ‘Newbie’ perspective but using 8-OS system
Dated layout & UI / looks dated and ugly at best
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Partitioning tool looks horrible
as compared to what? FIPS? RH8? Suse8.1? WinXP Home?
Some valid critisism in link of course
Mouse problem.
Never had it.. click LMB/RMB/Wheely Tadaaa!!
Select XFS and you either know your stuff or you’re Homer’s twin
Euh, default, ext2, ext3, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS,…
D’oh, let’s take XFS…
Authentication
Haven’t noticed it. Could be valid when correct but nice to have for wrong PW)
Mandrake should have worked on the looks and the UI
Sure, make Eugenia happy and then piss off someone else…
This is all about personal taste!!
WindowMaker and some apps broken
Valid point
Menu layout & 7 terminals issue
Use the friggin’ MenuEditor!!
It’s a lot easier to delete something from the menu than to add it.
800×600
Stock SVGA is how old? 15 years?
GTK Config tools
Personal taste
counter point could be that it’s ‘visual feedback when working in system altering modules’
Config tools take forever to start + no refresh
Pisses me off too….
Mandrake 9.0 focus
Who cares… It works for me.
Personally, I’m happy with 9.0 Not stellar, but getting better at every new version.
Regards,
UglyMike
Rajan got some facts wrong:
> IIRC, it is in GTK+ 2. But anyway, it is so because
> there isn’t any QT bindings for Perl.
Of course there is! And after having expierience with both GTK+’s Perl binding and PerlQt for Qt 3 I can say that PerlQt is no less stable or advanced then the GTK+ binding, quite the opposite is true. It even has reasonable support for Qt’s GUI designer which I like very much (for not too complex UIs). This is the situation today. But there was no usable Perl binding for Qt years ago when Mandrake wrote the first line of their Control Center.
Also you stated that the control center uses GTK+ 2. Thats not right. It still uses GTK+ 1. Their own little Perl GUI toolkit was never updated for GTK+ 2.
See http://perlqt.infonium.com/
Cheers,
Andreas
Eugenia, you haven’t encountered all of the problems with the 9.0. Another one that is mentionned on cooker’s mailing list and in some bugs is related to supermount.
Supermount in mandrake 9.0 is the worst thing they could do to sell their distribution. Imagine konqueror hanged every time you go to /mnt during 10-20 seconds (// zip). Imagine that pressing the eject button of you cdrom (cdrom not accessed, not displayed in any *term or file manager window) will eject your cdrom … and less than one second later reswallow it, so you cannot actually take the disc out.
But maybe the typical problem with mandrakesoft is the way they treat bug reports. They just don’t care. I’ve a long time ago written a bug that last as “new” for 1.5-2 years (and was present in at least 3 successive versions). The bug was deleted without any comment/question/request-for-details from anyone. I recently went back to their bugreport system to confirm a bug reported for 9.0 by a user. Weeks after, nothing. While 2 persons are mentionning the bug (and I give a workaround), it’s still classified as “UNCONFIRMED”.
As a benevolent tester of Mozilla for quite some time to, I have reported many bugs. None of them have EVER been ignored, even those concerning some small CSS implementation defects. Both projects use bugzilla. But Mozilla is day, MandrakeSoft is night. Sooooo many bugs present in the final were reported in the beta and in the pre versions. They were just ignored as usual.
Do they really think I will go on spending MY time posting bug reports and workarounds? I’m trying to help them improve their product. I’m not paid for it. I do not deserve despise and disdain!
I liked the review. Granted, the spelling and grammar could have been better (perhaps you need an editor?), but I liked how the negative was emphasized. All too often, when Linux sites review a Linux distribution, they give it a 9.9/10 and say that it’s the “best release ever!”
Ugh. I hate cheerleaders pretending to be unbiased reviewers.
People need to know which Linux distributions have ugly default themes, buggy configuration tools, poor UI during installation, etc. These things are glossed over in almost every review. It seems as though the reviewers are actually apologizers; for example, comments like, “The install could have been easier, but it’s a big step forward. 9/10.” Ugh. No. If it has problems, then it should be a 6 or 7, not a 9.
I used to like Mandrake, but I have become very annoyed with their amateurish, unpolished, buggy releases. Not that Red Hat is much better, but at least Red Hat has some degree of professionalism. Unfortunately, I think Linux distributions are becoming worse, not better, as time goes on. They should be getting leaner, smaller, and more functional, not buggier, bloated, and slower. Blech.
“Every Linux distro I have tried has aimed to be a Win98 clone and each of them has failed miserably. Why replicate what has been done (poorly)? If you Linux guys really want to beat MS, show me something that hasn’t been before. Until then, I am happy using Windows XP.”
The Windows XP file manager is a clone of Nautilus IMHO. Microsoft Windows tried to clone the Apple Macintosh. Apple Macintosh cloned Xerox GUI. Each of this exercise was meant so that our eyes would be looking at sonething beautiful. However, the exercise means copying one others ideas.
Do you not get it! There is no innovation on eye candy, each one can just copy one another. True innovation is when you do something unusual/unique and solve a perennial problem quickly or efficiently eg Newtonian Physics, Differential Equations, EMC2 etc.
If this is a topic of who looks better then your post is meaningless and deregatory. You judge a book by its cover and not by its contents. Did you get your education telling teachers or professors how good looking you are? Or you got your education studying for it.
The distro was tested on one, underpowered PC with multiple.OSs to complicate matters. When undertaking something as large as an OS review, take the responsibility to test it on more than one system. And spend some time on it–examine it thoroughly–don’t just whine about things not fitting on the screen because of a low resolution.
Creating an OS isn’t easy–you expect the Mandrake developers to take responsibility for every package on the CD and spend months fixing it while your review itself seems to have been mashed together in around an hour.
And sorry, screaming “I DON’T care” in response to spelling/grammar errors isn’t exactly the most professional/logical/mature answer.
What you wrote in this so called ‘review’ was nothing more than an editorial at the most–and yes there is s difference between the two.
Hello,
When is there going to be a Linux operating system, rather than the continual mess of Linux distributions?
Distribution != Operating System in my opinion. A control panel, some icons, a colour theme, and a whole lot of packages does not an operating system make!
I posted a number of comments on LT questioning the wisdom of the rapid, nay rash speed at which Mandrake 9.0 beta cycle sped through. Some people chose to take issue bleating it’s been available in the ‘pressure cooker’ for so much longer, blah blah blah. Well this is the result!
It is absolutely impossible to release a quality product the size of an entire distribution when you’re releasing 1 beta every 10 days with the entire alpha/beta/rc phase taking two months! Major bugs will be missed, the whole thing will lack polish and compared to other distros it will look shoddy. Mandrake 9.0 is shoddy.
I really used to be a great fan of Mandrake, using all the way through to 8.1 but I came to the conclusion that each release has become more bloated, more messy, more buggy and there seems to be no one at the wheel reining it all in. They never learn. They would do well to produce a point upgrade that addresses bugs and usability and little else. Forget adding this kewl new feature, just fix the broken ones it already has.
Andreas: Of course there is! And after having expierience with both GTK+’s Perl binding and PerlQt for Qt 3 I can say that PerlQt is no less stable or advanced then the GTK+ binding, quite the opposite is true.
When was Manrake 9.0 released? 3 weeks ago. When was stable PerlQT released? 17th Spetember. Doesn’t give Mandrake much time to migrate, true? As for stability, I have yet to see GTK+ with Perl crash, but with Python, it is a day in day out process (I still haven’t figured out the problem). maybe I could relearn Perl and try out PerlQt and compare it with GTK+…..
Andreas: Also you stated that the control center uses GTK+ 2. Thats not right. It still uses GTK+ 1. Their own little Perl GUI toolkit was never updated for GTK+ 2.
Dang, I hate it when I’m wrong. (I hated Control Center anyway, never used it). Besides, there is Perl bindings in the process for GTK+ 2 right now. Only that it is much easier to migrate to PerlQt than to GTK+. Think Bonobo/CORBA.
MDK 9.0 has excellent Greek support. Perhaps it is not important for everyone but it is important if you are Greek! Installing Greek ttf fonts automatically update Openoffice, Ghostscript and Cups. Also it has greek support in the Console, plus greek versions of OO and Mozilla. The best Greek support in Linux thus far.
RH 8.0 needs manual tweaking in order to setup everything correctly.
This is a bug that I have recently encountered that is VERY annoying. The first time I installed Mandrake, I configured my HP Deskjet 930C during the install and everything worked great.
But, about a week later, I reinstalled it and decided to wait until after the installtion to install my printer. When everything was up and running, I went into the control center and it detected that it was an HP 930C and I clicked Yes. It downloaded and installed everything, but guess what, I can’t print! My printer isn’t listed anywhere in any app. And, when I go back into the contral center and click on Printer, nothing shows up, it’s just a blank screen.
I hope they fix this in 9.1.
~Chris
Just a note on the GTK+ interface to the MDK tools. As someone said, it’s done this way because perl has good GTK+ bindings. Why use perl? Because the programmers Mandrake has prefer to work in perl. Resources aren’t infinite. Personally I use GNOME so they look pretty much in place, but given the choice I’d prefer tools that look a little out of place but are fast and that work (Internet Connection Sharing, for instance, is pretty much a killer Mandrake feature – I have no clue how the hell to setup packet forwarding and so on, but I just turned on the Mandrake firewall, activated ICS, set my other PC to DHCP, and bang, both have internet access) to, say, YaST2, which I always found hideously slow and unreliable. (Why oh WHY does it update EVERY SINGLE CONFIG FILE IT CAN PRODUCE every time you exit, whether or not it was changed?!)
The developers have said they weren’t ported to GTK+ 2 for 9.0 simply due to time constraints – there’s a *lot* of Mandrake utils, it will take quite a while to move them all across. This is apparently being done for 9.1.
Otherwise I have to say it’s pretty much a fair review, and Eugenia did a good job of noting the major flaws with MDK 9. (You might want to write up the supermount bug too, Eugenia, in the interests of more users finding out what’s going wrong. Try accessing a few files on a supermount’ed CD. For many people this breaks CD drive access completely. It’s a stupid supermount bug that was introduced in the late RC stage.) It would’ve been nice, however, to concentrate on some of the positive stuff – notwithstanding the bugs, MDK is comfortably my favourite distro, and it’d be nice to give it credit where it’s due. Personally I love the excellent work that was done on integrating OpenOffice into the Mandrake structure, I love urpmi (who said it was flaky? Explain?), and I think Frederic Crozat does an excellent job packaging GNOME and related stuff for MDK. I also think the printer support is great.
Oh, as for the major version change – there was quite a discussion about it, but I think it was valid. Not only did the GCC version change, but so did a bunch of other fundamental stuff, including major version changes to *both* major DEs (GNOME went from 1.4 to 2.0, KDE from 2.2 to 3.0). I think this is enough to justify a major change for MDK.
The problem is lilo (even with the RedHat XFS direct from SGI) can’t boot if lilo is installed in the XFS partition.
Put it in the master boot block and it’s fine. This is an XFS problem related to XFS keeping their file system design identical to the SGI Irix version… They can’t put the lilo data in the same place as EXT2/3/Reiser…
It’s documented in the XFS docs.
Bill
Having read the article and all the comments it is interesting to see that the comments can be divided into 2 groups: those who install it and the “modify it to suit themselves”.i.e those who are skilled; and those who are not skilled and, being unable to modify it so that it works, dislike it; i.e Joe user (like me).
Mandrake is believed, by the cognoscenti, to be aiming at the “desktop” market. However the Linux community (i.e. skilled people) do not realize that “desktop” has one meaning for them and another for Joe User. This can be seen in all the introductory books; which begin by saying anyone can learn Linux, and a few pages later saying:”see yout sysadmin for info…”
BUT consider this statement from the end of her review
“our target is clearly to provide a system that is a great choice to install Linux in enterprises.”
No wonder she finds Mandrake inconsistent.
Linux is build-in lots of distros, Windows XP is not.(so???)
Ehhm… Choice?
WinXP has very good hardware compatibility. Linux has not.
WindowsXP has way more software than Linux has.
WinXP has more games and better 3D compatibility.
Because Microsoft bought half-world´s soul. In the case of software, lot of them cursed their own sins after MS invaded/won their own market, and they had no place for their products.
WindowsXP supports a better office suite than Linux does
So you´ll never have an OS choice because of product leverage. You can stand points from product point of view, but there are still a lot of technical and political reasons to bet on Linux (or BSDs, or Hurd, or…)
I realise that each distro does fonts ion its own way (in the absense of a good standard)… cf mandrake and redhats… and they probably hack the apps to work with thier font servers…
anyway – OpenOffice on a default install using XFCE produces unreadable fonts with _negative_ character spacing on screen.. that is the characters merge and overlap each other… opening new docs, relaoding OOo, changin fonts, sizes, styles has no affect.
but the fionts are at least anti-aliased.
so i installed OO from the tarball from the source site… and it works but i have lost all the font AA and probably easy integration to the CUPS printing system?
i menmtione dthis on alt.os.linux.mandrake with no responcse.
plus, i had the same gpm bug on 8.2… start linux itno console mode and move the mouse ,…. it goes crazy and generates mad control cde… restarting gpm solves it… again… this occured in 8.2 and now 9.0….and on two differnt computers (p-ii, asus p2b, and duron on a via kt133)… with a ms 3-wheel mouse.
t
i agree with the review that mandrake are now a bit complacent compared with the others… need a fresh round of pushing the limits!
t
…users think that a problem in a linuxenvironment is bound to the distribution they use? A distribution is only a collection of programs. Maybe a little bit modified but it’s the same programs that exsist in other distros. And the hardware/driver-problems… lots of users think that, ie, a nvidiacard can have trouble running in ie. Mandrake but maybe runs fine in RedHat. This is upsetting. They all use the same base, linux kernel (now 2.4.19 is the latest stable). If linux is too hard for you then maybe you were ment to be a WindowsXP local user. If you intend to use linux you should dig deep and get dirty. Most questions can be found looking in the doc’s that every application comes with. And if that’s not enuff.. go search some mailinglists?
I am wondering how the distributions put the packages together. Do they just have a whole bunch of people, combined with the community writing spec files and just hoping that all the packages will play nicely?
Every package included in a distribution should be considered on its own, on its merits. There should be at least 1 year of beta testing – these betas will be pretty stable for most people and bug reporting features should be built in (directing all bugs to the distro maker). Where possible, custom software should be used to ensure packages are made to conform to certain standards (eg checked against some sort of ruleset specific to the OS and checked against packages already committed to test for conflicts).
I could of course be talking out of my arse here, because I have no idea how Red Hat, Mandrake etc package their OS. Does anybody know what steps they go through internally when they put together a distro?
The reason I’m saying this, is that there seems to be a lot of human error in the packaging of programs. Perhaps there needs to be a better packaging system and programs to create packages (as in creating the spec files, not building the packages).
azazel
Well, I would guess that the disk geometry may be the reason. Eugenia, did you install Mandrake in a slice/partition at the beginning of the disk? What kind of disk are we talking about?
Eugenia (IP: —.client.attbi.com) – Posted on 2002-10-18 03:41:15
> I _really_ don’t care about spelling and grammar. What
> matters is the MEAT of the issue. Not the candies.
1. Disagreed.
2. If this is your opinion, why do you care about Mandrakes “candies”, in fact, according to you, it is only the “MEAT” that counts.
3. I like your review AND I like Mandrake 9.0 (My primary OS). It’s Ok someone kicks their asses, because this way the developers get the motiviation to fix the issues in 9.1 😉
MfG
Sebastian
Well, it seems that nobody really points that out…
Eugenia, forgive me to say some geeky details to explain why some people can make XFS work with Lilo/Grub, while some others can’t…
Both Lilo and Grub can be installed into 2 different locations: the MBR of the harddisk, and the beginning of a partition. Basically, they serves as a kernel loader, but they have the extra functionality to be a boot manager. (One pure kernel loader is Loadlin in DOS.)
The purpose of a kernel loader, or a bootstrap, is well explained in FreeBSD handbook. Basically, it’s a small piece of software that can be loaded into the memory and execute, so that it can bring up a full kernel.
When Lilo/Grub is installed in MBR, it becomes the boot manager of the booting harddisk. This is easy to understand. When the system boots up, it will execute whatever in the MBR of the booting harddisk, and in this case, Lilo/Grub. Mind you, though, MBR is NOT in ANY partition of the harddisk.
Now the case if installing Lilo/Grub in the first sector of the / or /boot partition. Since the machine only look at the MBR when it starts, how can Lilo/Grub be brought up to boot the machine? In fact, if you use fdisk/cfdisk whatever to make a partition “active” or “bootable”, it’ll install a little default program in the MBR, telling the machine to search for a kernel loader in the first sector of the partition that has been marked “active” or “bootable”. Thus saying, if you have only one / and one swap partition, then either installing Lilo/Grub in MBR, or installing Lilo/Grub in the first sector of / and use cfdisk to make / bootable, they have the same effect, if the / partition is NOT XFS.
What’s wrong with XFS? It’s about its file allocation table. If you know a hell lot of file system, you’ll know that almost every popular file system (FAT, FAT32, NTFS, ext2, etc etc) has one thing called “file allocation table”, which serves as an index of telling the system where to look for a particular file in the huge disk address. Most Linux file systems, such as ext2 and ReiserFS, place the file allocation table in the first sector of the harddisk, PLUS at least one backup (ext3 seems to make a hell lot of backup FATs), so that if the major FAT is damaged, the file system is not totally inaccessible yet. However, XFS has a “feature” that, it has NO backup FAT. That means, if the FAT in the first sector got corrupted or overwritten, the whole partition is not accessible anymore, FOREVER, just like a unformatted partition.
That’s exactly the problem. If people install Lilo/Grub in the first sector of a XFS partition, Lilo/Grub will overwrite the XFS FAT, and the partition is gone. That is the case for many dual-boot users, since they often have already had a boot manager installed (for example, System Commander and BootMagic), and obviously they don’t want their boot manager got overwritten. In this case, they’ll most likely install Lilo/Grub into the first sector of / or /boot partition, which must not be an XFS. However, if Lilo/Grub is installed in the MBR, even if all partitions in the harddisk are XFS, no problem should be made.
That’s how it theoretically works, in practice, some people still have problems on this weird combo even if the criteria has been met. However, I’ve tested and made sure the above is right (for me) using Slackware 8.1. In Slackware 8.1, I’ve chosen to use XFS as /, and a swap, that’s it. If I install Lilo in the first sector of /, it fails; but when I install Lilo in MBR, everything works.
So, my 2 cents here. Thanks for your patience.
I have never heard so many people bitch like sore losers about a review just because they do not like what was said. Eugenia is very honest when it comes to these things, and if there is something she doesn’t like, she will say it. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that some teacher let her third grade class post on this forum. “Mommy, she said some bad things about my distro….make her stop or else…oh and can I have a cookie?”
-G
Indeed, I had to put my LILO on my hdc4, not on my MBR. Overwritting my bootman boot manager that my primary Windows partition is relying on, it is the last thing I want. So, XFS didn’t boot because it was not on the MBR.
“Frank” wrote:
This is not correct. Windows XP permits upgrades of hardware, without being branding a software pirate or having to plead with Bill Gates’ ‘minions,’ or anyone else for that matter. I have easily and legally upgraded video cards, ram chips, ethernet cards, CD-RW drives, installed additional harddrives, etc.
——————————
I know others who have not been so lucky. Win XP’s “hardware checksum” feature has bitten quite a few people, and if you call up Microsoft and eventually get to talk to a person, they tend to assume you’re guilty until proven innocent.
Frank continued:
This is not correct. The installed, default browser, Internet Explorer 6, has full cookie-management features. With IE6 running, see Tools/Internet Options/Privacy.
—————-
Does IE 6 also let you block pop-ups? Block JavaScript?
Don’t forget, too, that early versions of IE 6 shipped with a “feature” that automatically sent you to websites who were “Microsoft partners” when you did a search. Though I do believe they removed the feature after considerable bad press.
Dunno about you, but I don’t like being led about by the nose and told which websites I should go to.
Frank wrote:
Easily solved. See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/windows.html
—————————————-
My statement still stands. Win XP doesn’t come with Apache.
I know there are WinXX versions, I’ve run both Apache and ActiveState’s version of Perl on Win98 SE in the past, to develop CGI scripts. Though obviously Win98 is utterly worthless as an actual server due to the lack of even basic security features.
Frank wrote:
See Start/All Programs/Accessories/Command Prompt
————————
This one I was wrong on, and you are correct.
Frank wrote:
The JPL uses a variety of computer systems, from Beowulf supercomputers running Linux (with Redhat being the default distribution installed by the vendor, PSSC Labs), to desktop systems running Windows NT, et. al. The most common Linux distribution used by the JPL is Redhat.
————————-
JPL being a large institution full of individualistic scientists,administrators,and other employees, many with completely differing computing needs, it would be very surprising if everyone used the same hardware and software.
My statement is still correct. I said “rocket scientists use Mandrake Linux”, NOT “all rocket scientists use Mandrake Linux”. In the research group where my friend works, they use Mandrake Linux.
In the end, it always comes down to personal choice. WinXP may be a glitzed-up Cadillac with leather seats and a satellite navigation system, but it comes with a high price tag, not all of it in dollars. Linux is more like one of those old Datsun 240 Z’s – the fit-and-finish may not be great, the surroundings aren’t always luxurious, there’s a certain amount of noise, vibration, and harshness, but it’s solid, reliable, inexpensive to own and maintain, light-weight and nimble, and will run rings around the Cadillac on a twisty road.
Personally, I like Datsun 240 Z’s more than I like expensive new Cadillacs.
-Jules Verne
I agree with the review, the AA fonts in Mozilla are nasty, is there anyway to disable AA in Mandrake 9.0?
Thanks
accompanied by mdk-bashing. some apps may crash ( but not everybuddy- that piece of shit runs on my system, though I prefer better programs than that) but that happens on ALL the linux distros – I’ve tried RH upto 7.3.
I agree with the reviewer on ONLY one thing – they could have made default KDE prettier and true, RH 8.0 does that.
As for using GTK vs QT, I wondered the same, except I realize more people have GTK ( esp version 1.x) installed than QT, which they need for other window managers and many common gnu x-based apps. For people not using KDE, qt may not even be installed. I also wondered why they used 1.2 instead of 2.x.
Eugina I’m curios what OS do you use when you aren’t reviewing one, for office applications/internet/email
Also i like the way you do reviews becuase you dont fluff the article with bullshit but you show the criticism that need to be said, I think mandrake is a great company and distro but im not about to deny its problems
If a dual celeron 533 is underpowered to run a new user friendly distro is such a hypocrit. I guarantee that this same person has berated ms for making the system requirements of their newest os too high. btw mandrake runs fine on my underpowered cleron ~450, and I have 3 oses installed (gonna make it four by adding be one of these days).
Well I am sorry, but the wheel mouse works perfect. Just read wat is displayed on the screen “Move your mouse wheel to active the mosue” … Well, when you use the mouse wheel the mouse stops jumping like crazy and works like a charm.
Dear Eugenia, Thanks for your review! It sounds like you like Red Hat 8.0 more than Mandrake 9.0, is this correct? I am buying my first Linux distro next week. I want to purchse from their website to show support for Linux. I know I can buy or burn it cheaper, but I am not looking for that now. Any advice on which distro to purchase would be great. I surf, play games, email, and a little word processing and spreadsheets. I have an IBM Thinkpad 233MMX, 96ram, 3.2 hard drive, cd, and 56k modem. It will be a dual boot with Win98SE. I would like to eventually take 98SE off completely. Your assistance is greatly appreciated!
This was obviously not a normal setup for a box, this reviewer’s machine was nothing like what a average person’s machine would be like. So in saying that, how can this reviewer review Mandrake from a average person’s point of view?
How many average joe/jane users have Beos, a Windows FAT32 partition, a Windows NTFS partition, and use the Beos bootloader as their boot manager? I don’t know many, yes I know that there are poeple that do that.. but not many that just use their computer from day to day for “normal” things.
From what I have seen, MDK 9.0 has been good to the majority of poeple I know, plus it works great on the machines I have intalled it on.
Plus you used the expert install… maybe it’d go a little smoother and all if you used the one the normal user used… and installed it on a “clean” machine… maybe one with just Windows on it. I also don’t know many that would dive into linuxconf, which I didn’t relise was installed unless you choose to or something.
From what I see things that caused “Eugenia – It did not do it for me.” and similer comments is mainly because… you already had alot of things set up that created this messy install/setup/performance.
In a way this “review” reminds me of a extended troll without the offencive language, with a few big words, and maybe a rare valid point.
The main thing that turns me off to this written text is the fact that the machine it was done on was setup like it was.
btw, if you want to use a boot manager that can boot Beos, Windows.. and Linux..yet still be able to do all that XFS stuff using lilo probably would have been the better answer
I thik this first part is only for the personal edition I am not sure… but hey at least I know how to STFW. But seeing as you don’t have the “average” users machine I am sure you know all about searching the web too…
in Windows:
1. extract zbeos file from BeLaunch (Windows boot utils for BeOS/x86).
in Linux:
2. copy zbeos into /boot/ directory in linux (there should be boot.b, chain.b, vmlinuz*, …)
Use Mandrake Control Center (NOT linuxconf.. I know its tempting.. but NO.. mainly because I know it will send you on a fit of whining again)… or edit /etc/lilo.conf with a text editor, and set up the following:
other=/dev/hda1
label=BeOS
alias=b
table=/dev/hda
Just tack that on to the last bit of lilo.conf and of course replace “hda1” & “hda” with whatever device Beos is on. Of Plus you can also download the Linux version of Beos from http://www.bebits.com
But of course if you were the average user… you wouldn’t have to do that… or even have to worry about it.
What did not work for you… seems to work for most.
lol, of course… I’d love to hear you whine about it if you installed Windows, it would wipe out your mbr and put its own crap on it.
I always had the impression that linux was the solution for older hardware, but according to the zealots I need a 2 gigahertz machine and 500 mgs of ram to run KDE? Sorry, but windowsXX with its user interface runs at a more usable speed in a slower hardware. Why is that hard to admit?
Dragon, what point are you trying to make? It is your post that sounds like a troll. She made a 6 GB partition for her install. What difference does it make which bootloader she used? What has comes out of this thread is something I have never quite seen before – Mandrake zealots! You all conveniently fail to mention the positive comments she had on certain aspects of Mandrake. All it sounds like is that Red Hat and SuSE have shot ahead a little bit and Mandrake has not quite kept up. Who knows, perhaps 9.1 will be different.
jodie, it was, at one time, the case that Linux was great for running on older hardware. But, you have to remember, that Linux is the kernel and, when we usually talk about Linux, we’re talking about different distributions, some of which have lot of bloat compared to what they used to have. You might want to try Lycoris if you want something that is familiar to your Windows experience or, if you are looking for something really fast and pure Linux, try Vector Linux.
Mandrake sucks. Mandrake is ugly, unprofessional, and half-baked. Until Mandrake decides to hire some real UI designers, it’s always going to be bad. I’m running Red Hat 8.0 as we speak and it has to be the most well done Linux I’ve ever used. This is only after a couple of days of using. I know it’s better because I clicked on a .jar file in Nautilus and it opened up in File Roller. OH MY GOD! I actually didn’t have to associate the file with the application manually. It’s just little finishing touches like these that make using an OS much more pleasant. Mandrake obviously does not believe in minor but important details. My prediction: Mandrake will no longer exist in 2 or 3 years.
I never said anything about the sizes of partitons, the bootloader was one of her gripes, and my point was she was not on the “average users” machine or doing “average user” things. Yes I was only addressing the negative.. but hey.. so are you for me, I was also giving her info on how to get it all working.
I too run Windows, BeOS, and a few different flavors of Linux. I am not bias to Mandrake, I like them all. One advantage I noticed in mdk though is the fact it is built to run on pentuim class machines, optimized a little more for modern machines. The only downfall being you can’t run it on older hardware such as a 386. Redhat and SuSE are built to be able to run on 386s and up. One advantage of this (if you install it right) is that you can use your old hardware thats laying around.
What the others have shot ahead in is pretty goop, colorful junk and all. Otherwise.. I feel they are all about in the same level, they all are built on the same gcc 3.2 they all just about offer the same packages and I dont’ see were any one is truly superior in any way.
Now about the bootloader, Be, the company behind BeOS is gone. The operating system, the real one, is not longer being developed and things are falling behind. The bootloader is part of this package. Now that the development stopped, and development on other things are going on the bootloader has shown a first sign of a dead os. It cannot boot up a XFS system… now thats just one thing I know. But.. one of many to come.. probably in a short amount of time. Lilo.. and Grub.. and probably others.. can boot just about anything out there. That is my point on the bootloader, as she mentioned having problems booting and whatnot and a few things about XFS, and not wanting her bootloader which is gradually becoming outdated overwritten.
That is why I suggested fixing lilo to work with BeOS.
I suggest SuSE. They cost only $49 with free shipping if you purchase ther next version. They also will sent you the most coprehensive documentation and even fun stuff like stickers.
Here’s a loq quality picture that should give you an overview of what to expect: http://ratedpc.com/sourcefiles/reviews/Suse8point1/pics/box-content…
SuSE also has by far the best configuration tools in general and have an attractive stable and speedy desktop enviroment. If you buy it you also get 90 days of limiteed e-mail support which can come in handy.
I would definetely recommend this distribution, it’s manuals are like a treasure chest and they are written in a way that you can understand. SuSE also comes with all the applications you will ever need, however you shouldn’t install all of them, it will get too crowded.
Eugenia,
When I first read your review I had since several weeks been running Mdk9 on several machines, both professionally and at home. Reading the review upset me somewhat, I didn’t think you where being fair when compared with what other distributions provides. I got the impression you had something against Mandrake. Especially when considering that my own impressions of their newest offering has been very good!
But…
I went ahead and read the other reviews you put online. This did put things more into perspective. Reconsidering my opinion about the Mdk9 review I realize that I actually agree with most parts. I haven’t been subjectet to all these problems, but they are probably there, and they shouldn’t!
GUI issues normally upset me alot, I mean I have strong opinions about bad GUI design and reconsidering your points I think you are SO right. I guess the last few years of living through “getting the platform right” (which is what I consider has happened with Linux) have caused me to lower the threshold for how bad a GUI can be designed and still be bearable. But the times are over with babying of the distributions. Usability is getting to be the top priority in the coming years (if it hasn’t always been). If you get the underlying system working nicely but for Joe User the system is a complete mystery (from usability perspective) we are NOT king of the hill.
So my opinion is mainly, and this goes for most new distributions: The platform is working now, focus on usability, consistency and eyecandy (I actually think this is important :-).
That’s all
Regards,
Robert
Dear OSNews readers,
I have been waiting for this for years and now it has finally arrived! You can create top-quality PDF files with Mandrake 9.0 because TrueType fonts are embedded in the PDF files. I believe this is the first distribution to have this!
Many praises to the developers of drakfont!
Ronald
I’m a newbie and I’m just evaluating Mandrake Linux in order to leave Windows completely
I don’t know what you guys are using, but I have a PII 350/128mb, I have 2 HDs, one with WinXP/Win98 the other with Mandrake 8.0.
I downloaded 3 CD ISOs and burned them on 700mb CDs using Nero under WinXP.
No problem at all, very smooth indeed!
Booted and chose to upgrade, it took 45mins for 3 CDs, and Bingo! Everything was ok for me.
Windows isn’t even close when it come to installation!
In reference to upgrading hardware components with Windows XP “Jules Verne” wrote:
“I know others who have not been so lucky. Win XP’s “hardware checksum” feature has bitten quite a few people, and if you call up Microsoft and eventually get to talk to a person, they tend to assume you’re guilty until proven innocent.”
I install new hardware all the time for clients running Windows XP and this had occured a grand total of zero times. Regarding Microsoft it is doubtful the person in question has ever called them so their comments regarding how Microsoft treats people when speaking to them are, at best, ad hominem.
“Jules Verne” previously commented that there was no cookie management extant with the default browser of Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6. This is categorically incorrect and was factually corrected by the present writer; specifically, I wrote:
“The installed, default browser, Internet Explorer 6, has full cookie-management features. With IE6 running, see Tools/Internet Options/Privacy.”
To which “Jules Verne” responded:
“Does IE 6 also let you block pop-ups? Block JavaScript?
Don’t forget, too, that early versions of IE 6 shipped with a “feature” that automatically sent you to websites who were “Microsoft partners” when you did a search. Though I do believe they removed the feature after considerable bad press.”
Of course, this has *nothing* to do with the false claim that Internet Explorer 6 does not provide cookie management. As such, the best response, such as it is, from “Jules Verne” is to offer a response that has nothing to do with the initital statement, hence the informal fallacy of a red herring on his part.
In short, he wishes to divert attention away from the fact that he either (a) doesn’t know what he is writing about or (b) is willing to intentionally misrepresent the information.
But to entertain one of the red herrings, yes, Internet Explorer 6 most certainly permits the user to “block” (i.e., disable) Javascript. With IE 6 running, see Tools/Internet Options/Security. It seems doubtful if the person that made such error-laden statements has ever spent anytime actually using the browser in question.
“Jules Verne” wrote:
“My statement is still correct. I said “rocket scientists use Mandrake Linux”, NOT “all rocket scientists use Mandrake Linux”.”
This is contextually not accurate. The statement, in its full context, indicated that it was, and I quote, “OFFICIAL,” that the JPL uses Mandrake Linux. The honest read may simply read the thread in its normal and full context. I never stated, nor even addressed, that “all rocket scientists” (or even some) use Mandrake Linux–indeed, quite the contrary. The statement I wrote was to correct the false statement that it was “official” that the scientists at the JPL use Mandrake Linux, when it is specious if even some of them use it, let alone all or most at the JPL. Context is vital if you are to avoid eisegesis.
Point of fact, the best evidence indicates that the JPL doesn’t use Mandrake *at all*, let alone to it being the “official” distro of Linux.
“Jules Verne” continued: “In the research group where my friend works, they use Mandrake Linux.”
This is highly doubtful, as most “my friend” stories tend to be. The JPL uses a variety of operating systems for various purposes, with Redhat Linux being the installed OS in Linux environments.
The unqualified and false statements aside, I really am not interested in addressing any individual’s statements, particularly when the source doesn’t evidence even an introductory familiarity with the operating systems in question, and, as is typically the case, does not hestitate to offer false statements and red herrings in order to “save face” regarding their lack of knowledge.
The moral is that the OS cheerleading that takes place too often is more marked by immaturity, deception and technical ineptitude than by a calm and factual assessment of the actual facts.
For those considering Windows XP, it is very stable, has a coherent and unified interface, you are able to legally– and without pleading with Microsoft–to upgrade the hardware on your computer, and, yes, you can control how Internet Explorer manages cookies and other configuration options, as with other browsers. The distinction is that IE 6 renders fonts and layout better than other browsers extant. Linux is a great OS, particularly in a server environment and it excels at this. On the desktop, it has a bit to go before being a fully viable alternative to either Windows XP or Mac OSX.
I have been using Mandrake for 3 years now and I like it. With every new version of it, I see it advance. I don’t care about the looks of it. It does everything I need and it does it well. It detects all my hardware and installs the drivers and the programs for it. (And this on 2 portables and 1 Intellistation)
I don’t see what is not to be like about the Control Center. It’s functional. I also don’t see what’s wrong with the partitioning tool. It’s crystal clear to me how one needs to use it. (The intellistation has a combination of IDE and SCSI disks in it). When I first saw it, I immediately saw that it was an enormous improvement over fdisk, cfdisk or this other one that was a little better than these two. As far as I’m concerned DiskDrake is very functional to get the job done. (I have already set up a RAID array with it, piece of cake)
I was disappointed with your review and after reading your review of Redhat, I was convinced you would love Mandrake 9.0. It’s a pity, you didn’t. Life goes on and I’m sure Mandrake will keep going as well.
As to spelling and the use of language in general: You are writing for the general public, you cannot just say you don’t care about that. It’s your right not to care about it, but then you will need to hire somebody to make sure that it is corrected before it goes online.
Just my two cents,
Jo
I am sorry for “Frank”. Apparently in his little world, you can dispose of anyone else’s opinions and/or experiences by simply labelling them falsehood.
I’m not too surprised that “Frank” is so willing to assume my friend who works at JPL is fictional; since he evidently has the social skills of an underfed buzzard, he probably has no real friends, only made-up ones.
Sorry, Frank. I do indeed know two individuals who had major problems with Win XP following hardware upgrades, and I do indeed have a friend and former office-mate who works at JPL, and his research group does indeed use Mandrake Linux on some of their PC’s, as a result of which he is considering installing it on one of his home PC’s.
I am quite willing to believe that none of “Frank”‘s clients has had a problem with hardware upgrades on WinXP. Statistically that does not prove a thing. You can go out and find a thousand people over seventy years old who have been smoking since their teens with no occurence of cancer; that hardly proves that smoking tobacco is unrelated to the occurrence of cancer.
I have no interest in continuing this dialogue with someone so closed-minded, so I’ll leave Frank to continue his little fit of self-superiority by himself.
-Jules Verne
The drivel is thick in here. Eugenia, I think your review of the latest Mandrake, was neither less complete, nor more overly critical, than your reviews of the other distros. A review should point out the benefits and the shortcomings so that a prospective user has an idea of what he is getting into. Good job. Too much whining here and it seems to come from OS zealots who wouldn’t agree with you no matter what you write.
Peace.
I think that this article hit the nail on the head perfectly, from an end-user approch. Your typical end-user does NOT want the headache of customizing everything in KDE, or getting the install screwed up a dozen times because the mouse options flake out the install, or having 6-7 terminals listed, etc. The end user doesn’t care about dozens of options, they care about simplicity. True, Mandrake will not conquer the desktop OS till they’ve done that. As for a tech-user, I do enjoy that kind of flexability and I will continue to use Mandrake over the other distro’s because the have it more tegether than the others. But in the case of gaining the end-user market, Mandrake needs to make many changes to make the user feel comfortable and not confused.
Let me also state I think this is a good review, as have been the other reviews by Euginia I have read in the past. In an earlier post I said that I did not care for her writing style, which is true. But that does not mean I did not like the content. So I have been thinking on this for a while trying to come up with exactly what I did not like.
Euginia, and this is an honest question so please don’t consider it a flame. Do you intentionally glaze over the favorable impresions but expound upon the unfavorable ones? As an example, you spend 2 paragrahs complaining that Mandrake uses the default configuration for KDE and Gnome, another 2 or 3 expounding upon the menuing system, but only a casual refernece to the other WM options. In short you seem to ake offense whenever something does not go right but take it as a foregone conclusion when things do go right. Is this on purpose? In a perfect world everything would go right the first time but this is not a perfect world. The levelof effort to even get this far is an impresive feat IMHO.
Put another way. My impression of the article was that of someone who kept a notepad beside thier computer, whenever something went wrong they made a note of it. Then 12 days later they took that notepad and wrote up a review. X went wrong (3 paragraphs), did not like Y (2 paragraphs), Z needed this (5 paragraphs), everything else seemed OK though (5 sentences). Ther result is an article of pros and cons where I am clearly presented with the cons but have to dig for the pros.
I am also almost concerned about your incredible knowledge in some areas but then shocking inability to read directions. I hate to dwell on it but it is the dreaded mouse configuration example again. A newbie would go “Oh jeez, if a reviewer with 6 different OSes on her computer can not even get the mouse to work right, how can I?” Where in reality if you just read the screen this would not have been an issue. You went through multiple distros and THREE different mice and never thought to read the screen? Shame on you. Simliarly you discuss your XFS difficulties as if everyone would have this problem whereas most would not use XFS. This could have been mitigated by a simple note that the default (Ext3?) filesystem did/should not have this problem, if you use XFS though be aware.
That said I wish to make a quick comment on the commentors (including myself). Leave Euginia’s spelling alone PLEASE. English is not her first language IIRC, would you rather she post in her native language? I am sure there would be fewer spelling errors, or if there were errors, most of us could not spot them. If you want to complain about spelling go to /. at least English is the native language for those yahoos. I am sure she has gottent the message after the last 20 comments on spelling in the last couple of reviews. Te question to ask yourself is “Did the spelling or grammatical errors make the article hard to understand?”
Mike
And can we bring the topic back to the review and or the reviewer? This is not the place for OS wars.
My spelling is awful is it not? Typos shall be the death of me I am afraid. Sorry needed to say it.
Something about not being able to load a ramdisk. But the 8.2 install worked fine…
There doesn’t seem to be a fix for that either. People have had this on 8.* and 9.0 but mandrake as payed no attention to the problem.
I never liked RedHat because I found it ugly, and I don’t like SUSE’s stuff to much but untill a new mandrake comes out I’m
forced to go with RedHat (downloading right now)
Can’t say that I agree with the article, can’t say that I don’t.
I agree, in that what Eugenia states is her experience, and none of it is made up.
Mandrake have work to do to fix those bugs.
It is their own fault if a final product still has bugs in it that were known for a long time.
I do think the article was picky on things that don’t matter, but then, it’s nice to read that, since this way, the reader can form an image of what the writer wants and expects, how he (she in this case) thinks, in other words, from what viewpoint the review/report is written.
To me, it was a report on how Mandrake 9.0 installs and behaves in everyday use in 1 particular case. No more, no less.
It is not, however, an article on which to base your choice of an OS, Mandrake vs Suse vs Redhat or so.
I like Mandrake. It works for me.
More importantly: it’s fully open source, I can download the ISO’s, burn them, copy them for my friends and colleagues etcetc. It has all the config stuff in the right place.
Unlike Suse, which you can download via ftp only, not full iso’s, and they have done too many things to the setup/config files, which is supposed to ‘bind their customers’ to them. I will not be one of those.
This is my reason for linux instead of MSwindows.
I wish to be free.
And not caught up in contracts and licences that lead me to purchasing more in the future.
So I will not even try Suse, unless I can LEGALLY get/download full iso’s that I can pass around.
As for Redhat, it’s on my download list, … the one thing I have against them, is that they first said: linux is not for the desktop, then saw Mandrake’s advances into serverspace because of friendly tools, then changed their minds.
But that is merely a minor gripe, so I’ll give them a chance, next time I have some spare time, and after I download the iso’s.
Anyways, here are my observations with Mandrake 9.0.
System: asus a7v333 duron1GHz 512MB ddr2700 60GBmaxtor gf4ti4200i sblive5.1 dvd cdrw haupauge wintv-fm realtek ethernet
Installation as update, expert:
no problems, just very very slow, 2 hours or so??
I don’t know if it was checking on each package and checking again, but anyway..
Finally, there was a problem with the graphics, nv driver is dysfunctional or so? Luckily, someone on a forum posted recompiled nvidia drivers, put those in and they worked fine, incl 3d.
Since now my dma was working as opposed to mdk8.2 which didn’t recognise the chipset of the mobo (same in redhat7.3, which was later, and btw should have recognised it and be able to use dma on it, but that’s just aside), since it was older than the mobo, I didn’t feel like keeping the old stuff around, so I did a clean install:
-clean install (formatting root partition)
40 min’s or so, and voila:
again the same problem with the graphics card. I had saved the other one, installed the nvidia drivers again, moved the xf86config-4 to the right location, and all was well.
Everything working, except for watching encrypted dvd’s for which I installed the necesssary extra’s.
All ok. No problems with supermount, or anything else. Stable, no probs with Evolution, font importation or anything.
Even got starcraft working without any hassle, just typed wine StarCraft.exe and it worked… that’s a first…
Printer works fine: epson stylus color (720?)
Scanner doesn’t: hp 4200c (this is known to be a problematic device with linux, hp seems to want me to buy some new equipment.. I know some people managed to get it to work, and someday I will)
Other machine: duron700, kt133mobo 384MB, 15GB hd, dvd-rom audio onboard, gf2mx
Install without any problems, even nv driver was ok.
Put the nvidia driver for 3d, … the only problem was to have 1152×864 instead of 1024×768, it just wouldn’t.
Until I managed to do stuff with the modeline (some value had to be a multiple of 4…) like the log file mentioned.
Apart from that: all works.
Including the epson laser printer.
I made copies for 2 colleagues: one mentioned that this was his best OS install experience ever, beating any other win or lin install he ever did. Everything worked for him, he has an NForce machine.
Other colleague has a K6-2 machine, also worked fine, easy install etc. No probs. On a second pc, he didn’t get the adsl settings right, so still has to fix that.
Overall: not perfection, but not bad.
I do recommend Mandrake to any new linux user.
I will not recommend Suse (see reasons above).
I may recommend RedHat, if I find that they don’t force you to use the commandline for any network or other setting etcetc…
What does linux offer that windows does not, cannot and will not (sorry Eugenia, but I just have to comment on that too, forgive me… or just erase these last lines..;-)
FREEDOM.
I can do anything I want with my machine, under linux. Note that I cannot with windows (don’t have XP, just 98se, and my tv card doesn’t have any sound, if it starts at all).
The scanner is a minor point, it’s not mine, and some fuzzing around will probably fix that.
I’m willing to live with those inconveniences, they are mine.
Windows inconveniences however, are not.
I chose, with linux, to be the sysop on my own machines.
Instead of having some company in Redmont control them.
But a lot of people should probably stick with winXP.
With china and india, I think linux will have a large enough userbase to make sure there will be drivers for any equipment. That’s all that counts for me. (btw linux has better driver support for many things, like older (>2 yrs)canon all in one printer-scanners andsoon, ask canon and they’ll tell you to upgrade…)
“I imagine that Mandrake didn’t use QT because it is not free software. Gtk lisencing just makes it less of a headache.”
Good god! Where do these people live? Under a rock in Mars? The Qt-licensing argument was long ago. It’s been solved. Qt is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence (AKA The GPL). Now go and write that down 1000 times!
Sheesh, how much longer will people claim that “Qt is not free software”? I would assume that people who follow Linux and it’s developement would FINALLY understand that Qt is FREE SOFTWARE that is licensed under the GPL!
I am new at Linux and installed Mandrake 9.0 two months after installing Red Hat 8.0 and it seemed to me to jump from Hell to Paradise. A tutorial at the first run, sound board correctly recognized, with RD8 no, DIVX film running under Xine, with RH I had problems, main menu well organized and easy to browse (KDE), with RH you can get lost and with Gnome I found no way to configure the menu, half the time to install it, PDF file immeditely recognized and displayed and I could continue….I am only at the beginnng so I don’t know if there are bugs.
Even if I still think it’s a very good product I found:
1) Same wheel-mouse problem as Eugenia (mouse jumping crazy)
2) The boot loader recognized windows but not my Red Hat partition so I cannot acces any more RH from the boot manager
3) Graphical redraw problems with menus (not critical)
I do like the graphic interface and i do NOT think it looks old at all!
QT is only GPL’ed if you use it for GPL programs, last time I crawled out from under my rock, I read that if you take it as gpl, you may never reconsider and make a non gpl program out of it.
Manuel: the mouse problem is not a problem, with all systems I have installed, I had a wheelmouse, and by just doing what it says, namely moving the middle mouse button (up, down, clicking, just do different things for a second or so), it will all calm down, and then you will see it all works as it is supposed to.
This article plus comments is the only place I have come across so many mouse problems, I guess other people read better, or at all?
For the bootloader problem, just edit your /etc/lilo.conf file according to your setup, and run the command ‘lilo’, all as root.
Search on the web for examples, it’s not hard to figure out what you have to put in lilo..
Oh, what you can do is mount (man mount to find out more) your RH partition, and there check what is stated in the lilo.conf file, just add that to your mandrake lilo.conf.
Graphical redraw problems: no idea…
Like I said before, IMHO Eugenia’s review is more a snapshot of a single user on one system only.
For comparative reviews of RH, MDK, Suse, and soon also Lindows, have a look here: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/1,3973,646049,00.asp
There are links to the individual articles.
I don’t want to talk down on Eugenia, she did a good job on putting the finger on the sore spot(s), which needs to be done to get things improved, but the above linked articles are more usable comparisons for people who want to figure out what the best choice is for them. Again: imho.