OSNews was privileged to an early access to the final version of Mandrake Linux 9.1 Standard Edition and we were able to test it for almost a week now. Here is our review. Update: Added four screenshots. Update 2: Mandrake Linux 9.1 is out, read the PR, get it from mirrors, buy it or join the Club, from links found here.
For even more screenshots, there are more than enough posted here and here.
Installation
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The installation has been completely revamped. It looks good and its interface is cleaner with fewer steps required by the user (however, the power is still there if you need it, hidden under some ‘advanced’ buttons on in the ‘Summary’ screen). I also liked the little 4-option menu asking you how to proceed with the installation regarding partitions, I found it intuitive, clean and better than the competition’s. The only things the user needs to do is pick the language, keyboard, mouse, hard drive/partition and the package family and fire away the package installation. After the packages are installed, the user is asked to add a new user and choose the root password. Before the rebooting there is a summary screen, very similar to the one found in SuSE’s installation where the user there can do some more advanced configuration (e.g. configure the ethernet card, printer, sound card and monitor) or leave it as-is (autodetect) and reboot the machine to enjoy Mandrake 9.1. I don’t have major complaints about the installation procedure, except maybe a single bug I encountered: the installation would pick the audigy() driver for my first generation SBLive! instead of the emu10k() driver, and it would not turn on ALSA on boot by default. I installed Mandrake 9.1 twice and both times the same problem happened, I had no sound at all, until I turned on ALSA and picked the emu10k() driver manually (older versions of Mandrake didn’t have problem with this card).
Using the System
Mandrake’s kind of slow to boot as it loads a large number of services by default, but that’s configurable via Mandrake’s control center. KDE 3.1.0 is the main desktop environment, as always. But this time, we get a Mandrake with a… twist. The default widget theme and window manager theme is now original and applies to both Gnome and KDE (in the same way Red Hat did with BlueCurve). The new theme set is called “Galaxy” and it is indeed very cute, especially its widget set. While I still personally like better the BlueCurve window manager theme for its clearly defined buttons (something that Galaxy lacks and can be a problem to users who need more accessibility), Mandrake’s widget-set theme is probably the best found today on any Linux. Detailed, clean, with soft on-mouse-over effects that don’t distract. Additionally, new icons made their appearance in this release. I do feel that MandrakeSoft has put a real effort in this release in both the usability and looks of their product.
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The “What to Do->” menu is not there anymore, but the annoying “Terminals” menu in the root Kmenu which lists 5-6 different… terminals is still there (that’s obsolete and geeky, in my humble opinion). KOffice, OpenOffice 1.02 and Gnumeric are also there, but there is no AbiWord (sometimes I get .doc files that one word processor can read, but the other can’t, so I need to have all three installed to check out which one does each time). Mozilla 1.3 and Gaim 0.59.8 come pre-installed along with a large number of other applications, including mySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, Samba, a large number of 2D/3D games, XFree86 4.3, XMMS, Xine, Quanta, BlueFish 0.9 etc. In the third CD I found “closed” applications included, like Java, Opera, RealPlay 8, AcroRead and more. Java applets work perfectly on Mozilla, but they would load and then not run on the distro’s main browser, Konqueror (yes, Java was activated on Konq’s prefs). As for Opera 6.12, it would crash on every page that it had java in it.
It was a positive surprise to see Gnome ‘taken care of’ by MandrakeSoft, as now its default setup is not the Gnome default, but a panel that resembles KDE’s (and the other way around of course). The menus are the same as in KDE, and MandrakeSoft has included a utility to edit the menus of Gnome, KDE and WindowMaker. Enlightenment, IceWM and Blackbox also come with Mandrake Linux 9.1 (I would like to see a stable version of XFCE 4.x included in the next Mandrake as well).
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The Mandrake Control Center has seen an overhaul once again, and most of the tools now use GTK+ 2.x which enables them to at least look prettier. You will find tools for partitioning and NTFS/FAT32 resizing, ZeroConf (called ‘Rendezvous’ by Apple), printing, internationalization, networking, firewalling, internet connection sharing, monitor and gfx card configuration and a bunch more tools. All the tools I had the need to use all worked fine and as expected except the “Fonts” tool in the advanced mode, where it wouldn’t accept a directory as input (I had to select/load/select/load more than 30 fonts ‘by hand’ to make it install my fonts from a non-Windows Fat32 directory). In my review of Mandrake Linux 9.0 back in October I spoke of a problem where the CD-rom would spin forever when trying to load almost any of the Mandrake Control Center tools. I know that MandrakeSoft found and worked on the problem and tried to minimize its occurance on some machines (I received a number of emails from people who were experiencing the same behavior back then) and indeed, the problem is now minimized, but not completely fixed. Now, only three tools (ScannerDrake, XFDrake and Mandrake-Update) create that “spin empty CD-ROM forever” effect in this machine.
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3D worked fine and I was able to run a number of 3D games with my 3Dfx Voodoo5 (I read that the new Red Hat Linux won’t support Glide3, so that’s a plus for MandrakeSoft and the 3Dfx users). Stability with Mandrake Linux is good; however, I was able to completely lock up the machine (SSH wouldn’t respond) by running the JESS visualization plugin of XMMS, in addition to 2-3 more 3D plugins at the screen at the same time with the Voodoo5.
Another positive surprise with MandrakeSoft is the speed. This installation just feels faster than its predecessor, with apps launching faster, window movement better, etc. The kernel used, 2.4.21-pre, includes special Mandrake patches applied for extra stability. The default filesystem that was suggested by Mandrake Linux via installation was ReiserFS. Developers will find a number of dev tools, IDEs, and languages installed.
Conclusion:
With this release I see a very serious and very respectable effort from MandrakeSoft to create a better Mandrake Linux. It is just obvious that this is not ‘just another release’, it really feels that it had extra care. A lot of things remain unresolved in the desktop area though, like the inconsistency found in the main desktop environment (KDE); notably, the context menus on the desktop and Konqueror and the bugs encountered and detailed above. This is part of the Linux platform evolution of course, so future Mandrake Linux versions are destined to become better with time.
I would urge everyone to download Mandrake 9.1 and give it a go when it is released. It is a worthy distribution and especially this version is a sincere effort from MandrakeSoft to create something better and competitive. And if you decide to keep it, make sure you buy it in order to help MandrakeSoft to continue developing their product in the future.
Installation: 9.5/10
Hardware Support: 7.5/10
Ease of use: 7/10
Features: 7/10
Credibility: 7/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 8/10 (UI responsiveness, latency, throughput)
Overall: 7.66 / 10
I have tried mandrake 9.1 rc2 beta on my machine a
800 mhz amd duron 800 with 256 mb pc133 sdrarm, 3 gig hd,ms
wheel mouse, lg 40x cdwriter and a manli third patry 64meg
radeon ve agp 4x card. It runs fast but has a serious cdwriter bug mandrake has broken gcombust, the only buring
program that works is xcdroast (i was able to burn a cd), but dont try to blank a rewriteable disk with this beta of
9.1 rc2 this resulted in a kernal panic (whole computer locks up and two leds on keyboard flash). Another serious
bug i have found is the controll panel settings in the mandrake control center do not work (i was unable to change
video resulution from 800×600 to 1024×768), changeing video
modes worked in mandrake 8.2 .
At least they fixed the gcc complier so source code complies now , mandrake 8.2 could not complie anything!!
Does anyone know how to fix the complier in mandrake 8.2
so that c and c++ source code will complile ?
Download the final, and then come back here and complain.
Creston:
If you install the egcs packages (egcs, egcs-c++ and
egcs-cpp) you get the “kernelgcc”, kgcc and kg++, in
/usr/bin. Make symlinks to gcc and g++ and you should
be able to compile most programs.
I really recomend that the first thing you compile is
gcc-3.2 though
Peder
No Michal, you still can’t write to an NTFS partition
safely, only resize.
Check out the official Linux-NTFS site at
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ and especially
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#3.2
Peder
Easiest install of everything (ever) including autoconfig of USB webcam which has always been a bitch to get going in the past. Haven’t found CD-Roms chugging when empty which happened in the past. Automount so far works perfectly but eth0 failed to come up at boot time even though it had been told too. Apparently caused by APIC settings in Bios.
Apart from that though “top distro” award to Mandrake. Also noticed that with all services running, e.g. samba, postfix, Bind,nfs etc. it actually boots in slightly less time than win2k Pro on the same machine.
jools: another competitor for the problem could be ifplugd. try adding this line to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 :
MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=1
if it helps, great, if it doesn’t, take it out again
I’ve just installed Final, and
1) Galeon 1.3.3 is missing everything that makes Galeon Galeon. Had to go back to the old Moz and Galeon from 9.0, easy enough I guess but annoying.
2) Most decorative fonts don’t work in Gimp, which is the only program in which I use them, and in which I use them a lot. Gimp 1.3 sees the fonts has bugs I dont like.
2 strikes, but the second is a big one for me, any solutions other than 9.0 or is it time to try Red Hat again?
You should edit your .gtkrc file and add these fonts manually in order the GTK+ 1.x aplications like Gimp to be able to see these ttf fonts. So yes, there is a way to fix the problem.
As for Galeon 1.3.3, I think it is ways better than the GTK+ 1.x Galeon.
Slow to open applications or windows. Problem comes from DMA which I found that DMA is disable during boot-up.
So you need to do some tweak to enable it. Go to /etc/sysconfig then open harddisks with an editor and remove the comment “#” on ENABLE_DMA=1.
It helps for my condition, now my applications and windows open much faster then before.
I think this review did not give Mandrake the rating score it deserved.
As far as the sound problem the reviewer describes, it had no problem detecting his sound card, all he had to do is UN-MUTE his audio mixer (KMIX or AUMIX) as it is muted by default when installed. And the “What to do” menu is still there. Mandrake 9.0 deserves a 9 or 10 out of 10.
Sorry of the mistake on the DMA! “ENABLE_DMA=1” is suppose to be USE_DMA=1.
Regarding the rating, I would put Mandrake in the range of 7.5-8.5 out of 10.
Decent review, I liked it. I tried 9.1 out last week. I liked the installation, especially the fact that I did not have to select PostGreSQL any more. I had only 3 problems – with Zip drive (I have a 250 MB IDE/ATAPI), Open Office, and KDE.
At boot time, the Zip drive gets detected correctly, at /dev/hdd. However, once I finish booting into KDE, MCC reads the drive as /dev/sda4, and there’s no way to fix that that I know of (editing /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab does not help, and /dev is organized differently than in 8.0).
As far as Open Office goes – I had a bad RPM (wrong MD5 sum).
Also, KDE really overdid on colors, a la winXP. Too much color, not enough contrast. I suppose that can be fixed, but as a busy student, I don’t have the time to play with all the config features. I prefer the cleaner look of KDE 3.0.
All in all, I’m sticking with 9.0 for now, because 9.1 did not offer any real advantage to me over the former.