“MandrakeSoft has done it’s homework. Mandrake 9.1 has a professional and clean looking interface and it’s easier to use than ever. This article isn’t so much of a review as it is my experience installing and using it. I’ll let the pictures do much of the talking.” Read the review at TweakHound.
Mandrake Linux 9.1 – Another Step Forward
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
“MandrakeSoft … it is homework.”
Oh, no! Mandrake has betrayed us all! I go to school all day only to come home and find that one of the major GNU/Linux distributors is homework! Aaaarrrgh!
yet another stupid useless linux distro review
its time to move from the grouchy disto to the
distro of the people.
oh yes
Make the switch to Debian or SUSE. Mandrake is still to ‘Buggy’.
i’ve heard that suse is very nicely polished and very bug free… and although i’m along time mandrake user … i found this release to be the only one that freezes or crashes for no reason (even during apparent idling)… but suse’s file system layout and funny boot procedure prevents me from swithcing. i’m not even sure they fixed their package naming scheme… i seem to remember it was xxx.rpm instead of xxx-1.3.4.i586.rpm as it should be. plus the last time i trie dit they were all kept in funny directory like a/ bb/ x/ .. eh?
i’d love for debian to be up to date… i agree that someone has to do what they do… and thats fantastic… but not everyone has fast internet conections to keep up to date with debian and gentoo….
maybe the next mandrake will be a conservative stability release.
t
SUSE out performs Mandrake and is much cheaper. I have used mandrake since version 6.0. But I finally had to say enough is enough.
Excuse me! Debian is not out of date. It has been my primarly distro for a long now and I am glad I finally made the switch.
Mandrake is too ‘money’hungrey’. As a resu lt the end-user suffers from overall quality and stability.
Yes I agree that Mandrake is nice to use, but it also has some way to go with stability. *.0 & 8.2 for me (tested on 3 machines) were worse than Windows, freezing during the slightest use.
9.1 is better but I had trouble setting up RAID on the two machines I installed it on. Working now but it took quite a bit of tweaking.
And if the average small company with an NT server could have Mandrake connect to the server in the same way that Windows 98 does (via some kind of logon script) it would be a big boon for Linux on the desktop.
Nice flame, guy. Very adult of you.
come on people. mandrake has no stability
problems. its runs fast and well and it
doesnt crash. i realize u might want to find
an opening to root for your own flavor of linux
but at least keep it real.
mandrake does not crash continually and hasnt
crashed continually for quite a while.
this is linux remember. u are probably getting
linux mixed up with winodes. after reading some
of these comments it woudnt surprise me.
and i wasnt flaming red hat, i was inviting red hat
people to try Mandrake, the distro of the people.
thanks for the great review.
I was wondering when you were going to review the new Mandrake.
I see even with urpmi you still encounter some frustrations
with rpm software installation.
You should give a Debian Based Distro a try just to experience the ease of debian package management.
I would recommend Libranet as an easy intro to Debian.
well 9.1 has a lot of bugs to be fixed that make this OS very flakey for day to day business operations (besides using it as just a dumb terminal).
im waiting for the next release …
like … Mouse scrollwheel support is COMPLETELY CRAP
I think that over time. All of these problems in Linux will be addressed to make it completely user friendly. I do miss Beos and its easy point and click and voila it works. But at the same time Linux has forced me to learn things I would probably never would of with Be, Mac, or Windows. For that i will never be able to repay that forced learning.
So far i have tried over the years a lot of the Linux distros like Mandrake, Redhat, Caldera, Corel, Lycoris, Lindows, Peanut, Vector, Suse, Elx, Knoppix and Libranet. They all have all there good and bad points. I still need to challenge myself and try Debian and Gentoo though. I recently tried out FreeBsd and could feel the power there.
So as long as people are very passionate about Linux or the Unix variants it will have a bright future. Right now my favorite is Mandrake 9.1. But I got a feeling I would like the recent Suse 8.2 and Libranet 2.8. But havent got to the recent releases.
I started out in 1999 with Beos and Mandrake 6.5 looking for something else. I would of done anything to have something like Mandrake 9.1 back then. I sometimes wonder what Beos would be like today. I do feel that there is going to be one Linux distro in the future that is going to get most of it together and be the one to really breakthrough and become more accepted by the public. How long will it take? I dont know but I feel it will be relatively soon. Linux has gotten really good in my opinion that there are times I forget I am even in Linux. I show off my screenshots to my friends that are windows users and they are shocked at how Linux is like. So like I said there will be a disto that finally gets it all together and the public will take notice it is only a matter of time. I know this the more I use Linux/Unix the more I am impressed by it and others will see that too.
By the way I wrote this using the Safari browser in OSX using a powerbook. Like I said I like my Linux/Unix.
Hmmm…. I don’t think so – there will not be one Linux distro out there that will get it ‘right’. On the one hand we can see how Linux (all the major distros) get more ‘user-friendly’ – whatever that means, as part of user- friendliness is what you are used to and sadly most people don’t know anything else than windows – so for them user-friendliness means ‘does it look and feel like windows’. On the other hand Linux is about diversity and different flavours, so i can choose the one i like – personally debian, because of apt-get and stability, although i did use redhat, mandrake (i started with version 6.1) suse and knoppix.
I haven’t tried Mandrake 9.2 though (although i do like the galaxy theme) and i as i am not going to i will and can not comment on it – as i said, linux – a flavour for everybody!
I am not sure Mandrake will release a 9.2 version. Their financial situation may not be able to handle it.
I installed mdk 9.1 yesterday out of curiousity and I can honestly say…
This is one of the buggiest distros I’ve used in donkeys years. Mozilla/Galeon repeatedly crashed on me, as did konq. Openoffice simply refused to even load. The mandrake galaxy theme has numerous consistancy errors.
Oh and the mandrake control center is terrible (taking ages to do anything, and even then screwing up. It couldn’t even setup my dialup connection). In fact, I found configuring or changing anything in mandrake way more difficult than doing everything by hand in debian, gentoo or slack. Nice guis are great if they work properly, but otherwise they’re useless and infuriating.
How about just switching to BSD
Every distro is not for every person, and differing hardware can make a lot of difference. As others have mentioned, Linux can have a steeper learning curve, and as a consequence you learn more. The convenience factor is usually there for those that just want to click, and all of them have ample opportunity for digging in and learning how it works.
If you don’t like a distro? Please don’t flame it, use another one, or learn what’s wrong. I have a MDK 8.1 box that took 30,000 hits in april, and has been rock-solid:
1:07pm up 192 days, 11:49
I really don’t understand people who complain about whether distros are “stable”.
If your entire system is actually locking up, then it’s either not at all related to the distro or only related in a very minor way, because there’s only two things at all likely to call that: balls-out kernel crash, or hardware problem. The former is generally the product of some feature in the stock kernel that one distro enables and another doesn’t (good example – ACPI. MDK 9.1 almost shipped with ACPI enabled by default, but didn’t in the end because it breaks huge numbers of systems).
ioc2k, you have quite, quite, quite, quite clearly done something wrong. I can attest from pure personal experience (I’m in #mandrake all day) that there’s thousands of people out there for whom Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror and OpenOffice all run perfectly well. You probably installed from faulty media, or something.
I didn’t like the myriad of control panels for essentially the same function. I had to look through two or three different mouse controls before I found one that would let me switch my mouse to left-handed.
I installed mdk 9.1 yesterday out of curiousity and I can honestly say…
This is one of the buggiest distros I’ve used in donkeys years. Mozilla/Galeon repeatedly crashed on me, as did konq. Openoffice simply refused to even load. The mandrake galaxy theme has numerous consistancy errors.
if all of these programs are crashing on u and to be quite
honest i rather it then U have a problem. maybe u have
some wierd harddrives that are no longer in existence.
maybe your motherboard comes from another planet
trashing distros isnt the thing to do. if u have a prefence
for something else then fine. i find that so many linux
people will become sometimes even nasty and filthy
mouthed as they seem to think that being this way
benefits their favorite distro.
its a shame. but if u look around the interent u find that
so much of this is true. trash one part of linux as u
speak nicely of another has become part of being a linux
fan for so many and its really a shame.
Oh and the mandrake control center is terrible (taking ages to do anything, and even then screwing up. It couldn’t even setup my dialup connection). In fact, I found configuring or changing anything in mandrake way more difficult than doing everything by hand in debian, gentoo or slack.
this statement is so filled full of lies and yes this is lies.
i know so many people dont want to call it that but a lie
is a lie. this poster goes completely berzerk. i would find
it quite interesting to be able to have further contact with
him or or her, probably a him so that i could learn
why a person who quite possibly has at least something
going for them in life chooses to come to a linux news
place and paste lies.
poster, if u would like some help, email me i believe i can
put in touch with someone who may be able to help u.
Nice guis are great if they work properly, but otherwise they’re useless and infuriating.
ahhhh, a little piece of the puzzle. this poster would prefer
a command based distro only. but because gui s are inevitable
says they would be great but of course mandrake and
probably any other distro has has gui s sucks, is hated,
should be thrown down and stomped on.
thank u for listening
now that u found the control panel to fix your mouse up
do u think u would be able to find it again without having
to look here and there and everywhere ?
to make the statement that there are too many control
panels is just your opinion. most people dont mind
the different control panels. i actually dont call them
control panels but that works.
now lets talk about software.
i hear this a lot from Mandrake detractors.
i just hate the fact that Mandrake comes with so much
software, i believe it would be much better if Mandrake
only included one software of each type and no more.
hey, i spend some of my time in the alt.os.linux.mandrkake
newsgroup , the one in google and people are using
many different softwares to do the same thing.
u can even ask which software is best and u will get
answers from everybody including me and they will
be very different.
if u dont like the idea of lots of software, dont use it.
but lets have more software availble for people to
pick from. its all about choice isnt it ?
u dont have to hate one group to have another.
I tried Red Hat 9.0 and liked it very much. I believe its UI is more pleasing than MDK’s. However I could not access my Windows NTFS partitions. That disqualified RH 9.0 for me as it is imperative that I am able to access some of my Windows documents directly from Linux without having to boot into Windows. If there is a way to access NTFS partitions under RH 9.0 then I would like to know.
Then I tried Suse 8.2 eval-CD. My Lexmark Z51 printer did not work. Suse is able to detect it but it could not be configured because Z51 is a GDI printer which is listed on Suse’s hardware compatibility as problematic. This printer works on RH 9.0 and MDK 9.1 so I do not know why it does not work under Suse. That disqualified Suse 8.2 for me.
MDK 9.1 allows me to access my NTFS partitions and my printer works fine on it. In other words it allows me to do everything RH 9.0 and Suse 8.2 can do and more. It is as rock solid as any other distro, installs flawlessly, easily and within 20 minutes. It works for me. I do not understand why it does not work for some other people.
Re: AdamW
I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve used plenty of other distros (debian, slack, gentoo, etc…) without any problems. I’m no newbie, so don’t treat me as such. I find it fascinating that people get so defensive when someone slates a product. It’s like shouting at someone you disagree with (but don’t know) in a pub…
Re: patrick_darcy
Have you quite finished? Spouting sentances like “this statement is so filled full of lies and yes this is lies” isn’t going to win you any support or understanding. I simply mentioned a few grumbles I had with mdk9.1 (although apparantly it’s just me at fault) – is this a crime? According to your tone it must be. Take some valium or something…
there u go again.
no u werent just mentioning some distastes u had for
Mandrake u were trashing it. if u continue to do so in
the future there will people that call u on it. chill
penquin style
I ordered the Mandrake DVD on May 9 and never received it. Mandrake charged my credit card right away, though. Mandrake doesn’t answer my emails and when I called their USA office a recording said that everything had been consolidated in France.
So much for that.
I have enough of these “I am a Windows user since Win 3.1 – now I explore the world” people. They a) can not review an OS since they never used anything else than Windows and the fact, that they use an OS that copied most of Windows UI design (KDE/Gnome) does not make them wiser. And that I am right when assuming these people have no clue is proven by the fact, that they write about the installation of this OS.
Who the *** *** is interested in this ? Only those collegues, that are still on Windows… Why not send them this as an email ?
.john (Amiga, Apple, Linux, Win 3.1, WinXP)
i think everybody needs to step back and realize
that linux is just a little tiny blip on the desktops of the
world for the moment.
lets open up linux for more people instead of trashing
just for ourselves.
there needs to be ever more reviews of all the distros
so that people that dont know much if anything about
linux will get some reading done and maybe make the
switch.
This is my first experience with Linux and I have to tell you I’m very disappointed. After having read in many different publications how great and easy Mandrake Linux is for the newbie to use, I sallied over to the Mandrake site and ponied up $94.00 for the 9.1 Power pack. I was put off first of all by the lack of information or choice in shipping. I thought at some point through out the purchasing process, I would be given a choice, but it never came. After having made the purchase I then inquired to Customer Service about how long it would take to receive the software. I received a reply that I should wait 8 business days. Fine. After the 8th business day I began to worry. I have sent many, many emails regarding this order to both the US and Euro sites and have received ZERO reply’s from Mandrake. Mandrake Customer Service has simply chosen to ignore my requests. This is absolutely unacceptable. Period. If you’re going to do business in this manner-you will fail. Of course my credit card was charge THE DAY I ordered the product. Today is the 17th day and I have yet to receive the product or word from Mandrake on the status of this order. I was really hoping to replace Microsnorf with Linux….but if this is the type of Customer Service I should expect…I expect I won’t be changing any time soon. I’m really hoping Mandrake will redeem themselves by being honest and simply stating the product is not ready for shipping or refund my money. Hopefully they can prove my experience is rare and not the norm…..
Me Too, Saluki….maybe we’ve been duped…check out my thread on Buyer Beware.
Nyanta