Mandrake Linux, has just hit the street in an all new version 9.2 (codename: FiveStar). This new version is based on Linux version 2.4.22 (an optional Linux 2.6.0pre is also available and included), XFree86 4.3, binaries built upon GCC 3.3.1, Apache 2.0.43, KDE 3.1.3, Gnome 2.4.0, OpenOffice 1.1 and more. Mandrake Linux features a brand new revision of the desktop theme. The new interface is now called MandrakeGalaxy and attempts to bridge the gap between Gnome 2.4 and KDE 3.3.1.
“Celebrate this five-star new release with us: discover all its features and all new Packs, including the very new “Discovery” office/multimedia desktop pack. Mandrake Club Members and all 9.2 contributors (developers, translators…) can download Mandrake 9.2 ISOs at MandrakeClub with the BitTorrent technology. Additionally, Mandrake Club Silver Members and above can even download the first three ISO images from the PowerPack! If you aren’t a Club Member yet, either you can subscribe right now, or download Mandrake 9.2 from the raw tree, or wait the public release of Mandrake 9.2 ISO images, by the end of October, when all packs will be available in retail. Last but not least you can pre-order your pack or your DVD now at MandrakeStore.com to be among the first to receive it when it begins shipping.
If you’re wondering whether you should rush out and install it, read on for our first look at a distribution from the Fall 2003 distribution release cycle. Find out at OfB.biz.
So whats the point of owing a club membership?
Anyone know a BitTorrent link?
So whats the point of owing a club membership?
I guess the point is to help Mandrake stay in business. *rolls eyes*
Can’t seem to get access to the FTP servers to download it, anyone else have any problems?
Now downloading.
You should get a membership instead, it helps them a lot. I have been a memeber for 2 years and believe me we spend more money on other useless stuff. Last time I paid it was like 60 US dollars.
I think that should read KDE 3.1.3 :-)…
They should be on here in a little while.
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/torrent/
Currently only the RC’s are there.
Mandrake is my favorite, so this is good news for me ^_^ I hope that they can get rid of their money issues and stop having ads.
The point of having a club membership is that officially ISOs of 9.2 will not be available until the end of October. You can download the source and binary packages and built a distro out of that raw if you want however
You should get a membership instead, it helps them a lot. I have been a memeber for 2 years and believe me we spend more money on other useless stuff.
I don’t use Mandrake, but for a commercial distro who relies on selling software to provide free isos is just plain stupid. Mandrake isn’t Red Hat; they can’t subsidize free beer isos with huge corporate support contracts.
Mandrake shipping with Gnome 2.4 is bad news for SuSE that is releasing their new distribution tomorrow with Gnome 2.2.3. I hope Mandrake doesn’t take 2.4 too early.
Gnome is amazing, very fast, thanks to metacity. I was a long KDE user, but I consider switching.
I’m using cooker and gnome 2.4 is very stable (better than 2.2). It was very tested.
1.) Just as an FYI, the theme is not “now” called MandrakeGalaxy — they did that in the last release. This release has an *enhanced* version of MandrakeGalaxy.
2.) The BitTorrent download for the 9.2 ISO’s won’t be available to non-Club members until about the end of the month. I already started using it, since I’m a club member.
-Tim
i was one of the idiots that raced to download redhat 9.x, right as it was released. i even paid the ‘ransom’ money to redhat to get the fast download (only two days).
i was crushed to discover that under redhat 9, there is no way to run the kdevelop setup, so you get no docs. (it asks for a path, which i was never able to find.)
i’m back in redhat 8, and it’s like having my computer back.
after this experience, (and a similar experience with suse 8.2) i am pretty reluctant to trust any of the new stuff.
also, i think it’s pretty disgusting for the companies to demand ‘club membership.’ anyone who is willing to spend the effort to download 3 iso’s is a damn club member, as far as i’m concerned.
xeondarwin wrote:
also, i think it’s pretty disgusting for the companies to demand ‘club membership.’ anyone who is willing to spend the effort to download 3 iso’s is a damn club member, as far as i’m concerned.
They are not demanding club membership. They may plug it to death but that is their way of creating awareness about the club. For those of us who are not club members (myself included) the isos will be available at the end of the month when the power packs go to the retail stores.
Is it just me or doesn’t the Torrent include any md5-sums?
Mandrake introduced me to Linux. But I have since moved on. Although I do think its a bit dishonest for them to use Bittorrent and want to only give certain people access. Its like using club members to their own benefit. They do not pay for bandwidth when people use bittorrent, unless I got the bittorrent thing wrong.
Nobody’s stopping anyone from making their own BitTorrent and distributing it across the web. Mandrake just wants to give paying club members the added convenience of having any means necessary to download 9.2 first (how many club members are there, though? The BitTorrent -would- go faster if the torrent was made public and posted on Slashdot).
I can’t understand why so many people are upset because Mandrake gives a bit of preferential treatment to their “club members”. Dang – if you don’t want to pay any money all you have to do is sit on your hands for 2 weeks!
Personally, I think it’s not a bad deal for the $$. You’re supporting one of the few companies making a living from Linux, and one that puts out a damn fine distro as well.
Dishonest to use bittorrent? Who’s seeding the files in the first place? Who’s likely to continue to seed the files for quite some time after a user gets his own? Can you blame Mandrake for being fiscally responsible by using readily and freely available software to further procure their life in the world of Linux Desktop Distributions?
I’ve been a long time user of Mandrake and I am currently in my second year of MandrakeClub (Silver Level) membership. Everyone can whine and moan all they want (“what they want me to pay?”) but I have no problem supporting financially those things which I cannot readily contribute to in a more contemporary opensource fashion. Why is this? Because I understand Free as in Speech, not as in beer. So when Mandrake files for bankruptcy and i get downhearted, I have no problem hearing they are trying more innovative and creative ways of distributing their fine software to better use money and create better projects. This is a company thats dedicated to distributing its product by any means necessary, and has responded to user resquests to slow down its release cycle (consider that 9.2 was supposed to go gold mid september following mdk’s 6 month release history) and put more polish on an already slick distro.
I put my full support behind Mandrake and other opensource companies strugling with finding new and innovative ways of raising capital, you should too.
But if Mandrake is using Bittorrent, then people shall just get the torrents and download the isos. Maybe Club users will have at most 1 days headstart, but that’s hardly worth the value of the membership. Its actually better for everyone, Mandrake included to have as many people sharing via bittorrent anyway.
I meant that Mandrake is sort of using the club members as distribution agents, and these people are paying for the downloads anyway. What value is mandrake providing when it just supplies torrents, and uses their users bandwidth for distribution. That is why I said it seems a tad, ok , maybe not dishonest but it is using their users badwidth whilst charging for it. Anyway, if the users don’t mind, then it is a non issue.
The torrent you use to download via the club is for your user only and is limited to the amount of times you can download. So what there won’t be is an influx of group memberships distributing one torrent for all to download from, and therefore increasing the available userbase from whom to download the isos. Therefore, the people who benefit from this are Club members (and mandrake too as its saving money in bandwidth costs).
On the other hand where mandrake does run a particular risk is that users who are savvy enough to download via bt are likely to be savvy enough to reseed the iso for general consumption. Even so, Mandrake isn’t losing out too much if this happens, because they are still accomplishing one of their goals: that of saving bandwidth.
So Mandrake opening the avenue of Bittorrent, and that via MandrakeClub is bound to be a win win situation for everyone involved, from user base to top tier management.
I was a long time RH user (since 4.2) but switched to Mandrake when RH started to suck (circa 7.3). Mandrake 9.1 has been a great desktop OS at home. Gonna wait to see 9.2 for myself and then maybe take the plunge.
Checksums are no important in bittorrent, as the application performs a better file integrity verification. From their site:
How do I know the download isn’t corrupted?
BitTorrent does cryptographic hashing (SHA1) of all data. When you see “Download succeeded!” you can be sure that BitTorrent has already verified the integrity of the data. The integrity and authenticity of a BitTorrent download is as good as the original request to the tracker. Checking the MD5/CRC32/other hash of a file downloaded via BitTorrent is redundant.
What does that involve? Do I select which kernel to use or do I have to compile it?
Simply involves using Mandrake’s wonderful dependency mangement tools, as root one could type: urpmi kernel and it brings back a list of available kernel options.
It’s probably not available at install time, but probably as an rpm on the cd. Search for kernel in rpmdrake.
Does anyone know how to install Mandrake as a guest Linux OS on Win XP and get it to connect to the host OS through TCP/IP? I have not been able to do that through NAT while the same setup seems to work fine with other Windows guest OS.
I can perfectly understand why Mandrake are limiting their initial ISO access. But, that said, I cannot afford to be a member right now – what would be nice is someone who has the 9.2 ISO’s to make a BitTorrent link of their own to help those cash strapped and would like to install 9.2? I am sure some of you will not because you feel your “2 week headstart” is something to hold onto – but I know somebody will want to share the ISO (and under the Open Source licence I think they have that right). Link anyone?
Anyone else seeing 3KB downloads? Will take until the end of October to get them. Mandrake is a good distro, but they need to work on distribution channels. At least SuSE I can go to the local computer store and buy when it gets released. Mandrake is not carried anywhere anymore, except from Mandrake store. Good luck getting them to ship anything.
I will definitely become a silver member come November.
By becoming a member in November, if Mandrake sticks to its 6 month release cycle I will be able to have all the benefits of Silver members (proprietary applications like SO 7, Real, drivers, Flash, over 50,000 up to date rpms, a voice in development, active support and community acess, supporting the company etc.)and 3 Mandrake PowerPack releases, 9.2, 9.3 and 10!
Same here I am getting 38 Kb and this is freaking slow ! How is BitTorrent any faster then regularly downloading a file ? This thing will take forever to download ! I am on cable and this reminds me of the old 56k days before I got my cable modem.
http://www.mandrakeclub.com/article.php?sid=1251
It seems that this was not the best solution towards getting these ISO’s ! People are too inherently greedy to share and share alike.
BitTorrent is awesome… I get 1040KB/sec it gets faster as more people download not slower.
Anyone tried ordering a set of Mandrake ISOs from distrowatch.com? I think they offer a very fair price.
If you look back almost 7 months, you will see every body saying how MDK had a bad bussiness model, by giving away its MDK 9.1 for free before the boxed version was available in stores or even to pre-orders. This time, things improved a little from the bussines POV, as they at least showed some value of being a member of its Club, by letting them to get the new version mere 15 days before everyone else … well not a big change, but may be a small step on the right direction.
MDk should become more like Red Hat or Suse to survive, they have to drive a bussines, not a hobby. Next version should be available at stores and to Club members at least a month before that free versions. D/L version should be smaller, 1 CD may be, to animate more beginers to d/l just for the sake of trying, and to animate them to buy a boxed version to get a more complete product.
People sometimes forget that most software licenses used in all this Linux distros, only say that you have to give access to the source code, not that you have to give everything for free. RH, Suse,MDK and all other charge for constructing a more or less coherent distribution of software, give support, add artwork, add help/tutorial, some commercial applications and some additional services. Most of these companies pay back to community by hosting projects websites, giving back patches/changes, defending law aspects (think Suse/RH/SCO case), and of course, by giving some way to get ther work for free (ISOs, ftp, etc).
May be someone is wondering why I’m saying all this … it is just that I read so many msg about “why is not available now for free” or “why someone hasn’t set up a mirror for everybody” that shows me that people sometimes forget that getting this for free is a privilege, not a right.
I and many other’s ( look at the MDK link ) are at 1-5% and we are downloading at about 1-30 Kb’s a second. How is this fast ? Oh yeah don’t give me crap about slow connection ( I am on broadband 1.2 mb cable modem ) or PC ( 2.2 ghz PC with 1 gb of memory).
Well, it is rather widespread knowledge that most cable and DSL services have difficulties in maintaining high upload and download speeds at the same time. Try throttling your upload and you will probably see an improvement in download speed.
Check your Bittorrent documentation or search the net for details.
You can tell most of the people complaining about download speed haven’t ever used BitTorrent before. Just wait a day or so for more people to finish their downloads and become seeders, fellas.
Next they’ll complain that the ISOs are going too fast and using up all their download bandwidth.
I was an avid Mandrake supporter up till the 8.0 release, but found the latest versions haven’t been to my liking. I got the 9.2beta release, but I’m not sure I will bother with the final 9.2
The network card on my system just refuses to work with Mandrake – it’s a davicom bog-standard card that should use the dmfe module, but always uses tulip. No matter what I do, Mandrake won’t load the module properly, even though the module is definately present. It also refuses to detect another bog-standard SMC card – once again using the tulip module. I’ve tried recompling the kernel, lsmod, insmod – nothing will work.
Sure, it’s a small issue, but it bugs me enough to say what the heck – I’m not spending hours and hours firstly downloading the ISO’s and then trying to fix what should be a simple network issue.
RedHat 9.0, with the latest stable kernel installed, freshrpms to give the lacking multimedia support, the Nvidia drivers and I’ve got all I want in a Linux distribution. I thin RedHat is streets ahead in terms of design and usability, but you have to “tweak” it up first to add the “missing” stuff.
imho, the bluecurve theme is one of the best things that have happened to desktop linux for ages – I can’t wait to see what RedHat do with their next release.
MandrakeClub is the snakebite that will kill Mandrake,too many people are sick of their sniveling,and whining.
I don’t have disk 3, but you shouldn’t need it, considering it’s just extra languages.
Actually, to my knowledge, the kernel-sources are included on CD 3 — as well as a few other apps that may be of use. So if you want to compile your own programs against the kernel, then you NEED CD 3…
Someone posted a torrent..
These links do not work.
What doesn’t work? I am downloading and uploading as we speak… Is it the ISO’s that do not work?
the links work, though they are veeery slow for me.
“Checksums are no important in bittorrent, as the application performs a better file integrity verification. From their site: ”
And please how does bittorrent protect me against modified isos with backdoors and malware? Checksums are importent, even with bittorrent. Especially with bittorrent and other p2p software where everyone, including the EVIL GUY, can share stuff.
One more thing: okay bittorrent has checksums in it’s torrent file, but better don’t trust torrents you find in forums or newssites, etc. I would rather trust an md5 checksum on the vendor’s homepage, which I can check independently from the checksums in the torrent.
Or download the ISO’s from a trusted source
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ftp.php3
Choose this link.
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ftp.php3
Then choose.
I’m already a member of the Club or plan on registering soon, please send me to the download page.
Its, or the first 2 CD’s as I write, at :
http://www.suprnova.org/
MandrakeClub is the snakebite that will kill Mandrake,too many people are sick of their sniveling,and whining.
You, and your little dog too!
*cackle*
“And please how does bittorrent protect me against modified isos with backdoors and malware? Checksums are importent, even with bittorrent. Especially with bittorrent and other p2p software where everyone, including the EVIL GUY, can share stuff.”
because BT isn’t like other P2P systems. Each torrent is ONE TORRENT, it will only carry one set of files, you can’t hijack it and make it transfer some other files. The 9.2 torrents have been seeded by Mandrakesoft, a trusted source. With the way BT works, you can only possibly get the same files MDKsoft seeded, if you use the MDKsoft torrent. Case closed.
“because BT isn’t like other P2P systems. Each torrent is ONE TORRENT, it will only carry one set of files, you can’t hijack it and make it transfer some other files. The 9.2 torrents have been seeded by Mandrakesoft, a trusted source. With the way BT works, you can only possibly get the same files MDKsoft seeded, if you use the MDKsoft torrent. Case closed.”
A good point, each torent is indeed one torrent but what happens if the EVIL GUY decides to seed another slightly different torrent containing MDK9.2+ a load of malware? This will be a DIFFERENT torrent but you or I may not be any the wiser if we find a link to it labelled “Mandrake 9.2 isos” on some warez forum or other. So official md5 checksums on the MandrakeSoft website might be worthwhile after all? However MandrakeSoft could argue that they don’t need to provide them at this stage as people should only be getting these ISOs via the official bittorrents found on the Mandrake website.
I prefer Mandrake to Redhat only reason being with Redhat you are forced to download the three iso images, because the last two files on the third CD, grrrrr.
“And please how does bittorrent protect me against modified isos with backdoors and malware? Checksums are importent, even with bittorrent. Especially with bittorrent and other p2p software where everyone, including the EVIL GUY, can share stuff.”
or modify the checksum. Doh.
Is bootsplash see http://www.bootsplash.org implemented yet ? it seems that only suse has proper support to change those, its been lying untouched since mdk 9.0 i think, is it better now ? like able to change themes like in suse 9.0 ?
id really like to change the booting splash easily, tried compiling, stockkernels on 9.1 but dont seem to work
um…yes…it was in 9.1 too. check /etc/sysconfig/bootsplash , /etc/bootsplash and /usr/share/bootsplash . There’s a config tool, called draksplash. 9.2 has some rather spiffy new bootsplash themes, including a silent one now that bootsplash 3 has been implemented.
Alright! Finally up to the blazing speed of 4 kB/s. Only about 74 more hours to go now….
Maybe I should try a dial-up modem ( j/k )
Hi,have your guys ever heard from “aurox”?