I have completely skipped Mandrake Linux 9.2 because previous versions of Mandrake Linux were not exactly that “glamorous”. However, I wanted to try out the new Linux kernel 2.6.x on my new Linare PC and so I decided to give Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition a spin. Here are some quick thoughts on it on how MandrakeSoft has earned back my trust with this release. Update: MadPenguin reviews it too. UPDATE 2: More bugs, more bugs. I have changed the rating of the software because as much as I keep using it, I find more and more and more bugs all over the place. MandrakeSoft should REALLY sit down and think hard about their QA department (I have already emailed them about it).The goodies
Installation went through fine (except that it asked me for a non-existent 4th CD (possibly part of the non-community version)). Mandrake booted in graphical mode all the way (by default) and a KDE 3.2 desktop was unveiled. I liked how MandrakeSoft has organized the menus this time around with the help of KDE 3.2: few sub-categories and only the needed software installed (that’s for the default installation). The only problem with the menus was that for the system tools sometimes you had to go hunt deep into the tree (e.g. the gnome pref panels).
My biggest welcome surprise was the fact that Mandrake now installs by default a video editor, KDEnLive! At last, a distribution that is sensitive enough to the sign of the times and includes a solution –even if that solution is still very alpha. It shows sensitivity to the multimedia issue and I liked that. There is also the option to install Kino, the gnome video editor.
Other software options include OOo, Galeon, Epiphany, Mozilla, Kontact, Evolution, you know, the usual. Mdk 10 also comes with kernel 2.6.3 which seems to work fine on this Linare PC. Only my $20 USB webcam I bought at Frys 3 weeks ago is not recognized (2.4.x doesn’t recognize it either).
Mdk10 also comes with Xine, Mplayer, Xmovie, Totem but without Rhythmbox, Mono or Muine. There are quite a few CD burners included, including the eRoaster which I never heard before (still pre-release).
The overall speed of Mandrake 10 on this 1.3 GHz AMD Duron seems comparable to my Slackware 9.1-Current on my AthlonXP 1.4 GHz (1600+), booting is a bit slow because of all the services, but usage speed seems comparable (Slackware still uses kernel 2.4.x).
For those who read my yesterday’s review of the Linare PC would remember the adventures I had with both Linare Linux and Xandros for the SiS 740 driver. Mandrake’s Xfree 4.3 had absolutely no problem. It found the card, found the right monitor, and it used the right resolution/depth and refresh rate out of the box without me having to tell it anything: 1280x1024x24bpp @ 85 Hz.
The bugs
Mandrake Linux 10 is not without its flaws though. Here is a quick list:
1. KDE’s Kontact will reproducibly crash when clicking on its “notes” button.
2. For the love of me, I can’t change the theme on Gnome. I had to yank completely the ~/.gtkrc and ~/.gtkrc-2.0 in order to get the theme I wanted! When the user says “I want theme X”, the theme manager should do so.
3. During installation and later in the drak time/date tools, I told it that I am in the “Los Angeles” area and also instructed it to use a time server. Mdk would just not listen. It was stuck on the default “New York” timezone and it wouldn’t use the time server. I had to change the time by hand…
4. No matter how much work MandrakeSoft puts into their drak tools, most of them are still butt ugly (e.g. “Manage connections”), they don’t follow usability rules and they don’t refresh their windows enough, as you can see in the shot. Others will resize the buttons as you resize their window. Ugly!
5. The “Install” drak tool is buggy. I spent 15 minutes going throw the whole list and check the software I wanted for additional installation, only to get the installation bail out after a while saying that hylafax is conflicting with some other lib, and upon retry, it would then bail out telling me that a whole bunch of RPMs were not “signed” correctly, and after that point the “URPMI was locked”, and so I had to restart my installation effort from the very beginning. At the end –by doing installation for only few packages at the time– I was able to get what I wanted, but that was not a great experience. Plus when installing the RPMs, the installation window wouldn’t refresh, giving the impression that it was crashed (it’s not). I am shouting for this very thing on Mandrake Linux tools for 2 years now. Anyone listens?
6. Check the screenshot in this article, after you close the Bittorrent-gui “Open file” dialog you get that thing with no scrollbars (and I have pointed the exact same thing with LinuxConf on my review of Mandrake 9.0, 1.5 years ago).
7. The Drak-fax tells me that in order to configure the Fax server I have to give my root password after I hit “ok”, but by doing so it never asks me for any password and it doesn’t give me the fax server dialog!
(Update: Bugs, more bugs…)
Update: Even more bugs:
a. After rebooting Mdk, it would fail to load my eth0. People said that I had to go and disable “networking hotplugging”, well fix it then! There is no reason why a network card was working on the first boot and not able to
work after a reboot and the user would have to go disable stuff manually!
b. I wanted to change the “/usr/games/frozen-bubble” command in the menu drake to “artsdsp /usr/games/frozen-bubble” to go around another bug which was crashing the app when its Sound is on, and guess what. MenuDrake brought back to life (without anyone requesting it) the defuncted “What To Do ->” submenu out of nowhere.
The Mandrake-specific tools have seen many updates again and new tools were added. However some they now are more confusing than before. There are so many tools spread across different options that they don’t feel elegant at all. For example, we got different pref panels for “X server”, for “monitor” and for the “gfx driver”. Why the bloat when you can have all three options on the same panel nicely layed out? And why a “Manage Connections” and a “New Connection” and a “Remove a Connection”? All these options are relatives, but it feels that they spread themselves thin all over the place just to fill up the “Network & Internet” sub-category. MandrakeSoft should get a clue from Mac OS X’s preference panels on this one. MandrakeSoft should put together panels that make sense to be together and not fill out screens after screens with panels that for example only have two radio-buttons and nothing else and they could be part of another related panel.
Additionally, configuring CUPS seems to be indeed a nightmare. All these confusing options on the printing submenu about Lexmark, a printer that I don’t have… Sending a fax is not as straightforward as it is on Mac OS X either.
Also, urpmi is awkward. Its setup is not elegant, I would much prefer preconfigured servers based on my location and a nice gui tool for installing new apps.
I truly hope that MandrakeSoft will fix the remaining bugs for the commercial version in 1-2 months, ’cause I will be watching…
Conclusion
Despite the problems above, I must say that I have re-affirmed my trust to Mandrake Linux. All previous Mandrakes were filled with dissapointment for me, but this time I believe MandrakeSoft has created something that is much-much better than in the past. If MandrakeSoft pulls it off and fixes the problems above, they got a winner. In fact, I believe that this is the highest score I ever gave to any Linux distro so far.
For the next PC I would be buying for my little brother (not so little at 25 years old, but he still is the baby brother for me), it would be with Mandrake Linux in it. Slackware is still my favorite (overall score 7.83/10 in my Slackware 9.1 review) because of its simplicity under the hood, however Mandrake Linux 10 has all the tools/software a newbie needs to start off with Linux. Just fix the obvious bugs please!
Installation: 9.5/10
Hardware Support: 9/10
Ease of use: 8/10
Features: 8/10
Credibility: 5/10 (stability, bugs, security) (it was 7 before this change)
Speed: 8/10 (UI responsiveness, latency, throughput)
Overall: 7.91/10 (it was 8.25 before this change)
After installing MDK 10 Community my usb scanner and digital camera wouldnt work. I found the fix for anyone that is interested I logged in as root from the command line and checked off the ACPI check box in the Mandrake Control Center under the LILO preferences. Rebooted and voila it worked.
I still have a problem with the find files program under KDE and some sound issues. I am getting scratchy sound from it. Two dvd issues one cant read the dvd disc consistently. Plus a problem with movie playback even after the libcvss is installed.
Hopefully Mandrake will fix these bugs for Mandrake 10 Official. Compared to Mandrake 9.2 official which worked flawlessly for me. This version of Mandrake 10 has been a bit of a challenge. Hopefully they will fix this and all the other bugs if not I will have to go to a Debian system or Slackware or just take the plunge and do a Gentoo install.
>Ever consider that you may have flaky RAM or some other hardware problem?
A RAM hardware problem does not create bugs like “I won’t change your theme” or “adding the WhatToDo-> menu even if you never asked for it after a menu update”.
Please! We are not newbies around here!
Typed glxgears and no problems here worked fine.
Perhaps not, but you certainly seem to have a serious problem with someone disagreeing with your estimation. And yes, bad hardware CAN cause problems such as “KDE’s Kontact will reproducibly crash when clicking on its “notes” button.”
I can assure you, I have no bad hardware. Linare and Xandros did not exhibit any such problems on that machine. And regarding Mandrake, I have had many such bugs on previous versions of mdk on other hardware as well. Just read my previous reviews for 9.0 and 9.1: lots of bugs. MandrakeSoft has evolved their offer in many levels, but the amount of bugs they got is much more than any other distro. Maybe Fedora is only close to them in # of bugs I find per hour.
No, Slackware doesn’t have such bugs in general (some stuff are buggy, but you need to really search hard to find them).
Sorry I’m not Mandrakesoft’s SQA department. I just wanted a stable, fast distribution with the 2.6.3 kernel and not have to compile like Gentoo. Like I said before, I’m waiting on SUSE 9.1.
I have a system that I am constantly testing on to see if any of the new distros are worth a damn. And my main system with Gentoo on it. Well, I tried Mandrake and was sorely disappointed with it. I thought the test release of Fedora Core 2 was better than this, even without mp3 support at install. It felt more responsive and had less bugs than Mandrake and it isn’t a release version yet! Well, I believe I will be sticking with Gentoo!
“except that it asked me for a non-existent 4th CD […]”
IRIX 6.5.x (arguably one of the most user-friendly proprietary Unices) does this too with maintainer vs feature release. It is really a non-issue as long as you know what you’re doing because the manual states this. I don’t know wether the MDK manual states this. But there’s no damage at all regarding IRIX and i wouldn’t ask to have even more various images beyond the 3, or 4-default.
“My reason for not keeping 10.0 an my laptop (acer tm662) was that every
time X started the screen looked like pay-tv without a decoder – until
you switched to terminal and back, then everything worked (except
knotes, which crashed, but only when called from within kontact…). In
RC1 everything had worked fine. Except USB. Erm, except the mouse, which
did fine again.
Luckily I had kept my 9.2 partition. Right now I’m giving Debian another
chance, this week I got X and kde 3.2.1 running for the first time
”
Have you filed a bugreport to the maintainer of the package or to upstream maintainer?
“first, my centrino support! after getting ndis wrapper, it does not work! dont knw why!”
Most likely you need the actual driver from MS Windows. Don’t worry too much, Intel has finally released some source as driver for this WiFi card. Info/status at http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net
“I’ve read in the press realease that NTFS support has been completely rewriten.
Has anybody tested it? Is it really safe to use NTFS writing now on Mandrake 10.0?”
The answer is: Yes and no. I’ll explain later.
Since this MDK release has Linux kernel 2.6.x and since Linux kernel 2.6.x (as well as newer 2.4.x versions) has the “new”, rewritten NTFS implementation it does support the “new” features.
But wait. While the write support AS-IS _does_ work, is _more_ clean, is _nicer_ wtitten and _is_ safe (in contrast to the old driver), it is not fully functional! You can read exactly which parts of write support is supported at: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#3.2 also see paragraph 7 for more info about this new driver and for solutions to write to ext2/3fs see paragraph 3.2
Want write support for NTFS on Linux? You can use Captive then. It uses the ntfs.sys from your Windows machine. It works, but it is a “quick, dirty hack” and the driver ain’t open source. Also, be aware you need a Windows License. Works for NT/2K/XP. See: http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/
“Frankly, I’ve got to the point where I’ll only install distros which
include drivers for my ADSL modem (a common USB type). Linux distros who
go on about not supporting or issuing non-free software aren’t getting
the important point that an incomplete product is an incomplete product
regardless of their precious principles.
People just want their stuff to work.”
(That’s why i took the more expensive Ethernet one 🙂
Yeah i know someone who had a problem with their USB Modem too. He fixed it with Mandrake 9.x but with quite some work. Which modem do you have? I don’t know which howto he used but you might find the USB Modem link here http://www.adsl4linux.nl/links.php helpful.
“While I support the Free(Libre) Open Source Software philosophy, I find
it hard to say “Tough Luck!” to someone who wants his nVidia graphics
card to use its 3D hardware. I will recommend using the (GASP!)
propriatary nVidia drivers.
I don’t know about anyone else here, but I use Linux becuase it works
well for me! It does what I need done very well and reliably. If, by
your comment, you feel that if you don’t refuse to have anything to do
with propriatary or closed-source software then you should NOT run
Linux, then I think you are way off-base.”
If you support the FLOSS philosophy i honestly suggest you do not
recommend people to buy NVidia cards when they’d like to use Linux or
suggest that they’d complain to NVidia for an open-source driver.
In fact, the damn driver is closed-source, except for a small wrapper
which has been ported by a 3rd party (minion.de) to 2.6; on which
NVidia’s support is based.
Let’s oppose their merits, behaviour, or whatever it should be called. Let’s advice people to buy _officially_, openly supported hardware by friendly companies instead 🙂
Here’s what I did. Y’all tell me if I am going to hell or not. I downloaded Firefox but didn’t know where to install it to. Where is c:program files in linux? Anyway I looked around and discovered that mozilla was in /usr/lib so I tried to drop firefox in there. No dice, you have to be root. Fine. I learned how to see a console in my konqueror window, used the su command that I learned from doing a google, and it still wouldn’t let me do it. Since I don’t know how to copy files or folders in linux, I had to log in as root and do it with the gui. Fine. I told KDE to unhide root, logged in, moved the folder, and went back to my normal login. Viola!
Can somebody tell me what book I need to learn about stuff like this? Things like “where should I install stuff?” and some basic console commands?
Just wanted to chime in and thank Drill Sgt. for the network hotplugging tip…he saved me some time fiddling with settings. Hopefully that will be disabled by default in the final release.
Hi
tldp.org
linux in a nutshell. please email me if you want more docs
regards
Rahul
Wow. The Linux Documentation Project. I am getting into this! Thanks Rahul.
With using redhat as a base to begin with, and not continue using it.
Now they have to many problems.
Does it still overwrite the MBR even though you tell it not too.
Yes I know ask this on every MDK release, but on every release the answer has been the same, and that it is not fixed.
Is it fixed this time?
I’ve had that happen to me before with MDK 9 I think it was. This time I unplugged my Windows HD before installing
The two biggest bugs I’ve notices is that XMMS won’t play my MP3s. It didn’t work when I did an upgrade installation, and so I did a full install (existing partitions so I didn’t lost /home) and it worked fine last night and this morning. But now it won’t play, just crashes when I try to play a song. I have uninstalled it an re-installed it and it doesn’t help.
The other bug is that Totem will play video but not sound. I just get static for sound. Mplayer works very well though, much better than 9.2 (I don’t get errors when opening clips), so I just uninstalled Totem and I’ll pretend it doesn’t exist.
That XMMS bug needs to be fixed though. My friends will be disappointed if they come over and can’t use XMMS, because it’s so easy and friendly and so much like winamp…the rest of the sound programs don’t come close to its coolness.
In regards to “The two biggest bugs I’ve notices is that XMMS won’t play my MP3s.”
You do know that alsa in part of the 2.6 kernel. Which means it’s not OSS. Which means you need to tell xmms to use ALSA instead of using your old config for OSS. Not hard, same for totem and mplayer and the rest of em. Good luck.
IF what you suggest is indeed the solution to the problem Halifaxion saw, then it is also MandrakeSoft’s fault for not configuring these applications correctly by default.
Indeed. And that’s what the Community Edition is for. Identifying bugs and reporting them.
This is a new development model for Mandrake. Make no mistakes about it: Mandrake 10 CE will be full of bugs and other problems. It is meant to be a stepping stone to the stable Mdk 10 release, less of a moving target than Mandrake Cooker (which is constantly evolving and therefore often not quite usable) but more up-to-date than the previous Mandrake release.
The community edition is not really meant for “normal” end users – that is not its purpose. It is there to provide a development freeze so that the QA department can build a rock-solid official release. All the bugs you’ve indicated are quite valid, however it’s kind of pointless to say that it’s “Mandrake’s fault”, as those bugs are expected. As always, the best thing to do is to report the bugs to the Mandrake bug database, in order to make Mandrake 10 Official Release the stable, most bug-free Mandrake distro ever.
I am sorry then, but I find the whole thing completely pointless then. If this is a technically a beta, it should be identified as such: a beta.
Calling it a “community edition” and then having thousands of people getting _dissapointed_ in it because they expect something that it is _not_ a beta (and ending up with gazillion of bugs that are better attributed to an alpha), has the worst result for the commercial success of the Official version.
Personally, seen ALL these bugs on CE (in my book, this is an alpha, not even a beta), I would never buy the Official version. It is just way too buggy and I as much I use it, I continue to lose trust to mandrakesoft again.
The purpose of 10.0 Community is to find and report bugs.
10.0 Official will be out in May.
I don’t understand why people don’t read announcements before installing – and then complain about things they could have known before.
Spot on!
People at MandrakeSoft should learn from Lindows how to market their pruduct.
After browsing through some comments, i have got the impression that MDK 10 is nothing else than a nail to be driven into their coffin.
It’s a shame though, but they are not in the same position as MS was with their Win9.x series where people had no other choice but to accept their bug loaded rubbish. MDK’s main competitor are other Linux distributor and not MS or Apple. It’s about time they face this reality and try to compete against the SUSE, Lindows, or what have you or else die.
Unfortunatly they have not learned from their past mistakes and keep on repeating them release after release.
I went into Options/Preferences and switched the output plugin from OSS to ALSA and it WORKS NOW!! Thanks Thoreau!
I really shouldn’t have had to struggle with that for a day though; this strikes me as one of those obvious “how did they miss this?” bugs like the Amazing Disappearing K-Menu from 9.2.
after fixing all bugs reported?
No, just the “official release” which is commercial.
sorry all you sad sacks Im happy with it, its great I have had no stability problems USB with my Card reader works really well the themes are great its very pretty, havent had a crash or a fall over, the preemtive kernel is excellent with a noticeable increas of responsiveness, stop complaining and learn to write code
I have one other question that’s always nagged me, maybe someone here can shed some light on it. In Mandrake 10, 9.2, 9.1, Lindows, Lycoris, and Red Hat 8 (all the linux distros I’ve ever tried), whenever you go into an administrative control panel or go to install something, it asks for the root password, and there’s a little checkbox that says “keep password” or “remember password” depending on the distro, and it never, ever, ever does anything at all, in any of the distros I have ever tried. Why does this checkbox still exist in KDE if it serves no function and doesn’t do what it says it does and never has? Does anyone know?
Because the people who coded that can’t develop something that works across different installations. I have seen it too, it doesn’t really work, don’t bother checking it. Usability nightmare (like many other on OSS/Linux)…
That’s funny. When they made their announcement about the two-step Community and Official release, most people were happy with that and said it was a good strategy, a good step towards quality. Now people are upset ?
Mandrake is the most popular distro, and thus has potentially more problems because it is installed on many, various, hardware. We knew the CE would have bugs, and by the way, most of these bugs have been already corrected in the updates, available to everyone. BTW, there have been betas and RC before the release of the CE, it is up to people who are interested to try them. And this 10 CE works very well for the majority of people.
So if you don’t want to participate to Free software development, just wait ! All versions Community and Official will be finally released to the public. Then you will be able to download a polished product.
Other people who think it is important to squash bugs in a product that is freely available, that respects the free software spirit by making a 100% free software version available to everybody, that develops tools under GPL, that do not restrict redistribution with a proprietary installer, like many other vendors, just report them on http://qa.mandrakesoft.com, or on the mailing-list cooker.
Well, I really don’t understand how you are able to find so many bugs. You had the same complain about 9.2, which I am running since 1 year now and I haven’t discoverded not one serious bug. I think that the problem is on your side, and not on Mandrakes.
Try to read more carefully the manuals
This is the first linux distro ever breaking hardware from my computer. I have always had a dual boot with XP and linux. The very first thing that Mandrake 10.0 did was giving black screen and frozening up computer after selecting windows from boot menu. Since there was no solution to this problem i decided to install RedHat 9.0 back. But the windows xp was gone. Next step was trying to format hard disk and make a clean windows install. Installation program started fine but then, every time after first boot, i got this error message: Error loading operating system.
I have tried everything including making only one partition using linux fdisk, using fixboot and fixmbr commands from Recovery Console, making two partitions and trying to install either on /hda1 or /hda2. Nothing works. All i get is that same nasty error message.
Since any linux distro does still install i can make only one conclusion: Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition has somehow broken the very first sector of hard disk so that the windows installation can no longer write the accurate boot information there.
After all the hype that i have red about Mandrake 10.0 i was going to test it first with Community Edition and then probably pay the Mandrake Club Membership and get the official release later this year. Right now the situation is so bad that i am thinking about making a legal suit against Mandrakesoft for ruining my brand new hard disk. I think one needs only to get couple more similar cases and that will be enough proof against them.
This is too bad since i have always liked linux and i have tried at least 1-3 new distros every year. I am really shocked about the ignorance they show to linux community. How can they release such dangerous bugs for linux users is beyond my understanding.
bug 7959
well iam posting this from a windows xp.. thats too bad,, but..
This means their community edition is like Fedora, and Official is like RHEL, except that RHEL is probably much more stable an tested.
I think they are actualy putting an unnecessary strain on their resources to develop like that. I see no logic in it. Mandrake should really go back to the drawing board and come up with a strategy that works.
The password is usually only saved until the next login. This is not a bug, it’s there for security reasons.
If this (kdesu) tool forgets the password there may be wrong file permissions (kdesud, setuid, setgid) which leads kdesu to forget the password cause because of possible security risk. This behaviour is by design and it’s a problem of the distribution.
It works great with Suse 9.0, without doubts the best platform for KDE. It works acceptable with Gentoo but not as good as with Suse. That’s because of inadequate gentoo configuration scripts. This is simply a distribution problem.
Programmer has no chance to fix this until linux gets organized. Luckily 99 out of 100 gentoo users aren’t aware of the problems and are happy.
But maybe you think of another tool than kdesu.
> This means their community edition is like Fedora
No. Alpha and beta testing in Fedora is longer as Official. Fedora Core 2 is schedule for may 10.
http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/
Quote Eugenia:
“No, just the “official release” which is commercial.”
And ‘commercial’ means?
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/pr-releaseprocess.php3
Quote:
“3) Two or three months later, in April/May, “Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official” will be created from the Mandrake 10.0 Stable branch. It will then be packaged for several products such as the Mandrake Linux PowerPack. Mandrake 10.0 Official ISO images will also be available for all contributors and Club Members; then, after a short delay, Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official Download Edition will be made available on public FTP mirrors.”
Quote Eugenia:
“No, just the “official release” which is commercial.”
Community is commercial :
http://www.mandrakestore.com/mdkinc/index.php?PAGE=tab_0/menu_0.php…
Price : 59.9 USD
Well, i don’ t see much of what you are talking about, but it seems that all about hardware issues :/
The fact is that i’ve installed Mandrake 10 on my three pces and everything worked out as sweet as candy
So i don’t know what to say except that for me it is the best userfriendly distro ever.Of course there are some minor bugs, but i don’t believe that there is such a thing as a bug free os 
its better you improve your english skills and learn to read instead of misinforming everybody!
CE is available for free to the public. the link you are refering to is for people who have a slow internet connection and cant download it …
thx for your 2 cents!
This is the latest in a line of bad distro releases from Mandrake. I have tried all of them in the last three years. None have been very user friendly in opinion. I had tried the 10.0 “cooker” release and found it to be awful, but I tried this release based on the review. Same results. I’m not a cheerleader for any one distro, but the only distros I have ever got to work like they should are the Debian based ones like Mepis, Lindows, etc. It seems to me that Mandrake could take a lesson from Lindows. It installed and ran like it was supposed to right from the start. Yell “newbie” all you want, but if Linux is ever going to become a desktop option for most users, it will have to be a lot easier to install than Mandrake. I know most people want to see Linux replace M$ on the desktop (me included), but this is not the one to do it.
I’ve packaged bittorrent for Mandrake Linux. Bittorrent IS already fixed more or less. The official version doesn’t even open the file open dialog on startup but gives you the help screen (the window without scroll bars) if started without a file name. So it’s already better than the official unpatched bittorrent.
If you don’t like the bt GUI, why don’t you send a mail to the bt devel list or the author?
I have to agree with you. To switch over to Linux we need a very user friendly Linux to capture them. Some of my friends that are switching over would still find this Mandrake still not preconfigured enough. To suggest to them a switch I would have to say between Xandros or Lindows. I love my Mandrake since 6.5. However they need to make it really preconfigured for these type of users. Having DVD working right of the box and all the java and other common plugins. Also Xandros and Lindows ask 4 questions or so in total during install. If we are ever going to capture those desktop users we got to make more distros like these two even better than these two to keep them.
On a personal note if Mandrake 10 official does not become as stable for me as 9.2 was. I will have to go over to a mepis, knoppix or libranet to get the stability of debian. Hopefully of this will be mostly fixed by 10 official. If not with a pain in my heart bye bye mandrake.
> its better you improve your english skills
You are right, i’m not confortable in english. Do you prefer portugues ?
> CE is available for free to the public. the link you are refering to is for people who have a slow internet connection and cant download it …
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/10/community :
Immediately as a DVD set which includes commercial applications such as Acrobat® Reader®, Real PlayerTM, NVIDIA® Drivers and more.
You want free software but can’t get it with Internet :
http://linuxinstall.org/fedora.php
price : $10
Why is it that Mandrake 9.2 detects my modem and sound card but 10 can’t? I have never understood that about linux distos. Really, why is it that they can’t just have things that work still work. Anyways I’m sure I’m not the only one that notices this. Just which the big companies would too. Microsoft does the same thing.
//Can somebody tell me what book I need to learn about stuff like this? Things like “where should I install stuff?” and some basic console commands?//
Look here:
http://www.lindows.com
😉
Why is it that Mandrake 9.2 detects my modem and sound card but 10 can’t? I have never understood that about linux distos. Really, why is it that they can’t just have things that work still work. Anyways I’m sure I’m not the only one that notices this. Just which the big companies would too. Microsoft does the same thing.
With this distro (mdk10) just be a little bit indulgent as it uses kernel 2.6 and old configuration files may cause some problems
I am sorry then, but I find the whole thing completely pointless then. If this is a technically a beta, it should be identified as such: a beta.
That’s your opinion, and you’re entitled to it, but clearly Mandrake is trying to do something different.
Calling it a “community edition” and then having thousands of people getting _dissapointed_ in it because they expect something that it is _not_ a beta (and ending up with gazillion of bugs that are better attributed to an alpha), has the worst result for the commercial success of the Official version.
I disagree. For starters, none of the bugs I’ve experienced are bad enough to make me want to switch distros (then again, maybe I’ve been lucky). Second, anyone who follows Mandrake news already knows that this is a bleeding-edge, not-so-stable distribution, and that the stable distro will be the official release.
The problem is that OSS evolves so quickly that it’s hard to only have an “official” distro and another that incorporates all the latest and greatest. It’s not a matter of Alpha or Beta – in fact, these terms may be suited for individual pieces of software, but they don’t apply as well to distributions. Mandrake’s solution is to branch out from cooker a distro that will receive bug-fixing attention, but no new package versions. It tries to “fix” the moving target in place long enough to turn it into a rock-solid distro, without stopping the continuing development of cooker.
I think it’s a brillant strategy, and since CE is not meant for commercial sale (i.e. no boxed sets) it’s also the smart thing to do from an “enterprise” point of view.
Personally, seen ALL these bugs on CE (in my book, this is an alpha, not even a beta),
As I have said, these terms are well-suited for software development, not building distros. There’s nothing “alpha” about my Mandrake 10 distribution – it works very well. But I’m sure that it can be made more stable for other systems. In a way, Mandrake has chosen to get out of the alpha/beta/RC paradigm, and has rather opted for an “experimental/unstable/stable” model. I think this is a very courageous choice.
I would never buy the Official version.
That may be, but as I’ve read in your other reviews, you are a very harsh critic. You don’t exactly represent the typical Mandrake community user, who this distro is targeting. I suggest you wait until Mandrake 10 official (unless you want to contribute bug reports).
It is just way too buggy and I as much I use it, I continue to lose trust to mandrakesoft again.
Well, it seems that the market disagrees with you on this one, as Mandrakesoft is now out of the black and trading on its stock has resumed.
They have made smart business decisions so far, and this in my opinion is another one of them. I think you’re being unfair in judging the CE on the same scale as the upcoming Official release, but then again that’s just my opinion! 🙂
After browsing through some comments, i have got the impression that MDK 10 is nothing else than a nail to be driven into their coffin.
Just a suggestion, but perhaps you should actually try Mandrake 10 instead of drawing conclusions on the comments section of a web site?
It might surprise you, but MandrakeSoft is now doing pretty well, financially. They are out of bankruptcy, are showing a profit and trading has resumed on their stock.
This new distribution paradigm is a brillant move, if a bit unorthodox. I’m certain it will pay off for them.
I tried Mdk 10 CE today… No network! I jumped through all the hoops, tried everything… zero, nothing. I searched some foruns and newsgroups and it appears I am not the only one. Network connectio (of all things) seems to be very broken on this version: until it gets fixed, it seems I will have to search somewhere else for a 2.6 distro (I have an AMD64, so 2.4 just doesn’t cut it…)
If you read the original post, the problem (if it was indeed the problem) was that the user was using his old /home directory which means it was using all his OLD configs, not fresh new configs. So its not really MDK’s fault if he his old configs dont match the new defaults.
> I have an AMD64, so 2.4 just doesn’t cut it…
Try Fedora Core 1 from AMD64 (with Linux 2.4 🙂 )
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2004-March/msg0…
For Linux 2.6 you should wait a little :
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2004-February/m…
“- Fedora Core 2 test 1 is currently only available for i386-compatible architectures. x86_64 will appear in a later test release.”
> the user was using his old /home directory which means it was using all his OLD configs, not fresh new configs. So its not really MDK’s fault if he his old configs dont match the new defaults.
Wrong again!
When I upgrade Windows or even Mac OS 9 to OSX or to a new OSX version, all my personal settings are preserved for important things like networking or sound.
If MandrakeLinux or Linux distros in general can’t do the same for versions released just 6 months ago, then it IS their fault.
That’s exactly the point, Eugenia: his old settings were preserved – but the new installation requires different settings to work.
This is a difficult problem to solve, as you can’t overwrite old settings without pissing off users (and rightly so), yet some of the old settings won’t work with the new system.
The point which the poster you were replying to tried to make is that this problem doesn’t happen on a fresh installation, i.e. sound is correctly configured if you install from scratch.
Ok, well then this is more generic linux problem in general. I know almost all programs I use on linux, for better or worse, use the configuration files they find if there any there. Even IF its an older config with out of date info.
Ever tried using RedHat 9 Gnome and use that same home directory under Sun’s gnome? Doesn’t work so well, and yes this happens at my school with NFS.
Also, when you upgrade windows how many system settins are actually saved and not just blown out of the water? (Don’t know about mac as I dont use it.) Last I checked a windows install wont go through and check EVERY single app’s settins and update it if needed. I guess I just see a flaw in the analogy of this is all.
Your point is taken to a point, but there is no reason to start yelling, and say wrong again, as I haven’t posted on this subject yet. geez
XMMS problem is more likely to be a known incompatibility between current XMMS and very recent versions of glibc, I remember it being discussed on the Cooker mailing list recently. Not a lot Mandrake can do about it. An easy fix is just to use beep media player instead – beepmp is basically a GTK+2 rewrite of XMMS, and is packaged for MDK 10.0 I think in contrib. Works great for me. looks nicer than XMMS, too. no .shn or .flac support though, which is irritating.
For the guy who doesn’t have a CD audio cable in his eMachines PC – you can too play audio CDs. In XMMS or beepmp, go to the input plugin preferences, edit the preferences for the CD audio plugin, and change it from analog output to digital extraction (or something like that, don’t remember the terms exactly). Then you should be able to open tracks from /mnt/cdrom and they will play back just fine. You can also use digital extraction to play them via mplayer – do:
mplayer cdda://
general comments on this article and thread – I see a lot of vague bitching and whining and virtually no actual significant bugs…
I finally got the 4 CD iso files and upgraded from RC1 to CE and so far I haven’t had any issues I normally have after an upgrade. Totem and XMMS are now working fine. I haven’t tried failsafe mode yet though. All other programs seem to be working well. Only crash I experienced was KOffice while trying to perform a spell check. Only happened once though. I have to boot from CD2 as some people have indicated they had to do as well. It’s as if the boot function of the iso file wasn’t included or picked up on by my machine when trying to boot from CD1.
Currently, I’ve beeing using Kontact, KGPG with GnuGP, Kopete, Juk, KOffice, Konqueror, and URPMI the most. None have given me any showstopper issues.
Compared to OS X, it is far from polished, yet it’s worlds better than windows 98. I rate it about the same functionality as windows 2000 or Mac OS 9. If it had a more consistant feel throughout with a tad better stability, I’d rate it closer to Windows XP and gaining on Mac OS X.
I suppose that’s why this is the community edition. We are the test bed for the final version. Let’s hope that philosophy pays off.
Isn’t it good practice to do some research before investing your money in any product you intend to purchase?
I was going to try MDK 9.2, but after reading that it could blow up your CD-Burner, I kept my hands away from it. OK, it had problems with a particualar brand, but for me it was reason enough to forget all about it ….. In this time and age it is simply not acceptable.
MDK might have financially recovered, but to regain the consumer’s confidence and to survive in the future it is absolutly vital that MDK10 has all the problems of previous versions ioned out and offer a better solution than their main competitors. This doesn’t seem to be the case, though.
I’ve installed MDK 10.0 on 2 different machines. And I have been using them alongside other systems with MDK 9.1 and 9.2. Here are my impressions:
– Instaler: same as MDK 9.2 (as far as I can see). That is, it’s good, looks nice and does its job. One minor issue: if you do network install in ‘expert’ mode, be ready to (iteraly) spell out your network-card module’s name, as MDK doesn’t even try to auto-detect. Too 31337? Maybe I’m getting old… Aside from his, it went beautifully in both scenarios: fresh install and upgrade from MDK 9.1. (yes, nine point one)
– Use: It certainly has some bugs (kontact, quanta…) but in general works pretty well. retty good for a ‘Community Edition’. Can’t wait for the ‘Final Edition’.
MDK 10.0 wors nicely, specialy after upgrading to the latest patches (check the ftp://…./mandrake-devel/stable/Mandrake/RPMS sources). Now Quanta works way better.
Then, I’ve had trouble with an ISA sound card and with hotplug+USB. The ISA sound card (SoudBlaster) gets detected, but no sound comes out from it. I’ve noticed that the booting process complains while loading the audio modules. Manual use of modprobe is no good. If I want to reboot/shutdown the system in a proper way, I need to disable hotplug daemon, as it ‘hangs’ the shutdown process. I guess I have two cases for http://qa.mandrakesoft.org .
Aside from this, I like MDK-10.0 a lot: the new MCC is a very good improvement. Then, the new menues are a huge improvement in aestheticaly, usabilit and logicality terms.
Of course, some DrakTools are lacking in user-friendliness and plain common sense (rpmdrake / rpmdrake-remove: WTF are they sepparated?). Eugenia is quite right here.
Then, speed. The test machines are no speed demons (P-2-450 and P-3-700), and both perform beautifuly: fast, responsive and nicely. This makes me get carried away and I try to do too much with the P-2 (192 MB ram) and I discover that 2.6 + KDE-3.2 are very good but do no miracles (try using OpenOffice, Moszilla, KDE 3.2, Quanta, several konsoles… at the sametimewith so little ram). hen, the P3, with 256MB, works like a champion.
As a side note, let’s disclose that my first distro was Slackware in’96. And I’ve used Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Caldera, TurboLinux, Kondara, Linux BBC, *BSD, *nix… BTW, I moved from SUSE to Mandrake ~ MDK 7.0 and never looked back.
Oh! both Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 have given me zero trouble. Of course, I update my systems, so I have avoided the ‘LG nightmare’ (which was LG’s fault), ‘disappearing menues’ (fixed in *november* 2003) and other nuisances that get corrected when they are found and *reported*.
Disclaimer: yes, I own *one* single MDKsoft share. < sarcasm > So I’m terribly pro-Mandrake as I want to get rich quick < /sarcasm >
Salut,
Sinner
I had the same prob. with disk 1. thought it was corrupt but K3b verified it was ok. Booting off disk 2 is the supposed quick fix for now, but it doesn’t actually prompt you for disk 1. BTW this is the best Mandrake yet…I am sure the full release in May will be far better.. this is more like a late beta release..
basicly you have official = stable, community = unstable and cooker = testing.
if you run cooker you can and will experience deprencey breaks, day to day updates that are to add features but not to fix bugs and so on.
any amount of internal betas and RC’s will not pick up every bug out there. that is unless mandrakesoft sets up a testing lab with so many computers that they cover every theoretical combo of every item of hardware out there, we do not expect this from microsoft so why should we expect it from mandrakesoft?
this is why community got started. its a bleeding edge relase that is stable when it comes to features but one that will not be 90% solid when it comes to bugs. in 2 months there will be another release of 10.0 called official, this will be one where they have tryed to solidify the community relase. this is what goes into the boxed relases and in my view is the one that should be reviewed.
i have followed mandrake as of 7.x and every time we get a .0 release you can be damn sure its more buggy then the one before it. i think it was 9.1 that broke my cdrom (in intslled fine but after reboot it would not read). the problem was solved with some chating on irc and a helpfull hint about a program called hdparm.
linux distro communitys are way more open then any propriatary os helpdesk you will ever find. here you can run into coders and translaters, and all are willing to listen and help out.
hardware conflicts comes in all shapes and sizes. thats why apple gets the nice rep (strict control on hardware). and when your trying to use a os that more often then not have hardware drivers that are reverse enginnered rather then made based on reliable info from the hardware makers you can and will see crashes in the strangest of places. hell i have seen windows 2000 hang on a hardware detection when installing (i removed a cheap pci modem and the install went fine, inserted the modem afterwards and it got detected and installed fine). for some reason we are expecting more from a garage project then from a os that have multimillions development fundings. given the origins of linux as a os im surprised there are not more things that go wrong on a daily basis.
oh and eugenia, get of your high horse. some of the things your pointing out are itches at best and others are stuff that only a style obsessed mac user would care about.
Errmm…you realize the CD issue wasn’t MDK’s fault right? The CD-ROM Manufacturer didn’t comply with standards and decided to add there own special calls to the hardware, so when MDK tried to use it in a STANDARD way it broke it (or in your words, blew it up)…but somehow, I suppose you could call MDK on that…maybe…or not.
Anyways, LG (the cd-rom mnf.) has since updated their firmware so they are using standard calls so its not even an issue any more….but you’re right. I can see why this would be a good reason to never ever ever try MDK.
All I ask of people is to TRY it out instead of taking other peoples word for it. If you give it a legit shot, and it actually does blow up your cd drive, well then you can whine and complain (and provide pictures). Until then, if you don’t have anything constructive to say, don’t say anything.
There are too many people on this thread with an axe to grind. You can pinpoint them in the following manner:
Mandrake sucks, use Lindows.
Mandrake sucks, use Fedora.
There are a few bugs and it is not perfect, but it is very good. Some things I like:
*Great menu layout.
*Koffice is awesome now.
*Breathed new life into my hardware. Things are super fast and you can multitask in a way that I have never been able to do before on this computer with any other OS.
*Juk is beautiful. By far, one of the most intuitive and stable media players in FLOSS land. Its mp3 tagger is impressive.
*Write click on any folder to zip it or burn it to CD. Did I mention how truly awesome k3b is?
*Kopete is great and it integrates very well in a KDE desktop and Kontact is shaping up very nicely.
The one thing that I would agree with Eugenia on is that Mandrake’s tools need greater integration.The network tool is particularly confusing and poorly laid out. All the others are pretty good, though. Mandrake also needs to provide better documentation as the one that ships with Mandrake 10 Community release mostly refers to the MCC 9.2 tools. Hopefully, this too will be fixed before final.
BTW, Eugenia, I think it would have been fairer of you to do a review of the official distribution as that is what you will do with Suse. If you plan to do so and this is more of a peek preview then, by all means.
Finally, Microsoft has all kinds of remote exploits and viruses daily and people put up with it.
Apple, a multibillion company, releases an OS that kills USB connected dries and people deal with it. Yet Mandrake releases its community edition under very clear terms of what it was and people complain about it. The MDK community release was announced here and it was explicitly slated for people that like to live on the bleeding edge. If you are not one of them, wait for the official release and stop whining.
I might give it a shot when the boxed version will be released in May; unless a miracle happens and i can afford an Apple G5 with OSX Panther ….
>You are right, i’m not confortable in english. Do you prefer portugues?
why not italian, german or french?
you did misinform, point. this only shows your lack of knowledge … perhaps you should use MS!
Thanks for the great thread – all sides have shown up – Not a programmer ( I am not worthy ,, I am not worthy … ), I wanted to drop in on behalf of the regular people – you know one of those who reads threads BEFORE unleashing things I barely understand on a 3 year old notebook that amazingly brings the world to my fingertips while I slouch in my bed { and runs well on open source – Mandrake 9.2 }
Eugenia – like your descriptions of what you liked in your first review and felt your frustration is the last one
10.0 is a few days away ( cheapbytes is close and has been reliable .. ) – one of those who uses Win for work and Linux for learning and everything else… I push Mandrake 9.2 to those around me who even look like they want to pop the bubble of security by exposition that MS seems to promote these days and even take time to help them install it.
My biggest problem today is that MS put an XP file ( MFT ) way across a partition so that I don’t have enough room on a 30 gig drive to partition the drive the way I want to for a 9.2 dual boot installation ( and don’t get me started on NTFS vs. FAT32 )
Bottom line – for us who want to contribute to the open source movement and no clue about programming, being able contribute a few bucks here and there and to be able to report a bug ( “Given many eyes … ” ) is inspiring. And Mandrake has been a way to do all that.
Solved… switched to a fixed IP, disable APIC and network hotplugging. Had some small problems with soundcard, also solved (VIA 8327, disable something on the INPUT of Kmix to get OUTPUT sound… weird). Now gaining courage to use ndiswrapper to get my WLAN connection working… *shudders* (BTW, thanks Eugenia)
Here is update to the hard disk problem that i had with MDK 10.0 and although i can’t get it to dual boot with xp, i was at least able to get windows back to my computer:
I have always had dual boot with xp and linux so technically it is nothing new for me. But for some reason, and i still don’t know why, Mandrake 10.0 first made xp no longer to boot and then later i was no longer able to get xp installation to finish when i had already formatted the whole hard disk for a single OS installation.
My own impression was that Mandrake has somehow messed up with the File allocation table in the beginning of hard disk. I tried everything i could including linux fdisk, windows 98 fdisk, windows xp professional recovery console and so on.
I was able to install any linux distribution back to hard disk but there was no longer the option to install windows alone without getting a bus load of error messages.
The last resort was to write about this problem to linux installation news server in my country. I had given up all hope of getting windows back to hard disk but then i received this nice little hint:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1000 count=1000
This simple linux command writes the beginning sector of hard disk full of zeros. And it works: I couldn’t believe my eyes when the xp installation no longer crashed in the error messages after first boot!
So i’m now writing this message from windows xp. I do have still those Mandrake disks and my first impression about the new distro was overall very good. But since it failed to boot xp i will not install Mandrake back to this hard disk.
The most important lesson that i learned from this incident is to have always a simple linux boot disk available so that if hard disk gets messed up and nothing else works, dd-command works. I was so desperate that the next thing would have been Low level format. Thanks to the linux news group i found a working solution!
I recommend that anybody having similar hard disk problems should try the dd-command. It will break nothing it only writes the MBR full of zeros. In my case it was also the only way to get windows back to my computer.
If anybody knows a working solution to making dual boot with xp and MDK 10.0 i am still willing to try it but it has to be rock solid and not messing up the Master boot record again. Somebody wrote in other forum that Mandrake has issues with BIOS but i’m not sure if it is also related to this dual booting problem.
Oh and one more last thing, i have a quality IBM hard disk, it is so far definately the best that i have ever had and i have tested about 15-20 different linux distributions in it. Normally the dual boot with xp and linux has no problems at all.
Also, from all of the distros that i have had, i like Fedora and Slackware. Debian is also very good. The problem with Mandrake is too fast release cycle and too many bugs.
I gave up on mandrake after 8.0, previously being an big supporter of thier distribution (altho I was never a card carrying member)
I’m not suprised that this release also falls short on the bug front – it’s been that way since 8x versions and for some reason, every single Mandrake I’ve tried since then has plagued me with problems on various platforms.
I’ve since become a more educated Linux user and have switched to Slackware for the time being, slackware 9.1 gives me everything I need at speed without the bloat and the bugs.
Seriously, Mandrake need to buck up thier act on the bug front NOW or get left behind. I understand that they have new policies in place where they will issue a final 10 version once bugs have been ironed out, but I don’t have time for that.
First things first – get a new designer and ditch Mandrake Galaxy – it’s childish and ugly.
is that people complained about the loadtime when it was one tool. now its a bit faster as it dont have to deal with both install and uninstall in one code. allso, with being two seperate windows its more clear what your doing. haveing one tab for intall and one for uninstall that look the same functionaly can lead to people wondering why the window they belive are the install window is showing only the stuff they have installed. its a combo of user ignorance/stupidity and murphy: if it can be missunderstood it will be missunderstood. and whats clear for one user is total confusion for someone else…
…But after using it for a while I’ve noticed that the release is Beta quality. Don’t get me wrong, but when apps like GIMP2 Pre3 and Pre4 can bring a whole system down by doing a Scale Image or when xxgdb locks the whole system, one might wonder how catastrophic it would be in a server environment. I don’t want to bad mouth Mandrake, because I wish for them to succeed as I’ve noticed that a great amount of work has gonne into this release, but hell, it should atleast be stable. I can live with a bugy system, but not with one that crashes unexpected and leaves me no other choice but “hit the Reset button on the tower”.
Good luck Mandrake, cause if you mess this one up, you’re gonne.
We went through this same scenario when Fedora was reviewed. It seems only Slackware gets good reviews here, but if it’s so great why isn’t everybody using it?
Not exactly. Fedora had some issues but they where corected soon trough patches. Based on Mandrakes past problems, if they keep it up like this there will be no difference. I think that they’ve jumped to soon on the NPTL/kernel 2.6 bandwagon. I was impressed at first with Mandrake 10 and was planning to support them, but the problems that I had with it made me go back to FC1. Slackware isn’t that great, but it has the least bugs because it’s focused on stability. I would say that performance with Mandrake 10 is outstanding but stability is crap, and when something like xxgdb or gimp2 brings the whole system to its knees, it’s unusable. Just my 2 cents.
Gimp 1.2 is the default. Gimp2 Pre is on the CD, but it is the responsability of the user to install a non finished software. So please don’t spread the FUD like Gimp2 being the default image manipulation software, it isn’t.
> why not italian, german or french?
french is also fine.
> perhaps you should use MS!
No since 1998 (Slack with Linux 1.2). I’m an Unix/Linux developer (mostly C++ and SQL).
Any over problem with me ? Do you want to know my size ? How old i am ? etc…
But GIMP2 works fine on any other distribution, and what kills me is not the fact that it doesn’t work as supossed, but that it brings the whole system down. This isn’t supposed to happen on any linux system.
Jesus!
On my system Gimp2 works perfectly by the way, so it may be specific with your machine and the compilation options of Gimp2 in Mandrake. Maybe you should make a bug report ?
>Any over problem with me?
yes, I dont understand why you try to misinform people by mean …
kde 3.2 is fast; mdk has a nice galaxy theme; but the digital out of my soundblaster live 5.1 doesn’t work and i didn’t find a way to solve that problem; the digital out works fine under mdk 9.1, xandros, …
Is Mandrake 10CE/OE, and Mandrake in general, bounded for friendly desktop usage, or it can be used also as an admin friendly server?
Working with different OS’es in network administration, the easy of use and completness of gui tools are important issues. Well I know, Linux lacks some of them.
This is my first Mandrake install ever.
The installation went quite smooth, well, cd1 did not boot (but readable), I had to make a floppy. Few problems became apparent only after(some security locks, as I choosed the higher level, an aditional locale not set properly).
The GUI tools for server administration are poor and dilluted. I do not mean a novice interface, but a way of having a comprehensive view of the whole configuration and a fast way of detailed setting. Which is not the case. BTW, is it possible to setup a DNS server in the way webmin interface is doing?
When I upgrade Windows or even Mac OS 9 to OSX or to a new OSX version, all my personal settings are preserved for important things like networking or sound.
If MandrakeLinux or Linux distros in general can’t do the same for versions released just 6 months ago, then it IS their fault.
I’d have to disagree. In our enterprise, we had major headaches when we upgraded to Windows 2000 SP4. Personal settings WERE preserved but with the SP upgrade they were now not valid. We had to invest major time upgrading many third party apps after SP4 broke them.
BTW, I have been using 10CE for a couple of weeks without any problems.
If you want stable and really de-bugged, try Mandrake 9.2.1 -the club release. It’s still really fresh, but proven.
I’m posting this from 10.0 Community on my HP laptop right now, so that my pre-ordered pressed 10.0 final-version PowerPack CDs will have benefited from MY debugging.
-AkBrian