Continuing with the fast development cycle, Mandrakesoft has released the first release candidate of Mandrakelinux 10.1. More info here. Update: LinuxBeta.com has prepared a 142 page slideshow of Mandrakelinux 10.1 RC1.
Mandrakelinux 10.1 RC 1 Released
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Excellent !
They seem to be moving at a fast pace recently IMHO.
It’s not as advanced as FC3 with its software versions, but I’ve been tracking Cooker, the Mandrakelinux development branch, since ~10.1alpha1 and it has been quite stable for me. Mandrake is and has been, for my use, a wonderful desktop and development system.
Kudos and many thanks for all of the hardwork from Mandrake and everyone else that went into this!
Mandrake is rounding out the last rough corners before the official release – shouldn’t be long now.
Eeeeeek, from looking at the Wiki, it’s far too short a timespan from initial beta to release. Contrast it with Fedora Core and other distros, and you’ll see what I mean.
The last few Mandrake releases have suffered from a lot of bugs (although update packages have sorted them out within time), so you’d think they would spend longer on QA.
Here’s hoping it’s alright. They’re putting together a whole operating system, and that requires a LOT of testing. I really believe a QA cycle closer to Fedora’s would really lead to some rock-solid Mandrake releases.
It’s looking good – Mandrake as ever, one of the most acomplished/polished distros out there – for such a fully featured distro, excellent performance now too – thanks to the devs/others – looking forward to the final release
yes, thats the reason why i switch over to debian..
mandrake is great on the desktop, but there are to many ugly bugs, and they must use more time to fix and make a stable desktop..
Mandrake 10.1 vs Fedora Core 3
Mdk 10.1:
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/
2004-09-04 Mandrakelinux 10.1 Release Candidate 1 ISOs available.
2004-08-22 Mandrakelinux 10.1 Beta 2 ISOs available.
2004-08-04 Mandrakelinux 10.1 Beta 1 ISOs available.
Fdr 3:
http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/
13 July test1
13 Sept test2
4 Oct test3
25 Oct Release open, announced
mdk :
Beta 1 -> rc1 : 4 weeks
Fdr :
test 1 -> test 3 : 12 weeks
I love Mandrake for desktop, but Mandrake 10.1 will be realese without kde 3.3 and that is a big error. They support the kde team.
142 page slideshow here at http://www.linuxbeta.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=85&slide=…
“Mandrake 10.1 will be realese without kde 3.3 and that is a big error.”
Nah, that’s a good thing. As said above, Mandrake has suffered from QA problems and sticking with KNOWN, TESTED software is a good idea. KDE 3.3 may be cool and all, but it’s totally new and hasn’t been hammered on yet. Whereas 3.2 has seen three patch releases and lots of testing.
So it’s good to see MandrakeSoft put some focus on stable packages. With a longer release procedure, it could really improve things!
Definitely. I’ll be happy to see KDE 3.3.3 or so when 10.2 comes out in April
Install it yourself? I keep hearing that Linux has the best package managers, so put them to use.
And when 10.2 comes out in April people probably will complain if Mandrake don’t include KDE 3.4 🙂
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/600
Regarding comparing the release cycle of Mandrake to Fedora Core. I must say, the finished result of Mandrakes distribution is SO much more stable and polished than FC. Installed FC2 and I have never witnessed such a broken distribution that was supposedly “release ready”. FC is perpetual beta, no point pretending otherwise. It doesn’t have a stable release.
Now I was looking forward to KDE 3.3, but I’m glad they’ve held back in a way. KDE 3.2 is very stable for me at the moment. Actually I’m very happy with Mandrake 10.0 overall at the moment and don’t feel compelled to upgrade.
Why mdk 10.1 will be so polish/stable ?
Because Gnome 2.6, Xorg 6.7.0, … are tested from many mounth in FC2 (and gentoo, debian-experimental, etc). Don’t forget this.
Hey!
http://www.linuxbeta.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=85&slide=…
Did they revert to the old control center style with side menu? From other screenshots looks like not, but this one somehow shows tree view.
Yes, they did and I am happy that that is the case.
I hope this new release comes with complete isos, i downloaded the usally 3 isos for Mandrake 10 Official Edition and the package manager asked me for a 4th CD, which didn’t exist on any mirrors.
Many software was in that CD that i needed.
Also, Mandrake has lost its bleeding edge apealing now, and have changed for a more stable distro…
Installed FC2 and I have never witnessed such a broken distribution that was supposedly “release ready”. FC is perpetual beta, no point pretending otherwise. It doesn’t have a stable release.
I’ve been using FC2 on my laptop for months and it’s not crashed once. By contrast, Mandrake 9.2 was dreadfully unstable and there has been only one release since then.
I’ve been using LM 9.2 at work for 11 months now and it’s been rock stable with a mixture of ext2, ext3 and xfs partitions. By contrast I couldn’t even get FC2 to install
Just to say that being a strong supporter of linux I still think that the release process of most if not all linux distributions is really really broken (QA wise).
You never know if something that worked for 1 release will work for the next release.
I’m still using Linux at work because all in all as a developer I like it much more than WinXP (more flexible) but recently I just got a Powermac G5 dual 2GHz @home and (although Mac OS X has its quirks) I can now get the best of both worlds (commercial/oss) and I’ve never been happier with my computing life.
As for LM10.1 well I can’t install it ‘cos it chokes on my SATA drive on my ASUS P4S800D-E Deluxe…
Yes, it’s a very good thing that they reverted to the side-paned Control Center: it’s also much more KDE-like (the 10.0 implementation looked strangely “spatial”, Ã la GNOME 2.6).
What I would like most, anyway, is a pre-installed selection of additional mirrors (besides the update ones), in order to not be forced to use the (otherwise excellent) EasyUrpmi (http://www.urpmi.org/easyurpmi ) or – even more complicated – manual configuration: why should a new user have to manually do this additional effort? There should also be an easy, built-in way to integrate cooker/development mirrors into the GUI frontend for urpmi: for example, Mandrake 10.0 shipped with the broken (see broken IMAP mail, at least for some providers) Mozilla 1.6, and it’s a real PITA to be forced to manually add a cooker mirror in order to be able to download an updated Mozilla 1.7, for example – also as the official Mozilla from the official site doesn’t yet have the antialiased fonts in Linux (why?), thus being almost unusable.
BTW, does anyone know what “urpmi” exactly means? “Universal/Unified RPM Installer”, maybe? Just curious… 🙂 (Sorry, I’m not really a Mandrake expert (I come from OS X, mainly).)
Ok, I have asked this before but I didn’t get a clear answer. Does anyone know whether this version of Mandrake and FC3 just like the prev one still mess up (try to fix, whichever way you put it) your partition table? I hope this problem is fixed so I can safely install it along my XP system.
The problem has been fixed a long time ago.
Everybody here are forgetting that when this release comes out it will be 10.1 Community Edition!! Not OE – Official Edition. For OE it takes more time and bug tracking!
Exactly. CE is like a full freeze of code, which is released for testing by the Community, which provides a broader set of sw/hw configuration, that is the reason of this relatively fast pace moving from alpha to RC. The Official MDK10.1, the one that will be boxed and have support, the one that you can complain all you want w’ont for a while. You may think CE as a public beta (ala MS).
there’s actually a nice tool called urpmi.setup designed to do exactly that. comically, it’s in contrib, and not on the smaller CD sets. *sigh* (I also don’t know if it still works, it hasn’t been updated for a bit and I don’t know if it can still read easyURPMI properly, it uses easyURPMI for a “backend”)
urpmi stands for user-mode RPM installer. In early versions of MDK, users could install RPMs. This was quickly reversed as bad for security, but the name stuck.
as imapi and rambus pointed out, the representation of the release cycle given above is inaccurate. Besides not including the gap between CE and OE, as they point out, it also fails to include the pre-alpha snapshot released a couple of months back, and Alpha 1.
“Also, Mandrake has lost its bleeding edge apealing now, and have changed for a more stable distro…”
That’s just reading too much into release cycle coincidences. The decision not to include KDE 3.3 was made a *long* time ago – IIRC, back at the very start of the 10.1 process – on the basis that the release of 3.3 and 10.1 would be far too close. When a major new release of a DE or something is going to be included in a version of MDK, Cooker is upgraded to the alpha / beta as soon as it can possibly be packaged in order to work out all the bugs. For e.g., we had GNOME 2.3 in Cooker all the way through the beta process before the release that included GNOME 2.4 (don’t remember which release that was…). Since the decision not to include KDE 3.3 was made, Cooker stuck with the 3.2 series releases. Since 3.3 has not been tested in Mandrake at all, there’s no way it could be included in the release. That would be nuts. Mandrake has the same policy on new releases it’s always had, and this choice fits in with that.
fix for FC3 (and the incoming FC3 test2). AFAIK.
Thank for the useful info, AdamW.
BTW, another thing I would like to see in the Mandrake 10.1+ releases is the “themed” OpenOffice.org – http://kde.openoffice.org , – to be found in SuSE 9.1: Mandrake being essentially a KDE-based distro (even if better GNOME integration is also a good thing, of course), it would make the most sense. Here’s a link to a screenshot:
http://www.suse.de/en/private/products/suse_linux/prof/images91/oof…
The SuSE window theme also looks really, really good, IMHO: it would be nice to have a Mandrake “variant” of this… 🙂
… then smile that OOo wich comes with 10.1 is 1.3 and it is themed
… then smile that OOo wich comes with 10.1 is 1.3 and it is themed
I think it is OO 1.1.3 rather than 1.3 and yes it is indeed themed but using the Ximian icons and not KDE icons as Suse does. For a KDE centric distro that is rather unfortunate.
… that the new MDK OOo is themed: the best thing would be, obviously, to get the KDE look and feel (see previous screenshot) when logged into KDE, and the GNOME/Ximian one (http://www.gnome.org/projects/ooo/screenshots/writer.png ) when logged into GNOME. We’ll see, I guess…
I tried Mandrake 8 a while back and found it unprofessional and broken. Now I tried Mandrake 10 and it still is as unprofessional and broken.
The configuration tools are awful. They all open in the same window, there are 4 icons, I think, for network configuration: one for removing connections, one for adding, one for watching, one for managing. WTF? When I looked for a way to connect to Internet I accidentally found it… and it didn’t work. But it didn’t tell me why. WTF? I had to manually start dhclient.
In short awful GUI design and implementation. And then people wonder that Linux isn’t ready for desktop and Mandrake isn’t more popular.
All is not bad. Slackware was easy to configure and worked immediately. Some people finally recognised a need for a (registry) systemwide database and API for configuration.
http://elektra.sourceforge.net
Mandrake should use Elektra. Using this API, configuration tools can be easily written.
“I tried Mandrake 8 a while back and found it unprofessional and broken. Now I tried Mandrake 10 and it still is as unprofessional and broken.”
Thanks for your input, troll. You can’t get Mandrake to work but Slackware is easy. What did you read this somewhere because you couldn’t possibly be serious. Compare the popularity of the two distros and you’ll have your answers. Slackware is bare bones, almost nothing out of the box. No decent package management system and as as skimpy a selection of apps to be found with any distro. Stick with Windows. It was meant for people like you.
Thank you for calling me a troll for my constructive criticism. I indeed stick to Windows XP. Slackware worked according to the manual and Mandrake didn’t. There are many apps for Slackware at
http://www.linuxpackages.net/
There’s a great distribution of GNOME for Slackware at
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/
mandrake is not kde-centric either officially or unofficially. equal effort is put into development of both KDE and GNOME and the official position is that mdk is desktop agnostic. there has to be a default, and it’s KDE, mainly just because it always has been. that doesn’t mean it’s any more important or better maintained than GNOME.
it’s also worth noting many other WMs and DEs work fine in Mandrake. I use XFCE currently, as I’m on a fairly slow old laptop, and MDK’s packaged XFCE is great.
“I think it is OO 1.1.3 rather than 1.3 … ”
sorry my mistke. of course it is 1.3 