Mandrake Community Edition is the bleeding edge of the Mandrake development cycle. This is the release where the good folks over at Mandrake put the final test on new features and squash all the bugs they can before the final release. The ISOs are available through MandrakeClub for download before anyone else gets to see it. So is it worth your hard-earned cash to join the club? Is 10.1 going to be worth the upgrade? Find out in this review, fresh off the presses at LinuxForumsDOTorg. OSDir is also featuring a slideshow of Mandrake 10.1 screenshots.
Mandrake Community 10.1 Reviewed!
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Is this the default theme?
http://linuxforums.org/forum/images/content/MDK10.1_sysadmin.png
WOW!!
I wish it was the default theme; hope I’m not the only one to think it’s just beautiful.
But It looks like some Superkaramba dock.
This desk seems pretty customised to me.
Might look nice, but this superkaramba thing wastes a lot of screen space, especially that thick blue bar at the bottom; hope it’s easily configurable.
Anyway, I am a MDK fan (and not ashamed of that) so I am looking forward to check it out, although I am happy with 10.0 by now.
I have been using Mandrake 10.1 since they relesed it. I have mixed feelings about it.
Mandrake 10.0 was simply amazing. I had been using that as my primary OS ever since I got a copy of it on disc. When 10.1 was released I quickly downloaded and installed it. I was disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong, I did like the switch to XORG, and the whole thing runs faster and uses 64MB less RAM than 10.0
What annoyed me the most was the cable modem settings would not store between reboots, other things was that ALSA would stop and have to be restarted and the ATI driver would flash rapidly during extended bouts of shooting allies when I was playing Enemy Territory…..
Now the good news…..
A quick websearch for “easy urpmi” throws up a site. you tell it which version of Mandrake you are using,( 10.1 ) is supported. Tell it that you want Main, Contrib, and PLF, at the next stage it gives the commands you type in a console as root.
BUT instead of typing that in, you can use the control centre to enter them as FTP sites. I did that, they downloaded the lists and I was ready to go. I ran Mandrake Update from the menu and there was 900MB of updates already. I downloaded these, and it fixed all the queries I had with Mandrake 10.1… except Kontact, which after the update, now looks a bit too much like an XP program !
The system is excellent after you do the update and it is extremely fast if you go to kde-look.org and get the liquid theme, dunno why, just is.
One thing though, I cannot for the life of me work out how to get the icons down at the bottom like in the screenshot. I know they belong on the kicker, but as you can see there, the kicker is at the top. How him do that ?
Conclusion:
Mandrake 10.1 EXCELLENT for me
Mandrake 10.1 Not too good if you are not on broadband and cannot update
I think you can just make it disappear and back when the mouse passes over it, just like KDE dock in fact.
Hmmm….Hope so.
You asked:
One thing though, I cannot for the life of me work out how to get the icons down at the bottom like in the screenshot. I know they belong on the kicker, but as you can see there, the kicker is at the top. How him do that ?
In KDE configuration centre, look and feel you’ll find an option to place kicker whereever you want and resize it to your taste.
I know that.. that is not what I was asking.
I want to know how to keep the program icons at the bottom, like OSX but keep the kicker at the top of the screen, you know ? like in the screenshot
I think he’s using something like ksmoothdock in the screenshots:
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=6585
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=10955
The superkaramba theme is totally independent from Kicker.
so you can have set kicker to be top of the screen and let the OSX-like thing (Superkaramba?) at the bottom.
On my Linuxbox at home I have both, and it looks quite the same as in the screenshot.
I was using a distro about a year ago, I cant remember which one, but I was able to set up the kicker exactly like that, without running superkaramba. It was in the help pages that came with that distro. I just have forgotten how to do it
Anyway, I am at work at the minute and have to use win2k in here
so I cant even mess around with kicker now that it is fresh in my mind.
In fact, I will check this thread out tonight when I get home and hopefully I will be reminded to have another look at the kicker set up when I read these posts
yeah! Right!
And we can see that Kicker is top of the screen.
they broke kdebase again. kde kioslaves bug hell of alot (vanilla packages does not). saving over sftp:// is broke, it requires remote file to have 777 or file cannot be saved. great work again mandrake. too hard to NOT apply your patches that BREAK EVERYTHING ?! well, back to slackware. it just works. because IT DOESNT PATCH ANYTHING.
has anybody found update mirrors that work?
Excellent distribution, picked up all my hardware – fast and solid – all in all, good
Right click on Kicker
Go to Add->Extension
Click External Taskbar
That’ll put kicker one place and the application taskbar some where else.
I’ve installed it as soon as it has been released and so far I’m pleased, it’s visibly faster than 10.0 on my PC
yes, thats it, I remember now. Thanks
also @reddaz
here are some ftp servers that work properly. add them as ftp servers in rpmdrake, or the control centre.
plf
http://ftp.free.fr/pub/Distributions_Linux/plf/mandrake/10.1
main
http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/ftp.mandrake.com/Mandrakelinux/devel/10.1/i586/m edia/main
contrib
http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/ftp.mandrake.com/Mandrakelinux/devel/10.1/i586/m edia/contrib
or go to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org“>Easy and select ones local to yourself… either add them like I said or do it through urpmi.addmedia
Once you have these, the MandrakeUpdate works sweet
the transparent thingie below is ksmoothdock. and you might run Mandy 10.1C, but I whoulnt use the cooker. it breaks. for sure. now or after some time, but it will break. if you want to be up-to-date, use gentoo or debian-unstable or slack -current. not mandrake cooker.
I am sure mandrake 10.1 final will be a good product, by the way.
urpmi.addmedia main
http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mandrakelinux/devel/…
with synthesis.hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia jpackage
http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mandrakelinux/devel/…
with synthesis.hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia contrib
http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mandrakelinux/devel/…
with synthesis.hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia updates
http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mandrakelinux/offici…
with media_info/synthesis.hdlist.cz
I’ve posted a comment on themes and the such at linuxforums.org. Please see the article there.
🙂
I had already setup urpmi sources through easyurpmi, but I cant seem to get the ones for the updates to work because all mirrors urpmi tries to contact are listed as unreachable.
Has it been any ones experience that some file names in the file list obtained from these urpmi mirrors are out of date. For instance downloader for X (d4x) cannot be found because urpmi is trying to retreive an older file namely 2.5.0 – rc4 while it has been updated on the ftp site to 2.5 final. This after having done a fresh media update.
Nothing much objective in there.
http://osdir.com/shots/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=147&slide=1
>”What annoyed me the most was the cable modem settings would not store between reboots”
I am having a simmilar experience with MDK 10, I noticed if I make custom changes to the hosts file it will re-write my custom file after a reload and revert to the default file.
I notice that changing the default in /etc/lilo.conf has no impact on lilo what so ever. I get the impression I could probably just remove that file without impacting the system.
I also notice that if I change my TCP/IP settings in /proc/sys/net/core/* that the changes are seen on the TCP/IP stack, and again are changed back if I reload the system.
Where is all this control I keep hearing about?
..that the changes are not* seen on the TCP/IP stack..
Also if I change the order of the entries in lilo.conf they are not changed in lilo. I can also add and remove entries and the changes do not show up.
After changing lilo.conf you need to run lilo (type lilo at the commandline) in order for the changes to be written to the boot record.
Looking at the osdir screenshots.. Why is the package selection part of the “partitioning” step, and why does the “Summary” step include _configuration_ for the sound, network, etc, and other hardware. That’s hardly a summary.
According to his review he was ‘hard pressed to find any bugs in this release. Everything went so smooth you’d think that it was the official release’.
Well, I think that he didn’t install the nvidia drivers. Iv’e tried it a while ago, so maybe updates from mandrake corrected this problem. See http://ariejan.net/content/view/85/32/ for more info.
Overall I was pretty impressed with this distro, really smooth and polished, although I was really disappointed that they didn’t include kde 3.3. Yes, I know that they want a more stable distro, but a distro without gnome 2.8 & kde 3.3? Pity…
I forgot to mention that he has really weird fonts. Take a look at http://linuxforums.org/forum/images/content/MDK10.1_sysadmin.png . Yuk! I’ve encountered the same problem in the past, didn’t find a solution besides a reinstall
.
The fonts should be way better, something like this: http://images.mandrakesoft.com/img/10.0/s5.png . Huge difference IMHO…
does it support the silicon integrated si3512A?
their online hardware database doesn’t confirm.
the mandrake 10.0 installer fails … but if you do a modprobe sata_sil at the right moment it works… but booting fails. i wonder if 10.1 will work?
RE: “disappointed that they didn’t include kde 3.3. Yes, I know that they want a more stable distro, but a distro without gnome 2.8 & kde 3.3?”
me too, i have KDE-3.3 running nicely in slackware-10. for a while i had doubts about KDE as there were a few releases that were slow and buggy, but now it looks like the kde people definatly worked the bugs out and polised it up nicely,
although i personally prefer slackware i do reccomend mandrake to people that show an interest in learning Linux since it is a good distro for first timers and Linux newbies that is quite user friendly…
… a no go: it kept asking for the second CD image over and over again, even if it was already captured and active – and, after installing only with the first CD image (ignoring the others), upon restart it always ended up in an unrecoverable processor error (the VPC processor, I suppose).
Obviously, Mandrake 10.1 CE and VPC/Mac 6.1.1 don’t like each other too much: I hope this will be solved in the final release, also as other previous releases always worked (albeit quite sluggishly, of course).
Not that all this is of vital importance – but anyway… 🙂
have you tried to write your own script with ifconfig and then symlink it to the default runlevel? i couldn’t figure out how to properly set up hdparm on fedora core 2 so i just addded a script in /etc/init.d and symlinked it to S45myscript
yeah, I registered at your site earlier in the year. to be honest it was total shite.
I went back today after your blatant plug….
I was most pleasantly suprised by the much improved content. well done, keep it up dude !
Question:
I’ve installed MDK 10.1 Community + KDE 3.2 + ATI drivers 3.14.1.Then I used CD4 to upgrade to KDE 3.3. I use KDM as my session manager.
Due upgrading KDE, I ran throught the keyboard issue and fixed it.
But now I have another problem. If I switch to another session, X or text (vt7/vt8 or vt1…vt6), the vt7 sessions restarts itself. Besides loosing current work, vt7 starts stealing session focus even from text terminals (I switch to vt1 and vt7 refocus and restarts itself!!!), until KDE has finalized initializing.
When I ran the X session from cmd (startx), all messages I get in the text screen after Xsession crashes (if I ran it from cmd it does not restart itself, I guess due KDM is not present) are something like Connection lost.
Any ideas on this ? Please save the KDE3.3/MDK10.1 is untstable, bla bla …
i couldn’t figure out how to properly set up hdparm on fedora core 2 so i just addded a script in /etc/init.d and symlinked it to S45myscript
How was this hard to do in Fedora. It is dead easy. just edit the files /etc/sysconfig/harddisks . That file contains all the settin for your dma/hdparm.
From the review:
“It seems that Mandrake has finally accepted it’s role as the power-house, number one Linux distribution. The whole look and feel of Mandrake 10.1 screams out that they’re ready to show the world just what they can do and that there’s a reason they’re the number one distribution.”
The number one distro by who’s reckoning? I haven’t seen or heard any numbers to back that up… Everything I’ve seen says Red Hat still holds the number one position, with SUSE and Debian behind them, leaving Mandrake in 4th at best… Slightly biased reviewer, perhaps?
Perhaps the author is going solely on the page hit count on DistroWatch… Which, by the way, still adds up to Red Hat in front of Mandrake (DistroWatch stupidly splits out Red Hat and Fedora hits).
No, I’m not a Red Hat bigot (but I use it, along with Debian and Gentoo), I just don’t like people who make stupid claims. For a more realistic figure, I like to look at NetCraft’s Linux distribution market share numbers. Red Hat is number one, then Debian and SUSE. I forget if its Mandrake or Gentoo in 4th.
urpmi mirrors
By Heema (IP: 212.12.248.—) – Posted on 2004-10-12 12:42:21
thank you!!!
the easyurpmi site is down, so i couldn’t get urpmi set up as i had no clue as to where to pull stuff from.
Which, by the way, still adds up to Red Hat in front of Mandrake (DistroWatch stupidly splits out Red Hat and Fedora hits).
Fedora is separate. Red Hat is the desktop distribution that Red Hat discontinued.
I like to look at NetCraft’s Linux distribution market share numbers. Red Hat is number one, then Debian and SUSE.
Netcraft looks at servers. Not really relevant in this context. Even then, 52,000 servers on the internet isn’t to be sneezed at for such a company.
For a more realistic figure, I like to look at NetCraft’s Linux distribution market share numbers.
What other measure is there for this sort of thing? Given supposedly heavily backed distributions like Fedora and Suse there must be a reason for it. Yes, I know you have to log on and register, but I think that shows how successful Mandrake’s community spirit and following is. If they can build on that as a business then I think they look pretty good.
I haven’t really used Mandrake except for the time my friend had it on his computer, he had a dual-boot setup. I liked using Mandrake at the time, but had Red Hat on my computer at home…when I get a computer again I may try Mandrake 10.1 or Gentoo as I have never tried Gentoo so I am leaning towards Mandrake.
Michael
http://phantasyrpg.com/main.php?view=9898
Mandrake was my first distro, but soon I moved to SuSE and Debian.
I have tried every version, even after Mandrake was no more my main distro and I have found the following:
1)The overall stability is not comparable to SuSE or Debian.
2)Their heavy customized kde annoys me, especially the weird menus: what is wrong with kde as it comes from Kde.org?
3)No root login: OK, I can get root login to kde in a few seconds, and I know this a highly controversial issue, but why do they think that their users need a nanny?
4)URPMI: it might have been a great tool when it came out, but now I find apt4rpm so much better and faster.
5)Last but not least: prices. Their Powerpack doesn’t have a DVD, you must buy it separate. If you want what you get from SuSE Pro you must pay a lot more (especially considering that you can buy the Upgrade edition for just $50)
have you tried to write your own script with ifconfig and then symlink it to the default runlevel? i couldn’t figure out how to properly set up hdparm on fedora core 2 so i just addded a script in /etc/init.d and symlinked it to S45myscript
Wow, Linux is surely ready for desktop acceptance. No personal attacks but imagine an ordinary user in this situation.
That’s a little unfair. Cooker doesn’t break much more often than debian unstable; they serve the same purpose. I’ve been running Cooker exclusively on my systems for years now – so long as you’re intelligent about updating and read the damn mailing list, as you’re advised to, it’s perfectly feasible. Nothing I’d recommend for enterprise systems or servers, but perfectly feasible.
“1)The overall stability is not comparable to SuSE or Debian.”
I have only been logged into 10.1 for aobut 15 mins, so I can’t speak on this.
“2)Their heavy customized kde annoys me, especially the weird menus: what is wrong with kde as it comes from Kde.org?”
Oh yeah. To change the background in KDE, you still must click through the main menu, then 4 submenus. In stock KDE, you are almost always 2 menus away, main and sub. Yeah, I know this is nitpicking, but I hate whacked out menus.
“3)No root login: OK, I can get root login to kde in a few seconds, and I know this a highly controversial issue, but why do they think that their users need a nanny?”
Not only that, but where is kdm? What was so wrong with it that Mandrake had to replace/modify it?
“4)URPMI: it might have been a great tool when it came out, but now I find apt4rpm so much better and faster.”
Mandrake system tools are very fast these days, even though install/uninstall are STILL no longer in one app.
The most worrisome of all is, the kernel-source is no longer included in the community edition, not that Mandrake kernel source was ever known to compile without error. If you have a Nvidia or ATI video card, you can forget compiling your own drivers. Yeah, I know, don’t use hardware that has proprietary drivers if you don’t wish to deal with this problem. But it does prove the change in Mandrake’s tactics now. They use the proprietary drivers to attempt to force you to purchase it. You might as well use Windows if you wished to be locked in like this.
Oh well, there are plenty of other distros who don’t use proprietary drivers to lock their users in, so it really isn’t that big a deal. The sad thing is, I can no longer recommend Mandrake to new Linux users, given this situation.
that can happen if you happen to try and update during the mirroring process, as either the package list or the rpm *has* to be synced first, so while one is synced and the other isn’t, updating won’t work. Leave it for a few hours, update the list and try again, is usually what I do in that case.
yes, it does. my Asus mobo has a silicon image sata controller and my only hard disk is a 160GB seagate SATA drive; the installation of 10.1CE went flawlessly and there were no problems running it either.
” If you have a Nvidia or ATI video card, you can forget compiling your own drivers.
I’ve never had problems installing (nvidia at least, I haven’t had an ATI-based system in a while) video drivers. Any specific problems?
1. uselessly vague.
2. lots is wrong with stock KDE when you’re trying to make a UNIFIED distribution and you want to use packages that KDE doesn’t bother with. MDK patches the menu system for KDE, GNOME and IceWM (and I think a few others, not sure which) so that the main DEs used by MDK users all have the *same* menu system with access to the *same* programs. Isn’t this exactly the kind of unification people are always banging on about for Linux? It’s not like Mandrake is the only distro to patch GNOME or KDE, either. In fact, name one that doesn’t, apart from Slack.
3. because years of painstaking anecdotal research has shown that users do indeed need a nanny. disallowing root login encourages the indisputably *correct* model of system security and increases the security of the computing environment in general. I’d argue that *allowing* root login is basically irresponsible.
What? Yes it is. kernel-source and kernel-source-stripped are both on the main 10.1 CE CDs. What are you smoking?
Oh, and neither package is actually intended to be there for compiling-a-kernel purposes. If you want to build the MDK kernel, get the kernel .src.rpm. The kernel-source package is intended to provide a /usr/src tree for things that need to build against the kernel source.
Some points about Mandrake:
1) one poster here said they found Mandrake’s customized KDE menus annoying. Many (if not most) will appreciate Mandrake’s customized KDE menus, because stock KDE menus are not organized very well.
2), urpmi is terrific, as is RPMDrake. It makes installing new software as well as updaing existing software a snap – almost as easy as Debian’s apt-get.
3) Mandrake has done a terrific job of making very attractive themes and icons.
4) Mandrake is one of the most cutting edge distros, staying on top of the latest goodies like the latest kernel, the latest KDE, etc, while still remaining stable and with relatively few bugs.
5) Mandrake is fast. It’s very smooth and well integrated, and very fast.
6) Mandrake has a very good, very helpful, and very large user community. Many distros can make this claim, but few can to the extent Mandrake can.
7) Mandrake offers a wide variety of products. From Mandrake Move, to Mandrake Discovery, to Mandrake PowerPack, to PowerPack +, to the LaCie portable hard drive, to Mandrake pre-installed on PCs, to the Mandrake users club – it’s all there.
there’s an API change relating to power management in very recent 2.6.8-series kernels – including the one shipped by mdk 10.1 – which breaks nvidia module compilation. You can patch either /usr/src/linux/include/pm.h or something in the nvidia driver source to make it compile, but it doesn’t build out of the box. Technically the problem is that the nvidia driver isn’t compatible with the kernel change, so it’s something nvidia should fix, but of course users will blame any distro which ships with the new kernels (inc MDK 10.1). do a google for nvidia pm.h or something similar to get to a bunch of threads on the problem and various fixes. i’m lobbying to have this dealt with in *some* way in 10.1 OE, but there’s no certainty what will happen yet.
I’d like to note that I submitted anonymous-from-mindspring’s post for modding down because its allegation that 10.1CE doesn’t include kernel-source is *completely* false and potentially damages MDK’s reputation in the eyes of anyone who reads it and believes it.
Yeah, that’s the problem I always have when I try to introduce friends to Linux: “Sure, it looks pretty, but how the hell do I tweak the DMA settings and other HD parameters? You mean there’s no easy to use GUI for that? Then I can’t use this!”
1) In order to go into details I should write an essay.
Just 2 examples:
A)SuSE and Debian have never suddenly and disastrously crashed on me like Mandrake (occasionally) does.
B)At least SuSE has a repair tool that allows you to recover from almost any situation.
2) I have already read that. Why does then Mandrake Gnome have the same menus as the stock one?
3)We’ll never agree on that point. My view is that for a newbie who can’t have root login, admin work becomes unbearably hard. Making people’s life difficult is not a wise choice for a commercial distribution.
7)Mandrake Move: $$$$ (if you want the full edition): who is that fool who is going to spend that much, with so many free LiveCDs available?
Mandrakeclub: $$$$
PowerPack+ $$$$$$$$$$$
MDK’s GNOME setup isn’t stock. Not remotely. The menus are nothing like stock GNOME – they’re the same menus you get in KDE.
MDKMove is available as a fully-featured free download. You can pay for a version with proprietary drivers (which could not be distributed as open source) and with support for a persistent home directory stored on a USB key (a feature most free LiveCD’s don’t have anyway).
Club and Powerpack cost money? Linux distributor attempts to make money by charging for nicely packaged versions of its product? OH, WOE IS ME! The end of the world is nigh! You don’t have to pay. You can get a very, very good Linux distribution without paying a penny – in fact, I’ve never paid a penny for MDK, I prefer to contribute by testing, supporting other users, and through advocacy. So why complain about the fact that MDK will take your money if you want to give it?
I don’t know what you mean about SuSE’s ‘repair’ tool. Repair what? Are you aware MDK has a repair option on its installation CDs?
More detail on crashes, please. The only way I’ve got MDK to crash in the last few months is trying to load dodgy wireless network card drivers / firmware. bloody…wireless…cards. (not something that’d be any easier on any other distro).
ROOT LOGIN IS NOT NEEDED FOR ANYTHING. If you can’t admin your system without root login YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. If you login as root, ever, to a graphical interface YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. su, sudo and the little dialog boxes MDK pops up when you try to run admin tools as a normal user are *all you need to admin any MDK system*.
“I’d like to note that I submitted anonymous-from-mindspring’s post for modding down because its allegation that 10.1CE doesn’t include kernel-source is *completely* false and potentially damages MDK’s reputation in the eyes of anyone who reads it and believes it.”
Sorry, didn’t mean to offend. When I open up the software manager and kernel source doesn’t appear, what else can I think, other than that it is no longer included?
actually, you shouldn’t need to tweak settings for most drives, on MDK at least – they’re usually already set to the fastest possible (32-bit transfers, DMA on). This is definitely an area where the GNOME approach makes sense; don’t write a GUI-with-knobs-on, just make the setting right in the first place and let people who want to tweak for some reason use hdparm.
Can’t explain that. But I’ve got the 3 CD set of 10.1CE sitting at home and the kernel-source is on it – it was one of the first things installed, because one of the first things I did on installing 10.1CE was (no surprise) build the nvidia driver (fortunately, I knew about the pm.h problem in advance…). Does “urpmi kernel-source-2.6” from the command line work? What about searching for “kernel-source” (note the dash) in the package manager? Do you have all 3 CDs?
btw, i’ve no problem with the rest of your post – I don’t *agree*, but that’s no reason it should be modded down
. just the kernel-source part is definitely wrong.
Thanks for the clarification. I ran 10.0 OE with nvidia drivers for quite a while without problems, but I didn’t update the nvidia drivers to the latest version for quite a while. I wonder if something also changed in the newer versions of the nvidia drivers…
I flip around on that machine from distro to distro anyway, so it doesn’t really matter that much to me; I run Slack and Debian on my “primary” box (although I have to say, sometimes it’s nice to have the gui tools in Mandrake and SuSE to fall back on).
uh, it’d probably be “urpmi kernel-source”, not “urpmi kernel-source-2.6”. sorry. Or “kernel-source-stripped”, which isn’t a complete source tree but includes enough stuff for most things that build against the kernel-source to work. (that’s a new package for 10.1, to save bandwidth and hard disk space for people who really just need the package for nvidia drivers or whatever).
10.0 OE would be fine – 10.0 uses a 2.6.3 kernel, it’s only 2.6.8.1-mm2 and later (or something like that) that have the problem. As of now, 10.1 OE will also have the problem (although it’s worth noting that if you buy a commercial 10.1, the nvidia driver you get works – I think MDK patched it). I think it would happen with any version of the nvidia drivers; I guess nvidia will release a fixed driver soon, but they haven’t yet.
Which, by the way, still adds up to Red Hat in front of Mandrake (DistroWatch stupidly splits out Red Hat and Fedora hits).
“Fedora is separate. Red Hat is the desktop distribution that Red Hat discontinued.”
Not exactly. Fedora Core is the name for Red Hat’s community edition (somewhat akin to Mandrake Community), and Red Hat still puts out a distro w/Red Hat in the name, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Both are products of Red Hat, just like Mandrake Community and Mandrake’s server offerings are both products of Mandrake. As such, I feel the number should be all-inclusive, perhaps with a “Fedora/Red Hat” tag.
I like to look at NetCraft’s Linux distribution market share numbers. Red Hat is number one, then Debian and SUSE.
“Netcraft looks at servers. Not really relevant in this context.”
Not entirely relevant to desktop use, no, but the author made the blanket statement that Mandrake was *the* number one distribution, which simply isn’t the case.
“What other measure is there for this sort of thing?”
iso download stats? Surveys? I don’t know. But (not even) leading a list of number of page hits on some web site does NOT a number one distribution make.
“Do you have all 3 CDs?”
I do. I burnt all three last weekend.
No one has to agree with me. I won’t cry about it. I do see your point about the unified menus in Mandrake. I also know that the stock KDE menus aren’t perfect either. I actually tweak them to my liking, eliminating categories and placing apps in various sub menus, to make more sense to me. But even if I leave them as stock, I REALLY like the fact that most apps are only one submenu away from the main menu. I build KDE environment only, so don’t need a unified menu to include the few non-KDE apps I do build, as it is easy enough to add an entry for the few kappfinder can’t locate.
I will look on each of the three CDs to locate the kernel source rpms, rather than in the software manager. I have a friend on AOL (yikes!) who wants to leave AOL, then dual boot Linux. Mandrake was my first. I still think it makes a good first for Linux virgins. That is why I am trying it out on my third drive, to make sure it will be simple for her to work with. But I don’t want to recommend it if the kernel source isn’t included. If it is included I stand corrected and apologize for my error.
I don’t want to go on and on.
Just two points:
1)I DO want to pay for what is fair and reasonable, but a LiveCD? MandrakeMove is NOT the only one with proprietary drivers and commercial apps (Mepis, SuSE LiveEvaL…)
The club? You get nothing for your money, unless you have at least Silver.
I said PowerPack+, not plain PowerPack. And anyway the latter could come with a DVD (you have to pay a lot more if you want one)
2) SuSE’s and Mandrake repair tools (or options): I know both: Mandrake will take me to a konsole, SuSE will offer me a variety of choices, from an automated repair to an advanced one.
I’ve got a laptop with an ATI Mobility card and I have a Netgear WG511 Wifi card! Mandrake 10.0 was the first distro to be able to reboot my laptop without turning it off first, and now 10.1 promises to support all of my hardware, including all the power management stuff! Thank God for Mandrake.
1. Like I said; you don’t have to pay. If you don’t want to, don’t. Why complain about the products that MDK sells to those who choose to pay? If you don’t want to pay for a live CD, go ahead and download the free version of Move. It works.
BTW, it’s entirely possible to use the original KDE menu system on Mandrake. I don’t know how, as I don’t use KDE, so I skip-read the post that described how to do it, and don’t remember where I saw it exactly…but I know for a fact there’s a simple way to get it done, so if you like the stock menus so much, you might want to do a little googling
.
“BTW, it’s entirely possible to use the original KDE menu system on Mandrake.”
I was going to build 3.3.1 into /opt, which should hopefully use only KDE stock menus.
Ok, the kernel source is on the CD and it even builds without error. C++ apps don’t compile though, giving the following error:
configure: error: C++ preprocessor “/lib/cpp” fails sanity check
I thought, ok, it is GCC 3.41, so maybe the compiler is too new. But c++ apps don’t compile with whatever version of 2.9.x series included with Mandrake either. This is very bizarre.
yep, it would. I don’t know if some things like automounting and maybe print support would break?
I’m not sure about that c++ apps problem, I’m sure it’s not really that broken, it must be a specific problem you’ve got hold of somehow – maybe something vital isn’t installed? (of course, that would be a bug in that it’s wrong to be *able* not to install something that’s needed for it to work, but still). I’ll have to test a C++ compile tonight when I get home, can you suggest an app off the top of your head?
KDE 3.3 is included on the fourth disc of Mandrakelinux 10.1 Community Edition. This disc is available for free download via BitTorrent for all Mandrakeclub members. It was not made publicly available for non-club members.
However, KDE 3.3 RPMS are floating around the cooker repositories right now. They are reasonably stable, regularly patched and in the process of being bugfixed so that they may be included on the fourth disk of Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official and will be undoubtedly the standard desktop for Mandrakelinux 10.2.
“can you suggest an app off the top of your head? ”
Kickerpager is tiny and quick to build:
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=6702
Yeah, I know it is marked unstable, but it builds and works. I don’t think I am missing anything in my install. I did Google for that same error message with Mandrake 10.1. There were several hits with the same error.
I did spend much time in Mandrake community 10.1 this evening. It seems very stable and the gui is lightening fast, as are the system tools. I think it will work well for my friend’s first dive into Linux. I KNOW she won’t be compiling any apps, given that she is leaving AOL!
>”2)Their heavy customized kde annoys me, especially the weird
> menus: what is wrong with kde as it comes from Kde.org?”
>
>Oh yeah. To change the background in KDE, you still must
>click through the main menu, then 4 submenus. In stock KDE,
>you are almost always 2 menus away, main and sub. Yeah, I
>know this is nitpicking, but I hate whacked out menus.
The whole issue with default menus in Linux distros should be a non-issue, and it would be, if only the damn menu editors weren’t so annoying to use. Gnome has a nice, if poorly documented, drag-and-drop Nautilus-based system, but unfortunately Mandrake insists on ignoring it and using MenuDrake instead, which makes you create every shortcut from scratch. KDE’s menu-editor, meanwhile, sucks just as much as MenuDrake, and some of the menu options have to be changed from the separate Panel Settings.
Why can’t the DE’s just come up with a unified, simple system, preferably a folder of symbolic links like what Windows has? Also, why can’t we right-click on entries to remove them, and drag links to the menu to add them? Admittedly, Windows Start menu editing can get a little complicated when dealing with multiple user profiles, but the drag-and-drop ease of use is ten times better than the convoluted methods of either MenuDrake or KDE.
I have no probs with kmenuedit myself. I even have an admin submenu with
kdesu k3bsetup
kdesu firestarter
kdesu qtparted (when will this support reiser4?)
kdesu kwrite
kdesu konqueror
kdesu kps
kdesu kcron
I don’t see how kmenuedit could get any easier, whether creating new entries, deleting old ones, changing icons, etc.
uh. sorry to push you, but anything non-kde based? I don’t use KDE, it’s annoying enough to have a basic kde installed just for k3b, I really don’t feel like installing all the -devel libs too just to test cpp
. sorry. yeah, I saw the same kind of results on google, but no definitive cause or fixes. (and a lot fewer results than there’d be if it was a wide issue…check how many results you get if you google for the nvidia driver problem!)
btw, I found out about switching the menu system. it’s actually an option in menudrake; you can switch to stock kde menus there.
“they” are doing – it’s a work in progress at freedesktop.org. Once it’s done and integrated into KDE and GNOME, MDK will dump its custom menu system (which is actually the debian menu system, fact fans).
“sorry to push you”
No, I appreciate the help.
“anything non-kde based?”
Qtparted? It does require xfsprogs, jfsutils, e2fsprogs, reiserfsprogs & linux-ntfs. My system is KDE only. I am not sure I have any c++ apps that aren’t based on Qt or KDE
“I don’t use KDE, it’s annoying enough to have a basic kde installed just for k3b, I really don’t feel like installing all the -devel libs too just to test cpp
”
HA! I have said for years if anyone ever released an rpm distro that didn’t split libs & dev-libs into separate packages, I might consider leaving Gentoo. Kicker pager is only a transparent pager, since the stock KDE pager isn’t transparent, at least, not in 3.3.0. It should depend on no more than qt, kdelibs and kdebase. I don’t know how Mandrake packages those though.
“and a lot fewer results than there’d be if it was a wide issue”
Of course, its not like 10.1 has been out long enough either.
“btw, I found out about switching the menu system. it’s actually an option in menudrake; you can switch to stock kde menus there.”
I haven’t used Mandrake in 3 years now, maybe more. I don’t know how many changes they have made in the system. I had no idea you could select KDE menus from menudrake now. Thanks for the tip.
actually, I like the concept of splitting off -devel libraries; it reduces clutter. I just don’t feel like bothering installing them just for a test! right, building qtparted, here we go…
…
heh, it seems to require that e2fsprogs is installed from source before you can compile it. having mdk’s e2fsprogs package installed doesn’t appear to count (still gives me an error about libuuid when running configure). let me see if I can find something else.
well, it’s a really trivial one, but building the “hello world!” test c++ program at this website worked fine.
http://hepwww.ph.qmul.ac.uk/sim/gcclinux.html?desc=Compiling+and+Ru…
i’ll see if I can test anything more complicated, but does that one work for you?
hmm, I just noticed I seem to have already built quite a lot of C++ stuff on my 10.1CE / Cooker machine here. My ~/source directory contains these projects which contain .cpp files:
raptor-1.2.0, a rather crappy shoot-em-up that you can find at http://raptorv2.sourceforge.net/ , if memory serves.
residual, the scummvm project’s experimental implementation of LucasArts’ GrimE adventure game engine, which lives on the “subprojects” page at http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/
flac 1.1.0 (don’t ask me why I had to build that)
and, a biggie, mythtv 0.16 (http://www.mythtv.org/)
they all built fine. How do those look on your system?
“”they” are doing – it’s a work in progress at freedesktop.org. Once it’s done and integrated into KDE and GNOME, MDK will dump its custom menu system (which is actually the debian menu system, fact fans). ”
Will these be drag and drop a la Windows?
for the record most of my background with linux is centered around Redhat and debian Linux. The first version of Linux I ever installed was the copy of Debian that came with the rebel os issue of boot magazine (now called maximum pc), and now I work for a company that uses redhat (and fedora) on it’s servers (redhat enterprise for mission critical servers, and fedora for non critical systems). I tried to approach Mandrake with an open mind and with this thought I formatted and reloaded my workstation with Mandrake 10.1 community. Everything looked nice and seemed to work well, but I simply couldn’t stand the fact that Mandrake has modified all of the icons and themes for kde to keep their yellow star on the kde menu button no matter which theme you switch to. I even downloaded a few themes from kde-look.org with no luck on switching this icon back to the standard KDE symbol. this was a minor annoyance, but not a deal breaker.
I use a Cendyne 32x10x40 USB 2.0 CD-RW drive with my workstation, this has always worked fine for me under every other Distribution of Linux that has run on this system.
Mandrake seemed to pick up the settings for this device and all appeared to be working ok under K3b, but when I attempted to burn a ISO image for Ubuntu Live it went through the motions of burning up to the point where it started the disk spinning in the cd-rw drive and 30 minutes later I grew tired of waiting on it to start burning, and I started looking to see if I could find out what the problem was. I used dmesg to determine that the system had for some unexplained reason disconnected my usb cd-rw drive from the usb bus. I googled to see if I could find any info about this and had no luck.
so after tinkering with the system for about 45 minutes and several reboots later I still couldn’t burn a CD.
I have since then reformatted the system and I have reloaded my favorite distro on my workstation. My favorite distribution is Libranet 2.8.1 which I bought and paid for, and I’m eagerly waiting on the 3.0 version which should be released soon.
I’ll probably be called lazy because I didn’t put more effort into getting my Burner working, but heck if It was a situation where I had to work like this on every distro It wouldn’t have bothered me so much that Mandrake wouldn’t work with my Burner. I have a friend who uses mandrake, and he loves it. I will be waiting on the 10.1 official release to see if it fixes the problem, but in the mean time I need to be able to burn the iso images for it when it is released to the general public.
it’d be a lot more likely to be fixed if you’d post the precise dmesg output (paraphrases are worse than useless) to somewhere relevant (i.e., MDK’s bugzilla). if you already did, great! if not, go do it already.
can’t say for sure, but someone would have to be shot several times in the head not to think making it work that way would be a good idea.