Mandrake, SuSE Ready New Releases

Anthony Boyd writes: "At pclinuxonline.com, they are running an uncomfirmed story that Mandrake 8.2 will be released on March 18th. And of course, SuSE Linux 8.0 is going to be released in mid-April. Features for SuSE appear to include KDE 3.0 and a whole lot of games. Features for Mandrake appear to be a super small install and, well, stability. Sounds great to me."

Mandrake 8.2

[mauryisland]

Several folks where I work have been testing the Mandrake 8.2 beta releases, and they're uniformly reporting that things are much better than 8.1 release. Personally, I'd rather buy a Mandrake box than go the donation route, but either way, you should be getting great value for your money.

Re:Ready... go

[mauryisland]

I've had no trouble at all with Nvidia cards, though don't use them if you're only intrested in open source drivers.

I always download the source rpm's (I'm running a Redhat 7.2 box with a nonstandard Redhat kernel), run the command 'rpm --rebuild NVIDIA*.rpm' against them, and then install the new rpm's in the usual manner. They work great, but I don't a Windows box to compare them with.

Re:Speaking of games...

[lastninja]

try one of the candidates from no starch press sdl game development contest [nostarch.com]

OT: Other Linux games...

[antdude]

Ricky, have you checked these two Web sites yet?

Linux Games [linuxgames.com]
The Linux Game Tone [happypenguin.org]

Re:wow

[Anthony Boyd]

I can see announcing new releases, though I think slashdot goes overboard on that, but announcing RUMORS of a possible release?

Well, after I submitted the story, I kept hunting around for more info, and found what is probably the origin of the Mandrake 8.2 rumor: a mailing list post by someone at Mandrake. I'm not on the mailing list, but I did find a Usenet discussion about it at Google [google.com]. I guess the rumor probably has some validity, so Slashdot's probably right on the money at this point. Although, to be honest, I kinda hope it isn't released on Monday -- that Usenet discussion and a few others I've read make it clear that while this release is solid, it's getting rushed out the door, probably because of money issues.

Hey Mandrake, if you really need money coming in, take pre-orders and spend an extra week to kill off a few extra bugs. I'll buy it & take a charge to my card now, but just deliver on the stability rumor. I'll pay for stability.

Re:Speaking of games...

[JPriest]

Mandrake has a Gaming Edition [mandrakesoft.com] for about 70$ + S&H that comes with the sims and a 90 day subscribtion to Transgaming [transgaming.com] I'd buy it but I'm waiting on 8.2. There is also a version of Counter Strike [counter-strike.net] ported to linux.

Re:Why now?

[xcomputer_man]

There is a reason why MandrakeSoft chose not to wait for KDE 3 and GNOME 2: stability. One of the primary reasons why Mandrake 8.2 is being released is to provide a more mature, refined and stable distribution than its immediate predecessors. And I'll say it does pretty well at that. Bleeding edge software like KDE 3 and GNOME 2 that will most certainly have a couple of significant bugs at their initial release will wait until the next major version number change, most likely (perhaps you want to wait for Mandrake 9.0 instead).

Re:Why now?

[timerider]

Yea, especially when you consider the fact that producing a CD from master to 'ready-to-sell' packages does take time.

One folk at one of the suse mailing lists once mentioned the fact that the cd producer they use needs roughly one month for that. Based on the assumption that they still use the same CD fab, this would mean that the 'kde3' they claim to use as default desktop in Suse8 will in fact be either kde3 beta2, or some spurious CVS snapshot. The gnome they put in suse8 is rc2.

Now is that a good idea? I don't think so, especially in the light of this previous article [slashdot.org].

I normally are not a SuSE basher, but I won't touch that 8.0 with barbequeue thongs...

Re:Count me in...maybe

[MobyTurbo]

I usually copy the SuSE distro cds to my hard drive and have everything available every time I use YaST.Yast2 doesn't like the installation from hard drive but YaST has no problems with it.

One of the new features of SuSE 8.0 will be that rather than maintaining two installers, YAST2 will be the only installer - though it's text mode will be much improved for administration tasks over ssh and the like. You might want to take this into consideration before copying 7 CDs worth of RPMs to your hard drive only to find that YaST2 doesn't like it. :-) (Or maybe it's time that you bought a DVD-ROM drive; SuSE Linux Pro comes with one DVD-ROM with everything on it this removes the hassle of swapping CDs which might be the reason for your doing this.)

Mandrake 8.2 release date confirmed...

[LiteForce]

Provided there are no showstoppers!

List: mandrake-cooker
Subject: [Cooker] 8.2
From: Warly <[e-mail]>
Date: 2002-03-15 18:07:56
[Download message RAW]

I am in the process of building the final 8.2 isos.

These isos will be tested this week-end, and released on Monday if OK.

As a consequence if you find some free minutes this week-end and test all the uploads that have been done today, and report any regression, that would be quite a great help.

--
Warly

The original can be found here [theaimsgroup.com].

PPC, Alpha, [346]86 versions of Mandrake 8.2

[leonbrooks]

I hope they aren't also claiming that the PowerPC release is ready... I tried it recently, and while promising, it has some show-stopper bugs.

It's not. It went into beta some weeks after the x86 version. I guess they're planning an 8.2-for-Alpha as well, since there is currently an Alpha Cooker around.

If you want a version `optimised' for 386, 486, P3, P4 or Athlon, one of the things Mandrake carefully checked during this Cooker cycle was that Athlon optimisations worked properly, when selected. There is also a new package, rpm-rebuild, which will rebuild the entire distribution from source in one go.

They also timed the release rather well, fielding and dealing with the PHP, OpenSSH and zlib bugs in the 11th hour. It should be one of their best releases, BoC I'm no prophet: only time will tell.

8.2 already avalable.

[1%warren]

Cooker is in deep freeze at the moment, so if you don't mind doing an ftp install, you can get 8.2 right now. You might have to update a few rpm's later. I'ts probably more than my life's worth to say *where* you can get it on /. though. BTW, KDE in 8.2 is *much* faster than in 8.1.

Re:GCC 3.x?

[leviramsey]

Do either of them include GCC 3.x?

Mandrake offers it as an optional package. However, the entire distro was compiled with 2.96 (because of Mandrake's Red Hat compatibility policy), so 2.96 is the preferred compiler.

Re:Pensacola

[bero-rh]

No. Pensacola has nothing whatsoever to do with the next release of Red Hat Linux.
It's a beta of the enterprise edition of Red Hat Linux 7.2, tuned for high-end hardware and high load.
It's not what you typically want on your home box.

As for the next version, a beta will be released when it's ready. We don't preannounce releases.

Re:Red Hat beta - Pensacola

[bero-rh]

Please note that Pensacola is NOT a beta of the upcoming release of Red Hat Linux. It's a beta of the Red Hat Linux 7.2-based Enterprise product, tuned for high-end hardware and high load. It's not what you want to try on your home box and won't install on anything smaller than an i686.

A beta of the upcoming release of Red Hat Linux will be released when it's ready (we don't preannounce releases).

OpenOffice 641c in contribs

[buchanmilne]

Mandrake will not try and release Gnome2 and KDE3, since they have learnt from their mistake with shipping KDE2 with 7.2. This instead will be a rock-solid release, and since Star Office 6.0 will only be released in late April/early May, there is not point in waiting for it. Instead, however, you can get an OpenOffice 641c build (but better than the SUN-compiled versions since it is compiled with gcc 3.0.4, ie the Insert->Frame bug is not there in the Mandrake RPMs), working out-the-box (no ./setup -net to do) with multi-lingual builds and multi-lingual spell-checking (see the myspell-(lang) RPMs.