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Mandriva Businesses Linux Business

Mandrake Linux 9.1 (Bamboo) Is Available! 534

Not to load you up with Mandrake, but joestar writes "Mandrake Linux 9.1 (Bamboo) is now officially available at a number of FTP mirrors. This version appears to be a key release for MandrakeSoft and includes many new features such as a new simplified installation procedure, ZeroConf network support, Wi-Fi support, NTFS partition resizing and a brand-new... MandrakeGalaxy theme. It's very beautiful and the whole thing has apparently very few bugs, which is a good news. A full presentation is available at Mandrake's website, download is available from their FTP page as usual. As I see it, it's certainly the most important Mandrake release since version 7.0..." Update: 03/25 21:44 GMT by T : And if you like the distro, you can do both yourself and Mandrake a favor by ordering box sets straight from them, or joining Mandrake's Club.
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Mandrake Linux 9.1 (Bamboo) Is Available!

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  • Available? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Matey-O ( 518004 ) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:28PM (#5593690) Homepage Journal
    'available' might be stretching things a bit.
  • Release Candidate 2 is being served from most of these servers.
  • by Neophytus ( 642863 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:30PM (#5593703)
    I would encourage you all to buy the CD Set [mandrakestore.com] to support continuing development of this distrobution. Mandrake have been having problems recently, and every purchase counts :)
    • The problem is, by the time the CD actually ships, Mandrake will be testing 9.2!
    • Join Mandrake Club [mandrakeclub.com]. You'll be able to download things faster, too.
    • I would encourage you all to buy the CD Set [mandrakestore.com] to support continuing development of this distrobution. Mandrake have been having problems recently, and every purchase counts :)

      I have four cd's with two different distros of Mandrake that I havent even looked at. So paying for free beer that Im never going to drink is probably not going to happen, in my case.

      Strangely enough, I feel compelled to leech even more bandwidth in case I ever get the hankerin' to play with linux. But since I h

  • I've already sucked it down from the German mirror (no longer listed on Mandrake's site) and I'm burning the 3rd disk and starting a test install shortly... w00t!
    • This is not a troll. Please try not to mod comments down due to jealousy or being asleep at the wheel.

      Mandrake put up a release notice on their site over 2.5 hours ago, and the mirrors list has been dynamically updated as access and load changed. The German mirror (ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de) is no longer listed and accepting connections, however I was able to pull the three disks down at about 360 kB/s average. ftp://linux.ups-tlse.fr/Mandrake/iso/ was also fairly rapid, but was overloaded before the E

    • How is this a troll? Talk about serious mod abuse.
  • Holy Cow!!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by TopShelf ( 92521 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:31PM (#5593724) Homepage Journal
    This is the best news I've heard in 3 hours! [slashdot.org]
    • Re:Holy Cow!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Gerad ( 86818 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @05:29PM (#5594293)
      Except it's NOT a dupe. If you had bothered to even so much as read the TITLE, you would have seen that the previous article was just a review.

      Please. You give even karma whores a bad name.
      • It's about as close as two articles can get without being a straight dupe, so I'll stick by the original post. Although I bet any minute now we'll get an article for the 2nd review available...
  • by japhar81 ( 640163 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:32PM (#5593732)
    I've been using the betas for several weeks. This isn't an oooh-wow release, but it does include some package updates and the mandrake utilities are much improved.

    My desktop is running the beta now, and has been up for > 3 weeks. Guess we know its stable too.

    Keep up the good work guys.

    Oh, and lets get these out of the way now;
    • Mandrake sucks, use SuSE
    • Real men use BSD
    • Mandrake is just a bastard child of RedHat
    • Microsoft is evil
    • And are they finally free of RedHat?

      Funny how their releases seem to coincide with RedHat's. Is this the only way they can sell product?
      • re: free of redhat (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Dave_bsr ( 520621 )

        Mandrake is an rpm-based system, but now with tasty urpmi goodness.

        MDK uses some red hat tools (gpl'd of course - many distros use them, like linuxconf - probably some drak* tools use a little old RedHat libraries/code, but now mostly rewritten by MDK)

        um...other than that, the only thing they have in common with RDH that i can find is the whole Linux thing. They were even off kernel versions in the RDH 8/MDK9 release last fall. (This is probably why RDH is jumping release numbers - a two minor kernel vers

        • > MDK uses some red hat tools (gpl'd of course - many distros
          > use them, like linuxconf - probably some drak* tools use a little > old RedHat libraries/code,

          I don't think so because all Red Hat tools _were_ written in Python or Tcl/tk (if my memory is good enough since version 4 and 5.x of Red Hat...) and all Mandrake tools (including the installation procedure!) are written in Perl-Gtk or C.
  • Can I have some more?

    Some lucky people already got it. I am unfortuanelly victim to the dreaded "421 too many users" message. Anyone with a high speed connection that can mirror this?

    and by high speed I mean more than a t-1 cuz it's gonna get saturated.
    • Subscribe to the Mandrake Club [mandrakeclub.com], and you'll get access to an extended list of mirrors. It also offers other great features such as the instant download access to 50,000 Mandrake RPMS. There is also a feature in 9.1 that gives access to most 9.1 applications available at MandrakeClub (should be linked to the 50,000 packages stuff...!), just by entering login/password in a wizard... I tried to play with this feature today and it's a new way of experiencing an operating system, really. Need a new software? get
    • One of the things I rarely see on KazAa or eMule are linux .iso's. If anything, here's a perfect example of a potential legitimate usage for P2P.
      • i'm sharing this one right now on edonkey. At least i think i am...they're sitting in my mldonkey/incoming ...


  • My biggest hope here is that they have provided a
    REAL upgrade path from earlier versions. If anyone knows whether this is the case, please let me know. I'll gladly renew my club membership and then upgrade both my production servers from 8.2 to 9.1.
    • My notebook was sucessfully upgraded from 8.2 to 9.0. My desktop had some wierd problems so I did a clean install of 9.0. I have since sucessfully upgraded 9.0 to now 9.1rc2. When I finally have the final iso's I will be upgradeing both.
  • Is this a GPL'd feature? Last I checked, the linux-NTFS project was unable to resize an NTFS partition.
  • by joestar ( 225875 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:38PM (#5593785) Homepage
    Duval was interviewed today at Tweakhound.com about this new release and other MandrakeSoft projects:
    http://www.tweakhound.com/mdk9/articles/mdk9_1inte rview.htm [tweakhound.com]


    What do you see as Mandrake's advantage over other Linux distributions?

    Firstly Mandrake is certainly one of the most innovative Linux distribution. It also offers unique features such as supermount or the dynamic-device desktop. The hardware support is also one of the best available on the Linux distribution market so far. Internationalization is also a key-point because only 40% of our users speak English.

    Worth a read!
  • by Howard Beale ( 92386 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:38PM (#5593786)
    it's not like it's a new release of Debian. Now THAT'S something to get excited about!

  • ISO images (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DavidLeblond ( 267211 ) <me&davidleblond,com> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:39PM (#5593791) Homepage
    I can't get to the servers. Does anyone know if they're still using the 700 mb ISOs? My ghetto CD burner chokes after about 670mb.
  • by foolip ( 588195 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:39PM (#5593796) Homepage
    ...the whole thing has apparently very few bugs, which is a good news.

    This is a really strange statement. How can you know that there are few bugs when it has just been released? Of course the people who made it wouldn't have released it if they knew there were a lot of bugs, but making the connection to few bugs is... well unfounded. For a system like Debian woody with a 2.2 kernel you can probably safely talk about very few bugs, since it's been out and about and tested for very long.

    • Eh, 2.4 has been out a long time too but the kernel isn't the only piece of software that can be buggy in a distribution. Saying that there are few bugs is based on trying the release candidates and staying up to date with cooker before the release. In 9.1 most things really work and they do it well. That cannot be said for all Mandrake releases in the past. 9.0 had some issues for example, the worst of them being that supermount was broken. Having used all the release candidates and the final from cooker
    • by Thing 1 ( 178996 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @05:45PM (#5594444) Journal
      I just looked in BugZilla [mandrakesoft.com] and doing a query on all the UNCONFIRMED, NEW, NEEDINFO, ASSIGNED, and REOPENED (ignoring the RESOLVED, VERIFIED and CLOSED bugs), there are 1459 bugs.

      Now, I haven't followed this closely so I don't know if that's a little or a lot. I do remember that one version of Windows (2000? XP?) had over 64K bugs when it was released, so compared to that it's an order of magnitude and a half better. But I don't know how bad each bug is in either case, either, so this isn't much of a comparison.

      (Btw, the total of the three I ignored is 1848, so about half the reported bugs have been fixed. Again, no data on the severity of the fixed vs. open bugs...)

  • I'm running it now (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lpret ( 570480 ) <[lpret42] [at] [hotmail.com]> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:40PM (#5593810) Homepage Journal
    I downloaded it all night, and now it's installed and very happy. This is perhaps the easiest version (much less distro) of Mandrake I've used. Some key things that jumped out at me:
    • Better auto-configuration at installation. It was able to detect everything perfectly -- down to model number. This is a definite change from 9.0 in which I had to configure my printer, scanner, and sound card.

    • !--Note, I read the earlier review at OSnews and our good friend Eugenia was discussing an issue in which it didn't detect the right sound card (it found the Audigy instead of emu10k), well, I have the same card as her, and it found it fine and it sounds great. --!
    • It's a much cleaner look. Blame it on the widgets, but it is a much better look and something that will definitely help it as it matures.
    • Better support for my GeForce4. I was unable to get any decent gameplay under 9.0, but in 9.1 it runs great, divx plays smooth, and I'm once again happy.
    • Easy installation. This is a non-issue for most of us, but I am now able to recommend my grandmother to install this on her own. It really is that simple.
    These are the first things I can think of, I've had it running for a total of 12 minutes (and I'm already back on slashdot!) so there may be some other issues I've yet to come across.
    • Better support for my GeForce4. I was unable to get any decent gameplay under 9.0, but in 9.1 it runs great, divx plays smooth, and I'm once again happy.


      funny, I had no problems with that. www.nvidia.com download the tar.gz's of the GLX and driver, follow the instructions nad it magically worked.

      I wonder what was wrong with yout 9.0 install as I never had trouble with Nvidia drives on anything but a 2.4.20/21 kernel (and the patches for that are out already.)
      • maybe you should read your post. Sounds like you made quite a bit more of an effort than the parent. That's a lot of trouble to go through for a mandrake user.
        • quoth the parent:
          That's a lot of trouble to go through for a mandrake user.

          Oh! I see how it is...Mandrake lusers are all retarded, eh? : )

          you know, i've got no problems installing slack or whatever...but MDK has this neat thing in that most of the time, _it_just_works_. Which I like. We're not all retarded, you know... :P
  • by MarvinMouse ( 323641 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:41PM (#5593818) Homepage Journal
    That I am very glad I get that 20 minutes warning with my subscription.

    I got most of the download done before the slashdot crowd reduced by speed considerably.
  • As per usual, Mandrake has completely ignored the Gnome specs for menu layout, and have a completely non-standard menu system. All I can say is Ick, I'll wait 5 more days for RH 9 thanks. :(
    • Re:Fukt Gnome menus (Score:3, Informative)

      by fcrozat ( 444723 )
      We are not IGNORING GNOME menu layout..

      It simply doesn't fit our needs (and we have the same objections for KDE menu layout)..

      And if you don't like Mandrake menu layout, run menudrake and choose "Original menu style" in Menu Style dialog.. You'll have to create a new foot menu on your panel, due to limitation in gnome-panel..
    • Re:Fukt Gnome menus (Score:4, Informative)

      by matthewn ( 91381 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @05:06PM (#5594076)
      If you run MenuDrake, you can tell the system to use the standard Gnome menus. The change takes effect on next login.
  • Let's face it, all the distros currently aimed at desktop users are K-centric. Red Hat still plays down the importance of the desktop market and, umm, their tax monies may end up supporting America's rather peculiar foreign excursions that could be characterized as less than constructive. Would there be social demand for a new distro that concentrates on the G-experience in Mandrake style but with compatibility with the popular "plain Red Hat rpms"?
  • by davebarz ( 546161 ) <david.barzelay@net> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:45PM (#5593859) Homepage

    Actually, the Mandrake website says the new version supports "Re-sizing of Windows FAT partitions" but that NTFS support is strictly read-only, which sucks. You got my hopes up there for a while.
  • Is there really a reason for the code names like Bamboo? I mean, you can refer to it as "Mandrake 9.1"? If you're working on the next version...you can refer to it as Mandrake 9.2!
  • Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:46PM (#5593872)
    I thought they were going to limit the release to Mandrake Club subscribers to start with, and only make FTP access available much later. What happened to that idea?
  • I2 Mirror (Score:2, Informative)

    by pirodude ( 54707 )
    Anyone on I2 can get them from here:
    http://mandrake.dsi.internet2.edu/

    I'm currently grabbing all 3 ISO's at 350k/sec.
  • Ohhh pretty ZeroConf (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ihatewinXP ( 638000 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:55PM (#5593954)
    Im glad to see a linux distributor hyping the zeroconf protocol. It has always seemed to be a perfect match for me. here is an underlying protocol that when coupled with a _good_ gui install makes a very compelling product from an ease of use standpoint (let alone cost). Having Apple as a cheerleader will help as well, and already compaines like HP and TIVO are including zeroconf support. Imagine it, TIVO could work easier on a linux box than a comprable PC....Just a possibility. Another possibility that I hardly dare mention was a rumor that people (Apple) were working on local ZeroConf networks that offloaded intensive tasks to idle processors - Rendezvous/ZeroConf may a long (paradigm breaking) life ahead of it, its up to the imagination of the developers.
  • I have a PC at home that I don't use. If I installed Mandrake 9.1 and attached a printer to it, would my PowerBook see it using Rendezvous and be able to print to it? How would I set this up on the Mandrake side?
    • Better than that, when I connected by iBook to my network three months ago, it automatically detected the Epson 875DCS hooked up to my Mandrake 9.0 box, and I was able to start printing immediately! Much easier than the hoops I had to jump through to try and connect to the office SMB printer.

      - Stealth Dave

  • Can someone please tell me they've improved upon the fonts? I can't tell from the screenshots and I won't have time to install it for a few days, but the default fonts for 9.0 are terrible. The default fonts on Red Hat are wonderful. Is RedHat using proprietary fonts? I'd like to know why Mandrake is behind in an area that is *very* important to the desktop user.

  • and the mirrors are all slashdotted to hell.
  • Wow, Mandrake 9.1 seems to be from The Mysterious Future since according to their website they included a 2.4.21 kernel and according to kernel.org, the latest version is 2.4.20. Quite impressive, definately a distribution that's on the bleeding edge.
  • kernel 2.4.21??? (Score:2, Interesting)

    I dunno if anybody else noticed that on the presnetation it states:

    Kernel 2.4.21

    but kernel.org [kernel.org] has the latest stable version 2.4.20

    Is this just a typo or they have released a "stable" release using an untested kernel???

    • AFAICR they're supporting _their_ patched version of 2.4.21, and will probably just provide the final 2.4.21 binary kernel rpms later on.

      Frankly, I don't mind at all, though only in the case of desktops. I run a 2.4.21pre5ac3 kernel on my 'production' workstation at work, in order to support adequately my NForce1 microatx asus board, and it's quite decent.
      • from the Kernel prepatch doc. [kernel.org]

        Prepatches may be poorly tested, and may in fact not work at all.

        I don't think i could be a very good idea to realease something to the market based on something like this. If u r a particular user, with a particular need, and take the risk to try it out and get it to work is perfect, but think of how many people who get MDK to try out linux could get this one and run into problem, probably they will not like that at all and just stick to their old OS.

        Guess that's why I lik
        • This isn't a straight download of the 2.4.21 preX. Mandrake has tested it extensively. No commercial distribution ever ships with a stock kernel, so they all do their own testing.

          I would probably mark you down as a troll if I had moderation points today. Someone help me out.
  • by illegalien ( 313491 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @05:17PM (#5594162) Homepage
    The greatest thing about Mandrake 9.X is that it completely eliminates dependency issues... rpms are easy to install for those that don't wish to compile from source.

    I've been running a cooker version of 9.X for many months and even that is surprisingly stable.

    This is the kind of OS package worth paying for!
  • I am writting this from ML 9.1 (great, great release). Everything is a piece of cake, including upgrading my 3 machines, what I did almost flawlessly and with no effort (clicking "next" at each default option).

    One of the things that look promising is that Mandrake is now really using bugzilla (qa.mandrakesoft.com), you can get an account and help and they can track QA issues much more easily.

    My only concern with Mandrake is how they can make a profit. I was hoping they would release the ISOs a few day

  • by repoleved ( 569427 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @05:48PM (#5594461)
    I remember that one of my friends once offered the services of his ISP to provide free downloads. The next month he received a very large bill. Remember when you download these "free" ISOs that there is a cost for the ftp sites that provide the ISOs for free to everyone. It can actually get to be very very expensive to provide free ISOs ($7-10 per download). Also, remember that there were costs in testing and developing the distribution, and that whenever you download an ISO for free you are taking advantage of the resources that were put towards the quality distribution that you will experience.

    Mandrake is a fine company that really really needs our support right now. Whether you can help by lending them some of your time to fix bugs, or by providing software to make their distribution better, or (like most non-developers) by purchasing their distribution, I strongly encourage everyone who uses Mandrake to do their part.

    (I use Slackware, but bought a copy of Mandrake for my brother a while ago because he uses Mandrake.)

    An easy and cheap way that you can reduce your impact on ftp sites and also help to share the costs of distribution is to download the ISO from a P2P network (just check the md5sum against the official one from the ftp site when you're done), and/or set yourself up as a P2P mirror so that a few people can download the ISO from you. This is the best use of P2P that I can think of (much better than providing illegal copies of copyrighted music or movies). Another way you can help is to burn some CDs for your windows-using friends so they can try it out! :)
  • I support Linux (Score:4, Insightful)

    by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @06:22PM (#5594724) Homepage Journal
    I only wish it wouls support me. I've purchased ~10 distros, dating back to SuSE 6.1, RedHat 6.3, Mandrake 7.1, 8.0, 8.2, just to name a few.

    Everytime I run into trouble I get the same response: "RTFM"

    Well I *did* RTFM and the FM didn't help, this is why I was posting to your Linux forum!

    I have yet to see an install of the aforementioned distros install successfully (and by that I mean see all my hardware) on any machine I care to throw at it. BeOS however (and MS, but that goes without saying) sees the hardware just fine.

    I want to like Linux, I really do, but all I ever see from them is copying/playing catchup to MS.

    Maybe this distro will be a different experience for me, but I kind of doubt it.
  • by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @06:29PM (#5594773) Journal
    Has anybody who's succeeded in downloading this thing set it up for BitTorrent [bitconjurer.org], the P2P thing that's designed for applications like this? (Also, did anybody do this for the recent Knoppix? I saw one for version N-2 or whatever.) It's really the right choice for flash-crowd release slashdottings (and Mandrake and RedHat etc. ought to go hire Bram to help them :-)

    If you're not familiar with BitTorrent, it takes a large file (typically CD-size) chunks it up into ~1MB pieces, and client/peers who want the file either get chunks from the server or get pointed to other clients who already have them, and after receiving chunks correctly, make them available for other client/peers to download. The server keeps track of who's got what, manages its outgoing rates to something it can handle, and does some optimization to make sure all the chunks are getting handed out widely and efficiently, and either the client or server (I don't remember which, probably the server) does some anti-leech scheduling so that clients basically end up receiving at about the rate they're letting other people download from them if there's demand.

    One big difference between BitTorrent and the eDonkey/Kazaa/etc. P2P systems is that it's designed on a per-file basis - anybody who wants to export a given file can be a server for that file, and the client/peer process only exports files that it's actively connected to (either still downloading or being friendly and letting other people download after it's done), rather than exporting everything in your file-sharing directory.

    • BitTorrent Mirror (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sits ( 117492 )
      I have briefly set up the following with lots of help from the folks on #bittorrent (thanks!):

      Mandrake 9.1 Bittorrent link [sucs.org]. If you are behind a NAT or a stateful firewall then the link will not work until a few people whose machines accept incomming connections start downloading from it. Clicking the link will not automatically work but it can easily be fed to the Bittorrent [bitconjurer.org] command line tools.
  • Madness!!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @07:34PM (#5595142) Homepage Journal
    Wait a minute... Things aren't right here. I thought the formula was fail miserably, give up, pout, and sue [sco.com] someone. Not(gasp)suck it up, improve your product so that even Her Pickiness, Eugenia likes it and keep giving back to the community. This makes no sense at all. Good job Mandrake.
  • by Jamuraa ( 3055 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @09:56PM (#5595382) Homepage Journal
    BitTorrent Link of Mandrake 9.1 [levien.com] <-- You need BitTorrent to click here.

    Download BitTorrent Here [bitconjurer.org] or `apt-get install bittorrent` on debian, and I think there is a port for it for you FreeBSD people.

    Anyone who wants to get this file, should try using BitTorrent [bitconjurer.org] to get it. It is a file swarming application that helps everyone get the file by uploading pieces of the file you have already downloaded. It should transfer faster, and the best part is, everyone gets the file faster than the Mandrake FTP site, which I am sure has limited bandwidth.

    Props to the other people mentioning BitTorrent.

We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan

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