A Galaxy of Possibility: Mandrake 9.1 ProSuite 171
uninet writes "Our last consideration of Mandrake Linux was early this year when my colleague Eduardo Sanchez thoroughly reviewed Mandrake 9.0. In that review, Sanchez noted the numerous advances made in 9.0, but also reported some serious flaws that somewhat limited his enthusiasm. With that considered, we were anxious to find out if 9.1 could again return Mandrake to the amazing quality achieved in release 8.2. See what we found (including a look at features exclusive to the ProSuite edition)."
Pretty content-free article, IMHO (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A little late? (Score:3, Insightful)
eeek (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep this up and Linux might be just as easy to use as Windows. Having everything come on one DVD is a nice touch too - something I wish would catch on more since DVD-Roms are almost standard these days. No mention of the price though (anyone who says $699 gets an automatic -1, Cliche
Re:Article Text (Score:1, Insightful)
Dammit, that's not what "begging the question" means.
Re:Mandrake 9.1 (Score:0, Insightful)
I wish Linux would standardize on a decent packaging format for binaries and source, much as the Windows world has with .ZIP, and we could put a stake through the heart of this everybody does it different crap. Mandrake would otherwise be almost perfect to introduce people who have only used Windows to Linux... although for serious development and other usage I'd still lean towards Gentoo.
Re:Mandrake 9.1 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mandrake 9.1 (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait.. ZIP? Perhaps you mean MSI's and merge modules and all that fun stuff. I don't know much about software distribution, but I do know that ZIP doesn't have much to do with it.
Agreed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why does windows seem "snappier"? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a load of crap and you know it - or at least if you don't know it, you don't know much.
XFree is nothing to do with the slowness of your average Linux desktop. In fact, XFree is possibly one of the best components of the Linux desktop experience.
Quite often, it can just be using something as large as Gnome or KDE - usually what people compare Windows to. Fire up fluxbox or waimea or another window manager instead of your Gnome/KDE and you'll often have a zippier, snappier desktop.
Applications being slow to launch comes down to a lack of refinement of application code. For instance, fire up Evolution. It loads in a couple of seconds - far faster than Outlook in it's native Windows. But then fire up the Gnome Calculator - it takes nearly twice as long as Evolution! That's because a lot more attention and focus is placed on Evolution, especially with it having commercial sponsor - Ximian. All of Gnome's apps could launch as quickly or more quickly than Evolution, there just hasn't been the manpower of the attention to detail to make them load up quickly. Another good example is Gnumeric which has a near-instant launch time.
Perhaps Gnome / KDE should dedicate a release phase to making their desktop applications more efficient. (Yeah, right, like that'd happen.)
Other issues with not being snappy, or the desktop slowing under IO or CPU load are down to 1) a crap video card / machine, 2) a crap connection from which you access your XServer (think modem) or 3) the Linux kernel itself.
I'm a Linux advocate, but I have to take my hat of to FreeBSD on (3) because it has had decent process / IO scheduling for quite some years. I hear a lot of good things about XFree under FreeBSD and it felt very smooth on the one occasion I tried it. A lot of hoo haa about Linux 2.6 is the new scheduling concepts that do indeed solve a lot of these problems, but the reality is that it's about time! If anything, until 2.6, Linux has been somewhat overrated at times.
Any performance problems are not XFree related. Just get over it, we can't keep making XFree a scape goat when it's not even an accessory to the crime in question, let alone the culprit.
I like Mandrake.... but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. We're sick of RPM. We've hard RPM break on a few machines already (I think the RPM database becomes corrupted if I remember correctly). Needless to say, it's hard to upgrade your machine when your package manager goes kaput. APT/debs are SO much easier to deal with anyway.
2. Too much crap! Literally, Mandrake has TOO MUCH crap these days. I know Debian is hardly innocent, but the dependency train for whatever reason seems to be much more palatable when using Debian as opposed to Mandrake. Maybe it's all the package/package-dev combo packs that the Mandrake/RedHat people like, I'm not entirely sure. It's just too much honestly. Let me install mySQL and be done with it.
3. The big reason (for me personally), the Mandrake security model is totally whack. Once upon a time, Mandrake used to just run a nightly script which would email an audit of your system to the Administrator letting you know what was wrong. That's all it did, and that was nice. Now there's a set of different (horribly documented) security models that have all sorts of (horribly documented) behavior. I don't mind the security model idea, what I do mind is my system doing things for me (such as changing file permissions) without being explicitly told when and why this is going to happen. This has caused major problems for us on a few occasions and it's simply unacceptable. Maybe we haven't looked in the right place for the documentation, but I've tried to find it in the past with little success. I should have to go reading scripts to find this out.
What I've found is that with Debian I have a much better idea what's going on inside our systems. There are no surprises, things so far just straight up work the way we expect them to. We're competent programmers and system administrators, so this is great for us. If I were a newbie, I would definitely still recommend Mandrake. Whatever the security scripts are doing, it IS making the system more secure, but sometimes you don't want that.
If I wanted Mandrake to do one thing (short of switching to
Bryan
Suggestion - Security (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I like Mandrake.... but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
9.1 seems to be a lot buggier in than either 9.0 or 8.2. I really hope 9.2 doesn't have these kinds of problems.
Re:Give me wireless out of the box or Windows will (Score:2, Insightful)
Slackware Debian Mandrake AND RedHat were ALL working "out of the box" for my wireless nic.
Re:I like Mandrake.... but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Allright, I never had such a problem, and I used RPM based distros for years (RedHat and now Mandrake). Most problems that I saw reported in mailing lists about RPM going belly up are user problems: using --force to force installation, messing with the database, using experimental or third party packages, etc. If you stick to your distro you are most likely ok. Plus, there are tools to rebuild databases. Oh, and I've seen problems with debian database too (disclaimer: I love the debian project)
This is called granularity, and it is not a problem if you use a front-end to RPM, such as urpmi. Simply fire up the mandrake control center, then Software Manager, search for mySQL and you'll see a few packages. Click on what you think you need, and the software manager will select for you the packages required by dependencies. It is that easy. Separating _dev_ packages from the binaries is great. That allows for a minimal install for people who don't care about compiling stuff. What's wrong with it ?
Re:Give me wireless out of the box or Windows will (Score:1, Insightful)
Booted in WinXP, with the driver supplied by the adapter vendor, it took nearer 30 minutes and 4 goes at installing the driver (it looked like it had worked, but hadn't actually done the install). I then spent a couple of hours trying to get the card working with my AP and gave up.
Re:Mandrake is a nice distribution (Score:2, Insightful)
You really should check out the Mandrake Linux 9.1. Power PC Distribution. [mandrakelinux.com] It includes support to run Mac Applications on Linux in an X Window at Native Speed. [linux-mandrake.com]. It's called Mac on Linux and would let you get the big name support you so desire while running Linux on a Mac.