A Galaxy of Possibility: Mandrake 9.1 ProSuite

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)."

Re:Article Text

[ePhil_One]

Why all the raving about DVD based installation? Sure, you don't need to swap 3 CD's in, but considering the hardware this often gets installed on, how common will a DVD player be?

Personally, one of the first things I do is build the NFS share so I can do net installs on everything, update packages, etc. Not to mention its usually a pretty fast way to install

Mandrake 9.2 coming out soon!

[anonymous coword]

I'm currently running Mandrake Cooker and its coming on nicely over the last few weeks. Some things to look forward to is the new Gnome 2.4 desktop (along with loads of new apps), Kernel 2.4.22 (and an optional 2.6-test kernel for the adventureous!), KDE 3.1.3, which is now very stable. If you like gnome, but don't like Redhat's version, then Mandrake 9.2 is for you!

It's also very stable, unlike my experiance of 8.1!

Mandrake on the fly

[kgbspy]

I upgraded (yes, upgraded) my RedHat distro to Mandrake 9 on my Thinkpad this morning in the car on the way to work. Yes, it really was that easy, and sitting in traffic has never been so enjoyable.

It picked up the Thinkpad's cs46xx soundcard, allowed xfree to run in 11x8, and although it skipped past installing the bootloader without giving me any say in the matter (installing lilo straight to my MBR instead of putting grub on the Linux boot partition, like I would have preferred), it didn't completely destroy my MBR and refuse to boot my XP NTFS partition like RedHat did.

The whole install was incredibly quick, even on a P2 366 - all in all about 30 minutes, finishing just as I pulled into the office. On the down side, the installation procedures are a little more inflexible than that of RedHat or SuSE, and KDE 3.1 seems to be broken(?).

On the whole, after a couple of hours of tooling about, it seems to be an excellent release.

Re:Why does windows seem "snappier"?

[agrippa_cash]

As I understand it, Windows libraries are already mapped to each other. Conversely, a linux program has to follow a chain of dependant libraries and load them. You can prelink libraries to save time, however all of the libraries on your machine may have to be compiled locally to do that (cue for better informed response... HERE). This is certainly part of the reason. I would wildly guess that X11 is another part and maybe OOo for windows doesn't use GCC, but another more optimized compiler.

Upgrading

[prashantp76]

Interesting reviews, but ...
I for one am tired of seeing a new distribution every 6 months from Mandrake and RedHat.

My problem is upgrading - the distributions support it, but basically end up reinstalling the whole system. I'd rather they only came out with one major release per year, which was very stable and easily upgradeable.

I don't care if it doesn't ship with the latest and greatest KDE and kernel!

Re:Give me wireless out of the box or Windows will

[planarian]

I found it much easier to set up a wirless home network with Xandros (a debian-basted distro) than with Windows XP.And I'm a linux noob.

Re:Mandrake on the fly

[mrd_yaddayadda]

On the down side, the installation procedures are a little more inflexible than that of RedHat or SuSE, and

KDE 3.1 seems to be broken(?). On the whole, after a couple of hours of tooling about, it seems to be an excellent release.

This kind of thing staggers me. How on earth can you say a release is "excellent" when something as fundamental to it's use as one of the main desktop environments is "broken"!

This kind of comment seems to come from Linuxophiles a lot and it baffles the crap out of me...