Mandrake Linux 9.2 Hits the Street

joestar writes "Just announced at Mandrake's website, Mandrake 9.2 (FiveStar) has just been released. Mandrake Club members get full access to 9.2 ISOs (through BitTorrent), as well as... all 9.2 contributors and translators. But the best news, in addition to all (impressive) 9.2 features is that everybody can access the traditional binary & sources tree! Public release of Mandrake 9.2 ISOs will happen at the same time as Mandrake 9.2 Pack availability in retail. It makes sense."

Re:The club?

[Archie Steel]

Yeah, you are. The club is alive and well. Which means I'll be firin' up the old Bittorrent client as soon as I get home tonight!

download rate

[bluegreenone]

FYI I'm getting an average of about 20KB/sec with bittorrent. Certainly not lighting fast. Peak has been about 140KB/sec, low around 5KB/sec. Estimated total time about 17 hours.

Re:Question for current Mandrake users

[dan dan the dna man]

Having used 9.X for some time I think not. I liked Mandrake a lot, but it's instability was frustrating after RedHat. I eventually went back to RedHat (to prepare for the RHCE not for any real reason). I'll give Mandrake 9.2 a whirl, it's a nice system - but I too hope that 9.2 has ironed out a few of the X glitches (gdm was my bugbear).

Re:i586

[Gunfighter]

If you want optimized, install gentoo [gentoo.org] instead. Contrary to popular belief, you don't actually have to compile everything. If you download the CDs for your architecture, you'll find that the included binary packages are compiled for your architecture alerady.

Network install for the cheap

[waffle zero]

I've had success installing Mandrake using the network install floppy. Here are some simple instructions [umr.edu], but the gist is that you download the network.img [umr.edu] and note the location of a rpm mirror for when it asks you. It downloads a 45mb cramfs image and uncompresses it to memory so you should ideally have 90+mb of ram, or mount a swap partition from one of the other terminals.

I would recommend doing a very minimal install consisting of nothing but GNOME or KDE and any servers you wish to run. Then after the install, use urpmi [linux-mandrake.com] to install any other packages. With 9.1 I would get lynx and use it to grab a list of mirrors from Easy Urpmi [zarb.org]. I recommend using Texstar's repository whenever he starts packaging for 9.2. The page currently only has 9.1 and earlier sources, but expect people pestering him from this link to illicit an update.

Re:"Transparent" proxies

[Thing 1]

Another thing about BitTorrent: if you're using a DSL Router/firewall, which gives DHCP addresses to your machines of the form "192.168.x.x" then your IP address is internal-only; the IP address that machines on the internet think you're coming from is actually the router's IP address.

So in order to get BitTorrent working at decent speeds, you need to forward a few ports (which means you can only have BitTorrent at decent speeds on one of your machines -- someone please correct me if there's a better way to do it).

On my router, a Linksys BEFRS41, it's on the "Forwarding" tab, and I have just one rule set: ports 6881 through 6889 are forwarded to my main machine, both UDP and TCP.

That one little change brought my BT speeds from an average of 10-20 kBps to 60-80 kBps (the most this DSL line can handle; at another location I had cable and routinely got 200 kBps).

Hope this helps some of you out there!

Full Text...

[Kadagan AU]

Ok, Mandrake's site is running really slow, and I still have the window opened, so here's the text of their press statement:

A controversy has erupted today in the Linux community about the upcoming Mandrake Linux 9.2 and advertizing. Although the overall reaction from the community is mostly positive, a few people don't seem to be happy about having advertizing in Mandrake 9.2. We'd like to explain briefly why we have done this and why you shouldn't worry.

0) There won't be any ad in the screensavers in Mandrake 9.2

There will be one paid-ad in the installation procedure, and a few paid-links in bookmarks.

1) Ads are selected and won't be intrusive.

Our advertizing plan is only offered to MandrakeSoft partners - we select only ads that make sense as complementary Linux solutions. Additionally, ads won't be intrusive (no pop-up windows) and can be removed easily.

2) There have been ads in Mandrake Linux for years.

Maybe you didn't notice it, but in the installation procedure and in browser's bookmarks, there have been many links to Mandrake products, the GNU project, many Open Source projects and so on. In Mandrake 9.1 there was the first "commercial" link to a technical book content provider. Nobody was annoyed, we didn't get any feedback about that.

3) Free Software and business model.

As we are firmly committed to Open Source/Free Software, we want to keep on exploring business models that are compatible with this spirit.

Re:Upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Urpmi is a beautiful thing ;)
If you're using mandrake, learn to use urpmi. If you set it up as described at http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon (wait for them to get 9.2 mirrors up), then you can, for instance, say
"urpmi gaim" to download and install or updgrade gaim. (in the console as root.) It also gets any dependencies. ;)
"urpmi mozilla-firebird" installs mozilla firebird.
"urpmi tuxracer" installs the tuxracer game.
See the pattern? ;)
If you're not sure of the package name, you can search with "urpmi -y name", which will give you a list of related packages.
To uninstall something, do "urpme package."
And to upgrade everything, do "urpmi --auto-select", hit yes a couple of times and give it a while.

Re:I'm not impressed

[general_boy]

Samba 3.0 (release) is in the cooker contribs with package names samba3*. I'm running it now at work. It's packaged to be installed (but not ran) simultaneously with Samba 2.x, using a 3 suffix for all conflicting files and directory names.

Haven't seen the 9.2 release contribs though - has anyone? At least a Samba 3.0 RC should be in there, if not the release.

Re:Question for current Mandrake users

[Mimir]

I have to try and do an ftp install for the first time ever

Don't. It doesn't work. Tried it 6 times last night (mirror on ftp.uninett.no was already available), but the perl-install process loops on downloading package lists. It can't find hdlist2.cz which is supposed to cover media 3. I was even stupid enough to fry my root partition in an attempt at clean install when upgrade didn't work (separate /home partition. Nothing lost but time). Now I'm back to using RH9 with XD2. It's stable and has gorgeous font rendering. Sub-pixel hinting really works on my laptop (Thinkpad A31p), but it tends to crash when I wake it from suspend. Which sucks, cause I hate having to logout when leaving for/from work.

Re:So let's give everyone access to it

[ceejayoz]

Free != free.

Once you've paid for it, you can do anything with it (within the GPL's limitations) - including re-selling it to someone else, or putting it up for free download via BitTorrent. If someone puts it up for free download, you can get it - perfectly legally - for free.

Mandrake also has the freedom NOT to provide it to anyone who hasn't paid, as long as the source is included with the binaries they're selling.

Re:Use mkisofs to create boot CD from boot floppy

[wemmick]

When I tried this and got an error:

% mkisofs -b network.img -c boot.catalog -o bootcd.iso
mkisofs: Missing pathspec.

I added network.img to the end of the command and it worked:

% mkisofs -b network.img -c boot.catalog -o bootcd.iso network.img
Size of boot image is 2880 sectors -> Emulating a 1440 kB floppy
Total translation table size: 2048
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 0
Total directory bytes: 0
Path table size(bytes): 10
Max brk space used 3000
768 extents written (1 Mb)