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Linux Software

Linux-Mandrake best product of the year @ LWCE 120

Posted by Hemos from the wiining-the-award dept.
Daniel Stone writes "Linux Mandrake won the best product of the year award at LinuxWorld. It's bound to be a contentious discussion about what deserves the awards-but Nick Petrely's comments speak for themselves.
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Linux-Mandrake best product of the year @ LWCE More

Linux-Mandrake best product of the year @ LWCE

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  • Of the Linux distributions I have so far tried (RH5.0, RH5.1, RH6.0, Caldera 2.2, Suse 6.0, and Mandrake 6.0), the only one close to being ready for prime time is Caldera. My one complaint is that Caldera does not support SMP without recompiling the kernel. They should do as RH does, and support both UP and SMP in the original installation.

    Caldera was also the only distribution which painlessly supported 1600x1200 on my ATI Expert and Matrox G200.

    While I recognize that tweakability is one of Linux' features, it isn't one which most users really want to trip over on their first experience with the OS.

    Key items for any distro should be:
    1. Quick and painless install, free from techno questions.
    2. Easy internet config.
    3. Easy ethernet config.

    Once those issues are resolved, most people will be prepared to back off and learn how to tweak the rest.
  • I first started using Debian a year ago (when 2.0 came out). It was a pain in the ass to install. It is a year later, I'm running 2.1 and it's still a pain in the ass to install. And dselect is awkward to work with.
    I like it though. The upgrade procedure is indeed pretty nice. Although I managed to completely screw up the installation by trying to upgrade 2.1 to the unstable 2.2 via ftp. Had to reinstall.

    BTW, does anybody know when 2.2 will be released? Will it come with something better then dselect? And the toughest question -- what the hell does the word Debian mean???
  • having programmed in both toolkits, i must say that qt is vastly superior to gtk in both ease of use and elegance. -luqin

    ---
  • Borland's recent poll (targetting developers) showed that KDE was wanted/thought about more than GNOME for future apps, porting from Windows, what's used currently, etc. It's just as unscientific as a Slashdot poll would be, but it gives you a feel what some developers want. :)

    Check out the results: http://www.borland.com/linux/survey/

    Currently using: KDE 50.1%, GNOME 27.5%
    Interested in developing for: KDE 41.0%, GNOME 28.3%
  • if you use your brain (and I know you must have one in there some where) you shouldn't have a need to use lynx.

    Interesting. Is it your assertion, then, that blind people using emacspeak are stupid and unworthy? (And don't even try to convince me to use w3. lynx is much better.)

    If your comment is moderated down, I can only suggest that this is justice in action.

    --

  • Qt is a pure pleasure to use. For example, it is so easy to create your own widgets, it's kinda scary ...



  • The whole affair with GTK is a terrible mistake. Now we have "official GNU toolkit" that looks as it was designed in the early 90 ...

    Shame.

    Using C to create extendable GUI toolkit ??
    Stupidity!
  • I thought we were getting over the M$ monopoly when along comes RH and tries the same stunt again...

    What the hell are you talking about? How is RedHat a monopoly? How are they even SEEMING to attempt to monopolize the market? Do you even realize you posted this under an article about a slightly modified copy of RH 6.0 winning an award? What monopoly reacts with pleasure when someone takes their product, sells it, and wins an award for doing so?

    I'm not pissed off at RH for making money, I'm pissed off at them for bastardizing someone else's work, and presenting it in a substandard form to the general public, and doing it successfully...

    Again, I say, huh? Ok, first off, whose work is RH "bastardizing?" The FSF's? Check the license, bro. By definition the GPL says that THERE IS NO SUCH THING as "bastardizing" free software. Second of all, while it's become really trendy lately to lambast RedHat because it's popular (the horror!), how do you think it became popular? That massive RedHat media blitz before 4.2? (By the way, that last sentence was sarcasm. They seem to not have that on your planet, so I thought I'd point it out). RedHat's popular because they usually release a solid product (with the exception of 5.2, which of course is all most people who complain about how "bad" RH is have used). 6.0 works like a dream for me. Have you tried it?

    Basically, I gotta agree with the "evil" AC in the other thread attached to your first moronic diatribe. Just go away. You run linux because it's "alternative" don't you? Can't stand that a lot of people are getting into your "alternative" thing? I bet you liked Nirvana "before anyone else had heard of them".

    Oh yeah, and this whole obsession you seem to have with AC's being actually cowardly or something is just plain silly. If you sincerely believe that people without accounts never have anything worrthwhile to say, just set your threshold to 1. Fool.
    ----------------------
    "This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!

  • Caldera's really targeted at the office desktop. I'm not surprised that doing anything non-standard causes problems. I'd say, go with RedHat 6.0 for serves. I've installed it on a dual PPro, a dual Pentium III, three Pentium II's, and 2 486's, and had nery a single problem in any case. They were literally all first time, up and running, haven't shut down since the installer got done installs. Very pleasant.

    Now if they'd only let me have that Sparc box at work... ;-)
    ----------------------
    "This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!

  • Why hasn't this been given a "5" by the "moderators"? This is the most iformative and important statement on this subject in the whole thread.
  • And just what have you contributed to the code, Numbnuts??? If you're such an advocate of Linux, why don't you have the courage to post as other than an AC? It's fairly obvious that you really don't understand what I said, and in what context it was said, the original poster did, he was being sarcastic, and he caught me out, you however are just being stupid.

    It also appears that you cannot see what is happening in the Linux and the business world. You can lie about your credentials (Mr "93") all you like, but if you're too stupid to see the recurring (and documented) trend that many of us do then quite frankly, you are an imbecile. But then you already know that don't you?

    Let me guess, you're pissed off because you paid full price for Redhat, eh?
  • I understand the criteria the judges used, but they seemed rather nearsighted to not recognize that Applix is superior to both SO and WP. Just because it doesn't emulate windoz crap, doesn't mean it isn't the best - supports more formats than WP and SO combined. I grant the import and export should be incorporated into open and save, but I believe the Applix folks already know that and are working on it . . .
  • Shit. I have tried Debian couple a months ago and everything was pretty standard except fricking package managment software.
    Who the fuck designed it ??

    I have tried to install one fricking package, spent almost hours messing around with dselect .. and that was it. I won't touch debian for a long time.
  • Around the timeframe of Raster's early theme attempts (when he had themed the button, remember?) I sent /. a scoop about a nice hack I had done. See, I had totally, programatically themed Qt's buttons, scrollbars, menus and a few other widgets.

    It was technically interesting (if a bit perverse), and it was totally legal.

    Now, do you think /. carried that?

    Want to know what they *did* carry? An article about Rasterman's work, and then an article about a new screenshot of Rasterman's work :-)

    Of course Rasterman's work deserved every story it got, I had lots of fun with it, but don't try telling me /. covers both environments equally.

    Then again, it is /.'s right to be unfair. It's not like /. is actually IMPORTANT, right?

    BTW: do you think posting each GNOME article as from the "extremely-cool-things-you-want-to-die-for-departm ent" (not really, but almost) and KDE's from the "equal-time-department" shows an image of fairness?

  • I installed Caldera recently on a small server intended to serve a small business. We needed Samba, PPP, masquerading, fetchmail, and a special Web server installed.

    - I installed everything on the $2 CD from LinuxMall. (I assume Caldera only adds PartitionMagic to the commercial version.) Tried to boot from the CD, had to fix an IDE cable, tried again, and it eventually installed perfectly. Had this been a "normal" box, it probably would have gone right the first time.

    - Wanted to set up Samba using SWAT. SWAT is the excellent web-based configuration tool that's *supposed* to come with Samba 2. It was nowhere to be found. Mildly irritated, I edited smb.conf by hand. Samba worked but not flawlessly.

    - I set up PPP then started to work on IP masquerading. Guess what--masquerading had not been enabled when the kernel was compiled. So I decided it was time to learn how to compile a new kernel for myself. OpenLinux 2.2 comes with kernel version 2.2.5 and I downloaded kernel version 2.2.10. I thought there would be nothing wrong with an upgrade.

    - Read HOWTO's until I finally got the kernel configured and compiled. After reboot, everything seemed okay except for Samba. Went to the Samba Web site and downloaded 2.05a. I didn't mind doing this anyway since I would finally get SWAT with it.

    - Compiled Samba and got it running but discovered that it would not accept *any* passwords. Searched around a lot and discovered that PAM had not been enabled in the compile. I figured PAM was standard enough that all distro's would use it by now.

    - Even with everything installed correctly, could not get PAM to work with Samba because of something different about the way PAM works on Caldera. Tried to revert to the usage of the Unix crypt() call. Had to grab libcrypt from the RadHat 6 installation on my laptop, and by sheer luck it worked.

    - Had to install a second network card. Spent an entire day playing with "make xconfig" only to discover that for some reason, if you compile two types of network interfaces into the kernel (rather than make at least one modular), the kernel will detect only one of them. Or so it would seem. Admittedly, this problem had nothing to do with Caldera.

    - Tried to install the linuxconf package from the RedHat 6.0 distribution. Wanted to be able to point and drool to configure the machine since I'd already spent more than a week on it. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Linuxconf is very, very nice IMHO. It should be integrated into KDE and GNOME. But after installing it, the machine would barely boot. Fortunately, rpm --erase restored my rc.d files. :)

    Only two days ago I had to install a new server that would serve similar functions. I used Mandrake 6.0. No major problems, no need to recompile the kernel, NO MISSING LIBRARIES... and in fact, I got Netatalk working on Linux 2.2. According to the Netatalk FAQ, it doesn't compile on 2.2. But it did! I spent only a few hours too.

    Conclusion: if all you intend to do with the Linux box is already on the Caldera CD, you've got a winner. Otherwise, use something else!!
  • yes... I think it's time: Red Hat, Debian and SuSE have had their own logo in Slashot... Why not a cool Mandrake logo too??? It's great!
  • Potato (Debian 2.2) will hopefully be released before the end of the year. There is discussion on debian-devel of forking a freeze of 2.1 now and creating an intering distribution to fill in the gap.

    Potato is supposed to ship with deity, the replacement for dselect -- it is a front-end to apt. Apt itself is going to gain much new functionality, including a very useful 'build from source' option.

    I'm very looking forward to the deity/improved apt combo -- apt is a wonderful tool already in Slink, and much nicer than dpkg.

    Finally, Debian is a contraction of the names "Deborah" and "Ian" -- check the website. :)
  • Your name's not really Bill Gate$ is it??? Who else would be silly enough to want another decade of minimal choice?

    Do you actually use Linux, or are you a "blissful" Windows user? One of the reasons why Linux has become so popular of late is that the very Windows users you seem to think exist in such "utter bliss" are looking for something better, there's nothing wrong with having viable alternatives, and I can assure you - Redhat would not be my distro of choice, it's a crap distribution - there are plenty of distro's out there vastly superior to RH. Not to mention that they are selling the fruits of someone else's labour for their own corporate gain, mainly to fools like you! And the scariest part is you are proud to admit you are dumb enough to help fund their attempted monopoly.

    You can't compare UNIX to Linux, they are as different (ideologically) as chalk and cheese. Linux was designed from the ground up as an open source alternative, not a commercial O/S. It's companies trying to monopolize Linux for their own ends that will screw us, not the distro's giving away their work on it purely for the betterment of Linux itself.

    You should take the time to remember, where the hell would Linux be without the GPL, and open source??? You want to go back to writing your own drivers, eh?

    Now Redhat is getting rich on the unpaid work of the thousands of volunteers worldwide who have put so much of their lives into improving Linux for everybody, and fools like you want them to close their (poached) source for their own gain - are you intellectually impaired in some way?
  • You see, there I would have to say you're wrong. Linux and this whole free software/open source stuff has been around for quite a while now. The companies you list, and anyone getting in now has got to have asked themselves, "What if someone copies what I do and makes it better?" The thing about the GPL, is they must release the better code as well. RedHat recognizes this, Mandrake recognizes this. If RedHat wants to include Mandrake changes in updated RPMs, fine. Everyone gets a better product in the end.

    At Comdex back in April, Bob Young was asked this sort of question during one of the panels, he basically said this same thing, I don't have an exact quote is all. But for a more recent quote (yesterday), visit LinuxWorld [linuxworld.com]'s web site. When Nick Petreley asked:

    Donnie Barnes replied that Mandrake had asked Red Hat if they had a problem with this, and they do not. Red Hat is actually pleased, because under the GPL, Red Hat can incorporate the improvements. This is an example of the open source model working, and it is the responsibility of companies using the model to help new companies coming into the open source community. Larry Augustin voiced his agreement and added "this is a credit to the (open source) culture." Giving up control, which would drive a traditional company crazy, actually results in better products. (Donnie Barnes is from RedHat.)

    I can't say it better myself. Once you leave that, "I'm being cheated" attitude and realize all of what Open Source means, you'll get it too.
  • My distro didn't win! Obviously it was a setup. Janet Reno should look into this!

    Give me a break! Are you expecting me to believe that Mandrake OUTSPENT SuSE and Redhat in bribes? Have you thought about returning your Mandrake package, or are you more interested in pouting? Did you even try out the installation support you paid for? Grow up and learn to spell.

    (I didn't know that there was a Netscape for KDE. When was that announced?)
  • The solution I found was to get the newest lynx rpm and install that.

    Worked great after that.

    I guess they messed up on the compile or something.

    Or you can use the source rpm too.

    Did you also email mandrake with a bug report???


  • I have come to expect it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Things have been this way for years. Click the "topic" link and you will see there are 48 Gnome stories vs 22 KDE ones, despite KDE having a much larger user base and developer interest. Slashdot editors simply don't like to cover KDE.
  • You know, it's easy to sit back, read other people's posts and then reply, trying to look clever like you did, but the real test of a person is whether or not they stand by their convictions, I do.

    Yeah, I got trolled, I will freely admit that...but it was pretty bloody subtle humour, and I'll bet I'm not the only one! The sad part is what led me to get caught out in the first place - Let me illustrate: the Linux community is gradually "dumbing down" (you're a good example of that!) to a point where it won't be long before comments like that are completely devoid of satire - some people I have met actually think like that - and that scares me.


    I thought we were getting over the M$ monopoly when along comes RH and tries the same stunt again...this is beneficial for no-one, except of course RH! What really frightens me is that they are succeeding - largely due to the same uninformed (dumbed down) users I spoke of earlier.
    If you can honestly say this doesn't frighten you then you are either a fool or a liar!

    I'm not pissed off at RH for making money, I'm pissed off at them for bastardizing someone else's work, and presenting it in a substandard form to the general public, and doing it successfully...forget about Debian, there are plenty of better distro's out there than RH. I'm also pissed off at the Linux community in general, for being stupid enough to allow RH to get as far with this charade as they have, it doesn't say much for us as a group of so called "intellectuals" now does it?

    All I can say to you is that at least you had the intestinal fortitude to post as yourself, not AC, as do many other frightened children!
  • In Mandrake's default installation, PostgreSQL fails to load. *sigh*. If anyone knows how to get this to work, I for one am all ears.

    But still, this is a minor bug compared to the problems I had with Windows NT4. Sheesh...

    --Tom

  • He has said so in half a dozen of his articles in LinuxWorld. Don't you read them?

    Or you mean he is a KDE fan, but uses GNOME for some hidden reason?

    Or perhaps that even though he likes GNOME better, he understands that currently in some situations KDE is more suited?

    Or what in heaven are you talking about, (that is not in your own mind, I mean)
  • FWIW, Redhat 6.0 includes KDE (using it now...it switches between desktops faster than Gnome on my system).

  • This was the funniest thing I've read in a long, long time. Thanks for cheering me up!
  • Hi. There have been a PILE of anti-Mandrake posts, and that is simply not fair. Yes, Mandrake is based on RedHat. Yes, they owe a lot of success to RedHat. No, that doesn't mean that RedHat should get the award. Mandrake offers many benefits over a RedHat system. We are deploying it where I work BECAUSE of those advantages. While the ISO that you download has some problems (most of which have been mentioned already) it is, overall, the best I've used. Here's why I think it's great: 1) Better Apache support. They've used whatever Apache is newest since the get go! They also include MySQL RPM's, PHP RPM's and all sorts of other goodies. 2) WAY better applications! Everyone always points out how it has a better KDE (which is a significant feature) there are a lot of other little stuff that they sneak on too: XEmacs, X11Amp, MandrakeUpdate, CDparanoia, CDrecord, Xcdrost, and a slew of others that I can't think of at the moment. 3) FANTASTIC support. I've e-mailed the Mandrakesoft people on multiple occasions, and they've always been quick and courteous. Despite the fact that I've only ever ordered the 5.3 CDr and downloaded 6.0. 4) Cooker. For those of you that don't know, Cooker is the "unstable" branch of Mandrake. It's a real boon, as new RPM's are added every day, and they ALL WORK! Something that I never found to be true with rawhide. I've tried RedHat 4.2, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.0, Mandrake 5.3, 6.0, SuSE 5.1-6.1, Debian 2.0, 2.1 and Potato. At the end of the day, my favorites have been Potato and Mandrake. I'd love to stick with Debian, I really like the deb's, but Mandrake consistantly brings out the newest versions of the software I want. To me, with Cooker, Mandrake has changed from being a distro that is a RedHat knock off, to one that more closely resembles Debian, and happens to use RPM's and is compatible with RedHat. The best of all posibilities to me! (having said all of this, I think I'd still stick with Debain for a server, as it is SO stable) Thanks for reading all of this, Ben
  • Not really. You can use the KDE one if you have KDE installed (I use Kmail as my email client with no problems). Or stick with lynx... Netscape sucks, but not as badly as not having a browser at all sucks!
    ----------------------
    "This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!

  • YMWV (Score:1)

    by SeanNi ( 18947 )
    YMWV... as in: your mileage will vary. Apparently, even in the same car.

    /me: 1 week ago. Using GNOME -- happy, happy joy joy. 3 months and nary a crash. All is well.

    Hard drive failure.

    Fuckshitcrapdamnhell.

    goto( store ); buy( new_hard_drive );

    Reinstall, reinstall, reinstall.

    Linux from same disks, apps from same disks, GNOME from same disks (made backup).

    Identical SW situation, identical HW situation (except for hard drive).

    Crash.

    Damn

    rpm -ev gnome*; rpm -Uvh gnome*.rpm

    Crash

    Arrghhh

    repeat ad nauseam

    Maybe I'll try KDE...
    --
    - Sean
  • I installed the latest (6.0) and Lynx won't work! This is unacceptable! It dies saying
    metamail: can't open temporary file...
    Arrrgh! I need my LYNX!!!!!!!!!!
  • I also installed Mandrake 6.0 and all sorts of things didn't really work right. telnet backspace didn't work right with some servers, gdb wouldn't debug binaries build by gcc, some of the config programs stopped working...

    Might have been my fault, could have been the packages that were automatically selected, but I started over with RedHat 6.0 and encountered zero problems.
  • I think it's a little bit surprising that the considered distros were Debian 2.1, Caldera 2.2, Mandrake 6.0, Red Hat 6.0, Slackware 4.0, and TurboLinux 3.6 Workstation, and that Suse was not even considered. I believe they make more money then RH (well, not counting the IPO)...

    Also, it believe it's quite pointless to give opinions on religious wars subject (like KDE/GNOME) or (EMACS/VI). Whatever they say, they will end up having about half of the Linux community disagreeing with them.

    The only to find out (in one way or another) what is the prefered distro or the prefered product (and I use the word prefered instead of best) is through a big vote...
  • I know (part of the reasons for this). Many of the Mandrake programs are designed to give you Pretty Colors (TM). For example, there is a wrapper for gcc (colorizegcc or something like that) which colorizes the error messages. These extra color sequences probably cause some other wrappers to go nuts. Also, it doesn't come with EGCS, but instead cometh with the PGCC.
    But LYNX doesn't WORK!
  • fixed race?

    being a novite, i bought mandrake pkg.. wouldn't even boot kernel on my PC after install. ntm frigging up my old dos files.

    then, i bought SuSE pkg.. works fine. netscape for kde being the lamest app incl., as ALL others work WELL.

    far as i'm concerned, mr drake owes me 25$.

    undoubtedly, A LOT of wallstreetofdeceit polticking to be experienced fromnowon. read about VAlarry's claims to be bigger than the net now. oh well.
  • I think mandrake is kinda like windows...
    They try to cram a bunch of cool stuff into it... but it doesnt always work properly.

    Lynx didnt work...
    I had problems with the compiler...
    DHCP didnt work...
    Was way slower than other distroz on the same box...

    Dont know if something like this deserves product of the year though....

    -LoungeAct-
  • But then can't it be argued that redhat just added a few enhancements to a collection of free software? If redhat should get the award, then can't it be backgracked to GNU, Linus, etc? This is the idea behind free software. Make it better, and that's what Mandrake did. Sure, if it weren't for redhat, there'd be no Mandrake. But if it weren't for GNU (etc etc) there wouldn't be redhat.
  • Complain, complain, complain.... I use Mandrake. I've also used RedHat and Debian in the past. I liked all three, despite having one problem or another with all of them. Probably due to a lack of knowledge, but, oh well.

    I love using Linux and I've learned a lot about it. The problem is: RedHat wins and award, Mandrake wins an award, Caldera wins an award... so what. If Slackware, TurboLinux, SUSE, or any other distro won an award there would be people complaining about that too. The point here is "YOU HAVE A CHOICE".

    Not that I never have a complaint with Linux from time to time, but if I can't make something work, instead of blaming the distro, I blame my lack of knowledge.

    Maybe people should stop complaining and start working on their problems... everything would be much better.

    I love Linux, but day after day I have a new reason to like the Linux community less and less. Lack of a sense of humor and constant complaining makes communicating with others here really tiresome. Long live Linux and the people who care enough to learn it.
  • I think mandrake is kinda like windows...
    They try to cram a bunch of cool stuff into it... but it doesnt always work properly.

    Lynx didnt work...
    I had problems with the compiler...
    DHCP didnt work...
    Was way slower than other distroz on the same box...

    Dont know if something like this deserves product of the year though....
  • Oh thank you so much! Thank you thank you thank you!
    Lynx rules....
    My guess is most of the problems with mandrake are solved like this....
  • Uhm, okay smart guy..if you're using Linux Mandrake..it comes with A) KDE and B) tons of 3rd party software. So if you use your brain (and I know you must have one in there some where) you shouldn't have a need to use lynx.

    .:watches comment get moderated down to -12:.
  • Well, one word actually, two syllables - but I get your point.

    Thank goodness for that - I was starting to worry that Redhat might have gotten hold of the source code for the Micro$oft Subliminal Message Wizard and begun using it to assimilate unsuspecting users...

    Phew, but I still won't be letting my guard down!

  • Hint - if you see an "Astroturfer", you should reply to them directly instead of posting a random, worthless comment.

    That is, unless this is a Linux advocacy robot posting -- I've had my suspicions.
    --
  • Ha!!

    The person who's bitching the loudest about people using Free Software fell for this one hook line and sinker! I guess all that self-righteousness about Debian blinded you to any form of humor.

    It's called satire. Look it up in the dictionary. If you're pissed at Redhat for making money, why don't you point the blame at the GPL! After all, it's the GPL that allows people to sell GPL'd software. It's the GPL that opens up sourcecode so that other, less-enlightened, folks can use it.

    If I didn't know better, I'd say you're pissed at Free Software being Free! IF YOU DON'T WANT PEOPLE USING YOUR CODE, DON'T MAKE IT FREE!!!

    Wipe that egg off your face. It looks silly.
  • Some of us prefer to use Lynx. I am one such person. Sure, we're missing out on waiting 3 minutes while the images load, and the scrolling Javascript banners that say "You are now at my website", and our screens aren't delightfully subdivided with increasing layers of frames, and we don't have that wonderful blinking text, or text colors that are the similar to the color of the background, and maybe we don't know the excitement of having our browsers crash, and maybe we get confused by the ability to always/never/conditionally accept cookies on a per-domain basis, but I think we'll get by.

    It can even be said that the web is really about text, which Lynx handles beautifully. But people who say that probably prefer reading books to watching TV, and are thus obviously crazy, and their opinions should be discounted.

    (Sarcasm: OFF) I will admit that Lynx doesn't fit every situation. Online banking is one example. For these few purposes we can fire up some bloatware like Netscape. But Lynx is great for a general purpose browser.

  • I've been using Caldera for about a month, and I'm ready to get rid of it for something better. I couldn't even install a new kernel without killing the system.
  • Ok, I'll vote.

    I started using KDE at beta 1. Flakey, a couple of X server crashes a month. Everything worked as advertized, there just wasn't much advertized. At the time, however, I was ready to give up on Linux rather than learn m4 to configure fvwm. KDE B1 was a breeze to customize. Everything I wanted in my menus was there in minutes.

    But the license really bothered me. I was very excited at the announcement of gnome and tried 2-3 betas. I couldn't keep it up for an hour at a time. OK, patience, let's see what 1.0 brings....

    What an amazing disappointment! I loaded 1.0 with Great Anticipation. It crashed X 3 times while exploring the control-panel. Several more X crashes, and I gave up. I know this is NOT a universal experience, many people are happily using GNOME, so maybe it's a Video card/Xserver/Gnome compatibility thing ('tho I tried 2 very different machines).

    I am truly grateful for QPL2, and the efforts of BOTH the KDE and GNOME developers. The coopetition breeds better software. And I wish GNOME the best of luck. But for someone who X's to Solaris & HP boxes to do real work, including critical admin work that had better not be dropped by a hung/trashed X session, KDE gets my vote. KDE Beta 1 was better than GNOME 1.0. The only time I have problems with KDE is when I play with themes (which are still experimental anyway). Swap themes a few times to check them out, and it's best to log out and back in when you're ready to start working again.

    I'll play with GNOME at home as new releases come out, but it has lost any change of being put on my production machine until it proves itself worthy. None-the-less, I believe it WILL prove itself one day. Then, we'll have to vote again.

  • You should fix this lynx problem by creating subdirectory ~/tmp under the home directries of all accounts:


    /root/tmp, /home/usernames/tmp, /etc/skel/temp


    Check http://home.knUUt.de/tom.be/faq.html for more info.

    Good luck.
  • Thank You. That needed to be said.
  • Amen!
    Plus, in Lynx I can read a slashdot page as it loads. What a novel idea! And when I'm going BACK to a page, it doesn't even need to reload the whole thing like Netscape does.
    --
  • I was concerned about Mandrake compiling their whole ditribution with pgcc, and particularly the kernel. (There are known to be problems with pgcc and the kernel, but even the pgcc people don't clain to know all possible problems) and MDK is compiled with options which are a bit "fancy", too.) I have used RH for years but picked up MDK6.0 and have tried it on 3 machines. On one, the ide-tape oopsed immmediatedly (and didn't work) every time I tried to access it. I installed RH6.0 and it was fine. ( I even switched back and forth a few times and it was quite reproducable.) The second and third machines fsck sometimes on boot up (even after a normal shutdown) and give lots of fsck messages (more than normal even after a crash) and a substantial number of files get lost. I have monitored alt.os.linux.mandrake and see pretty much the same kinds of problems you would have with a normal stable distribution and people seem generally to be happy enough with it. So I am interested in some of the comments posted here. I really like most of there enhancements but even if pgcc is not the problem in any particular case, it still is another variable to be ruled out any time you have a problem. And honestly, for what? Even the pgcc people say that the speed up is usually only about 5% (I generally observe a bit less) and that only for processor intensive stuff. Plus it doesn't run on anything that doesn't support the pentium instruction set (i.e. not 486 or 386) although I have heard that in practice that is not true. The Mandrake people say it won't anyway. Constructive comments are most appreciated.
  • Netscape for KDE? No.

    Maybe you misunderstood something though. KDE has the browser Konqueror, which is missing certain features but crashes less than Netscape and requires almost no time to load.

    Of Lynx, Konqueror, and Netscape, I use all three. It depends on what kind of site I'm going to.
    --
  • Debian's had a ftp install since at least 1.3, and probably before. It wasnt enabled by default though. Now it has APT, which can get your packages via ftp, http and from any mounted resource.
  • Gtk-- incomplete? What is missing?

    IMHO the people claiming that Qt is far superior to gtk+ is just showing their bias towards C++ and haven't used Gtk--.

    /mill
  • I can't speak to most of your technical concerns, as I have too little experience in Linux, and haven't yet done battle with tape on Linux. (My history with tape anywhere says it's mostly good on paper, but highly unreliable.)

    I find Gnome not even close to comfortable, and decided to try Mandrake to get a Red Hat with KDE. I find KDE to be hugely more polished, and less flaky.

    I like Caldera, which is also KDE, and is the only one which has been able to fully configure X for 1600x1200.

    I like that Mandrake doesn't support less than a Pentium, as I no longer have anything running which is not at least a Pentium.

    My only problem with Caldera is that it doesn't support SMP out of the box. And each time I tried to recompile the kernel, it failed. Probably I need to install some source RPMs, but how would I know?

    I like Linux, but it desperately needs documentation work, and Caldera is miles ahead of the others on installation. For now, I can't afford the time to school myself in it.
  • I had much the same experience, but with a slightly different end result.

    KDE Beta 4 was my first KDE, and I was mucho impressed. Not only was it just worlds better than fvwm95, much better looking/more functionality than WindowMaker (Ok, before the flames start-- this was from the perspective of an M$ refugee. I have since used WM for long stretches and once you understand The Window Maker Way, it's a really nice window manager), etc. So I stuck with it for a while.

    Gnome betas started coming out, and, being a Linux type person by now, I was always willing to try out the newest thing. Tried 'em, didn't like 'em. Frankly, on a 15" monitor, Gnome took up way too much space. Plus it was extremely unstable. So I went back to KDE, and all was well.

    Then the big Gnome 1.0 uproar went up. So I just had to try it again. And, just like you, I was shocked at how unstable it was. The panel pretty much NEVER started up right (and every time it failed, I had to manually reconfigure it all over again), etc., etc.

    But a funny thing happened. I fell in love, somehow. Despite it's instability, and problems, it was just so much prettier than KDE that I couldn't go back anymore. And luckily, those really were just first-release flutters. The vast majority of those problems have been fixed, and my gnome/E desktop is stable as a rock for long stretches on end. In fact, I can't recall the last time gnome has crashed on me.

    I recommend all those who stuck with KDE cause gnome 1.0 was such a disappointment, get the latest rpm's or whatever (and seriously, get ALL the latest ones!), reinstall, and try out Gnome one more time. It really is pretty, and works extremely nice.

    As always, this is my preference and my experience, and YMMV :-)
    ----------------------
    "This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!

  • 1) Do you have a Pentium or better? Mandrake is compiled for 5x86 - a 386 or 486 won't run Mandrake.

    2) I don't know what you did, but Mandrake never touched my Windows drive. I'm guessing you did something wrong when partitioning.

    3) You can get a Mandrake CD at Cheap Bytes for like $3. No reason to waste money...
  • Mandrake wouldn't be necessary if Redhat didn't have a history of releasing buggy distributions, and if Redhat wasn't so violently opposed to KDE for whatever reason. Not to start a holy war, but KDE is clearly the better product IMHO, and every other distribution but Redhat seems to understand this. Redhat has hired some GNOME developers, and IMHO that is why they wish to push GNOME over KDE. You can disagree if you'd like, but that how I feel.

    Redhat packages a bunch of OSS utilities. Mandrake takes that package and plays with it until it doesn't suck anymore. I've got no problem with that.

    Furthermore, Mandrake should be enough proof to all those people out there who believe that RedHat is going to become Linux's MS, that that isn't going to happen.

  • Fixing the Lynx Problem (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hi.. you can fix the problem with lynx by modifying your shell resource (ie .bashrc) to include the following... export TMPDIR=/tmp or just type that in everytime you login. after that.. lynx works great.

  • KDE/Qt sweeps the awards!!! (Shame on Slashdot!) (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 12, 1999 @09:41AM (#1749605)
    What Slashdot shamelessly tried to ignore on its front page:

    The significance of the Linuxworld Editors' Choice Awards lies not so much in that Mandrake won product of the year, but in that KDE and Qt swept all relevant award categories:

    1. Product of the year.
    Both Mandrake 6.0 and the runner-up Caldera 2.2 put heavy emphasis on KDE; Caldera's installation lizard is built with Qt (with help from Troll Tech). So KDE/Qt win both 1st and second place;

    2. Distribution/Server.
    Mandrake wins again! (OK, this award has less to do with KDE directly but still, the term `Mandrake' inextricably invokes KDE);

    3. Distribution/Client.
    This time Caldera 2.2 wins with Mandrake second! Again, not directly related to KDE but see 2 above; a KDE-oriented distribution wins both places;

    4. Desktop Environment.
    Winner: KDE 1.1.1
    Runner-up: GNOME 1.0.9/Enlightenment 0.15
    Need we say more? Well, as a matter of fact, yes:

    "KDE is what Microsoft's Active Desktop should have been. It has all the power of Active Desktop and much more -- but without the inconsistencies and instability of Windows 98. KDE 1.1.1 is unsurpassed for simplicity and ease of use. And while it isn't the fastest desktop
    available, it's no slouch in the speed category, either. "

    5. Programming Library/Tools
    Winner: Qt 2.0
    "Qt 2.0: Qt 2.0 is a library of functions and widgets for creating intuitive, easy-to-use applications. The strength of Qt 2.0 is in how much it simplifies the task of programming graphical applications for Linux. The KDE desktop was built using Qt 1.4. Qt 2.0 adds several new classes and extends the flexibility of the libraries. GTK is the primary competitor to Qt, and although GTK is an excellent library that is arguably more flexible than Qt in some respects, Qt has by far the more elegant object-oriented library of classes. Qt excels because it is a more abstract class library than GTK, which minimizes the amount of work the programmer must do in order to write applications."

    6. Productivity Application/Suite
    Winner: StarOffice 5.1
    Runner-up: WordPerfect 8

    Neither of these awards are directly related to KDE, but StarOffice is well-known for being KDE-compliant, and the makers of WordPerfect 8 for Linux are making a KDE(and Debian)-based distro!

    The significance of this should be obvious to any reporter worth his salt. If GNOME (which I wish all success) had had a similar day at the awards I am sure Slashdot would have been quick to point the obvious significance on the front page!. In this case, however, Slashdot shamelessly ignores this on its front page. I cannot help but think that the KDE/Qt success may have deterred a front page story listing the awards. Too bad: I thought that we had matured past these kinds of slights.

  • Has anyone installed both Debian and Caldera recently? I would like to know if the differences in installation are as significant as the Editors seem to think they are; they claim Debian is "one of the most difficult distributions to install" while Caldera "coddles you through the most pleasant installation experience available."

    Is this true? What do users experienced with both think?

    NOTE: I'm just interested in the relative merits of these distros' installations. Stick to the installations, please.
  • Slashdot still doesn't really carry much KDE news and most news is skewed towards Gnome and RH. For example, in a /. story it was recently said that KDE won the Borland/Inprise survey with Gnome close behind. Well the poll results are available at http://www.borland.com/linux/survey/. How much do you want to bet it isn't carried because KDE absolutely swept the poll?
    The relevant questions:
    10. The Linux desktop environment that I currently run is?
    50.1% 11638/23209 KDE
    27.5% 6380/23209 GNOME
    11. Which Desktop environment are you interested in developing for?
    41.0% 9527/23221 KDE
    28.3% 6565/23221 GNOME
  • While I haven't used Caldera, I've installed Debian several times. Most of it seems pretty easy and about what you'll find with most distributions. It even adds a normal user for you - something Redhat visibly lacks I think. The menus of choices while installing is less than perfect, but okay.

    But the package management is godawful. First, pick a role for your computer. Or if you don't like that, pick tasks. You'll still have no idea what you're picking, or how much space it adds up to. After that's done, try to use that ugly excuse for an application designed by someone who truly hates users - dpakg or whatever its hateful name is. And then it segs and drops a core somewhere halfway through the install. Debian seems to be a nice distribution, but that ugly package manager needs to die.

    Of course, my favorite installers are a dead tie between Slackware and FreeBSD, so...

  • I can't speak to the Debian installation, not having done one recently, but I choose Caldera whenever (a) the machine already has Windows and has to be dual bootable and/or (b) when someone with little unix/linux experience is going to be administering it. I think my 4-year-old could handle the install (especially if it's not going to be a dual-boot system) and the Caldera COAS stuff makes routine admin pretty easy.

    (I use SuSE at home, though.)
  • If you're a Debian user then you'll know just how superior it is to Redhat - whose recent releases have been IMHO pretty bloody disgraceful!

    The obvious question then is why the hell are you waving Redhat's flag??? They are trying to become the next M$, on the coat-tails of Linus and the rest of the genuine Linux community.

    This should make you more upset than Mandrake pulling a bit of a "Redhat" trick on Redhat, eh?
  • no, i'm just saying it did not work for me. y'all are absolutely positive that there is no politiking going on in the race for the billions, right? i have 0 favorite in the race. my spelling is atroseeus, so what.

    why would a pkg. (oh excuse me DISTRO) be product of the year, if it doesn't work?

    netscape came with the SuSE pkg.. sorry if my terminology isn't up to snuff.

    there was no support, other than e-mail, that was not answered.

    y'all is mighty touchy. i'm about as groan as i want to be. i expressed an experience, and an opinion, pardon me all to haites.
  • Perhaps the slashdot maintainers would care to comment on this. Censoring what the Open Source community reads to further a personal agenda isn't what I'd expect from (presumably) intelligent adults.
  • I had to install Debian a few months ago. Getting the base OS on is not all that bad, although it's surely second-rate.

    But once you want to start putting packages on, or X or a window manager, good bloody luck. I find it impossible to believe that anyone thought it was a good design. I think it's a test - if you can't figure it out, you're too stupid to use this product anyway, so go away.

    LJS
  • Don't worry. There are plenty of Linux users and developers with fine senses of humor. I know a bunch of them. It's just that the nasties often get more vocal than the good people.

  • Alright, let's have a (completely unscientific, informal) vote to determine preference.

    Seems there's two ways to determine preference to me. One can look at the number of apps developed with GNOME in mind versus the number of apps developed with KDE in mind, or one can ask everybody to vote for either GNOME or KDE.

    You'd think the first would be relatively easy to determine. Unfortunately, I haven't the slightest idea how to go about finding out. Any ideas?

    Now, the second is a lot harder--"everybody" is a lot of people. But we can conduct a nice informal poll whose results mean nothing quite easily (a la the /. poll). Fun fun fun.

    Interestingly, the Editors picked KDE as their winner over GNOME because "KDE is as stable as a rock, [but] the GNOME panel and file manager have a few bugs left to iron out." In your experience, are the KDE launch panel and file manager more stable and robust than their GNOME counterparts?

    Not including Suse was silly.

  • Just wanted to clarify that Unreal Tournament has not yet been released... What was announced last week was that the port is almost complete and will likely be released with the retail version when it appears (which should be released shortly...)
  • Right on! But let's be honest here. We can't just blame the Mandrake team, it's that damned GPL license that's the root cause of all this shinanigans. Since those evil Mandrake folks could look at the source code for everything in RedHat, fix and change things, recompile with Pentium optimizations; that's the real evil here. And it's all RMS's fault. Sharing code, sheesh, that's bullhonkey.

    And now that RedHat has bunches of millions from the IPO, they should take everything and put it under a no-source-code-no-modifying license. They don't need any of this stinkin Open Source stuff. And they will get the awards they truely deserve. The stock owners will love it when they get all the awards, and the stock will go even higher!

    And while they're at it, they should buy out every other distribution. Why are there 4300 distributions? That's anarchy! Unix split into a bunch of different versions, and look at it now. You can't go to Best Buy and buy a computer with or a box of HP-UX or AIX. Do we want to end up like them?? This is chilling proof that this anarchy must be reigned in. If there is only one choice, users will be happy, stockholders will be happy. Just look at Windows; those people are in utter bliss.

    That's the only way to solve this. Which world would you want to live in?
  • Debian can't be any tougher than COL 2.2. The reason being that I have yet to get COL 2.2 to install, including reboot, on my box.

    I've never tried Debian v-anything, but the very box that COL 2.2 won't run on, currently runs RH 6.0, Slack 4.0, and w95, and has run FreeBSD and OS2 so I don't think it's a hardware problem. Since I've put boxes together with OSes since xenix on 286-AT days I don't think it's the installer either. ;-)
  • I tried doing a Debian install once, but I didn't see anything to do a FTP or HTTP install of it. So I was stuck, without a CDROM on that computer. Has at least this much been improved? I've seen other distributions have everything from those two, to SMB, NFS, etc.

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