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Linux Software

Mandrake 7.2 Download Available 196

Posted by Roblimo from the another-salvo-in-the-distro-war dept.
Yes, Mandrake 7.2 is ready for download. It hasn't been officially announced or spread to all the usual mirrors yet, but word crept out yesterday on mandrakeforum.com. Be patient if you can't get through at first; you know how these things go; and keep an eye on the official Mandrake site for further news. This release is nice advance over Mandrake 7.1 or 7.0, worth downloading and installing (if you're a Mandrake user) for KDE 2 and KDE Office alone, both of which are incorporated into it. I got a small head start and played with 7.2 a bit last night, and found both some neat stuff and a few small but interesting usability gaps.

The first thing I found myself wondering when I logged in as root was, "Where's my CD supermount icon?" It wasn't there in root. Only users see it. Yes, you can do the usual command line mount/unmount, but isn't the point of Mandrake to be as close to 100% pointy-clicky adminable as possible?

A new Linux user trying to install (say) StarOffice on Mandrake 7.2 from a CD is going to be doing a fair amount of needless head-scratching. It was frustrating to pop in a StarOffice CD as a user and try to install it, only to get a "KPACKAGE has to run as ROOT" error message, then to log in as root and not find an obvious, E-Z method of reading files from a CD. Whether this is the fault of KDE or Mandrake I do not know, but it is a needless bit of hassle.

Another thing that threw me and my friend Joe (who owns Amnet Computer and helped me with the test) was that not only was RealPlayer not included, let alone pre-installed as a Netscape plugin as it was on the previous Mandrake releases we have gotten used to using, but that no PDF reader was preset as a plugin. Mandrake has spoiled us in previous releases, we freely admit, but we wish they would keep us spoiled. It is not hard to install Netscape plugins, but we're busy people so the less time we take setting up a new system the happier we are.

CUPS, the new Common Unix Printing System, was dirt-simple to set up for the Epson Stylus Inkjets both Joe and I own -- as local printers. We were not able to get our printers running through our networks with CUPS. The GUI configuration tool looked simple, but apparently wasn't. Perhaps smarter people can get it to configure network printers, but someone used to Windows probably will probably give up on network printing with CUPS fairly rapidly.

KOffice has been well-described (and rightfully praised) elsewhere; it is a beautiful piece of work. All the Windows people who claim they can't switch to Linux because they need PowerPoint have just lost that excuse. I was able to make a nice-looking slide show in KPresenter after only a few moments of trial and error. Other KOffice components are just as slick, and the new KDE desktop is a thing of beauty, in my personal opinion far more attractive than the default Windows desktop.

The Mandrake 7.2 install itself was flawless; when we followed the defaults (which means about all you have to do is select a keyboard language, then click "yes" several times) and selected "all packages" we didn't have much more to do besides watch The Simpsons. We tested both a low-end desktop computer Joe had just assembled and my Sager (essentially generic) laptop, and had no problems with either of them. Even the laptop's sound and video autodetected correctly and started right up. The only grumble Joe had (in part because he likes to grumble) was that it's about time for Mandrake to start providing support for Winmodems whenever possible; the low-cost motherboard in the desktop we used for our test had a Winmodem built in, and Joe said it was one for which Linux support is now available.

All in all, this was about as fine and easy a newbie-level Linux install as you can get. Yes, we all know Mandrake's partition scheme is not as cool as the preferred Debian one, or even Red Hat's, but Mandrake isn't aimed at old Unix/Linux heads, and its default partitions seem to do the job just fine.

If you download and install Mandrake 7.2, I would appreciate it if you would either post your experience below or email me to let me know how it goes. A Mandrake developer is supposed to be at my house Wednesday to help figure out some problems we had installing and configuring the retail sale version of Mandrake 7.2 they sent me -- a level of service most users can't expect from any software vendor. But dealing with the "boxed set" (and the reason Mandrake is giving me this level of personal attention) is another story for another day, one I hope to have for you either late this week or early next week.
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Mandrake 7.2 Download Available Today More

Mandrake 7.2 Download Available Today

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  • I don't understand the problem that some people have with these GUIs. They are just one way to publish the underlying APIs (for clicking). Just as the command line instruction is just another way to publish underlying APIs (for scripting).

    The issue is that neither should be the only way in which a particular API is published. I resent as much the fact that an API is completely hidden behind a GUI (often the case in Windows) as an API that is completeley hidden behind a command line instruction (often the case in Unix/Linux).

    For example, how can you use the Linux grep functionality in your code, without resorting to executing its commandline? Where are the APIs?
  • I did try that. I also went in and installed the line printer daemon as well and still could not get it to work. After I installed everything and tried to launch printtool I found myself back in the cups configuration tools.

    I am not sure why they went with this cups system anyway. Mandrake prides itself on being the best distro for beginners. This translates to mostly home users, so why would they install a system that is more geared toward network printing and from the looks of it a system that is not as well supported?

    By the way, I am able to print with PDQ. It works just fine, but is not as slick as printtool and lpr.
  • The distribution was already on about 90% of the mirrors before Slashdot ran the story.

  • Check the current development status in freshmeat [freshmeat.net], at the bottom of the page.
  • Netscape is included as the one exception because Mandrake doesn't feel there is a sutable replacement at this time. Yes Konquerer is out there but if you don't want KDE you're kinda screwed.
  • I had 7.2 beta-1 working on my asus 7700dlx geforce II gts... I'm would imagine they havnen't broken anything between the beta and now.... good luck
  • Ok, granted you can go from existing ext2 to ext3, and not ext2->reisterFS. Given.

    What I worry about is using reisterFS now for an install, and then something like ext3 becomimg the more "accepted" file system. Then, it won't be easy to go from ReisterFS to ext3 without backup/format/reinstall.

  • I've put up a mirror for an http download from a .edu site http://eskimo.tamu.edu. [tamu.edu]

    I hope this helps out some students on the Internet2 backbone get their Mandrake fix a little quicker.

    -podious
  • Why was netscape included at all then?

    seriuously, why?
  • Personally, I find Mandrake's floppy install *better* than Debians. Why?

    1) Debian requires 5 floppies - and it's difficult finding 5 without errors. Mandrake's only requires 1.

    2) Mandrake's install off the floppy gives you their great graphical installer. Debian's installer is bit confusing if you don't know what you're doing.

    I know that Debian is working on the install process of their distro - but if you like the floppy/internet install of Debian, you really should give the Mandrake floppy/internet install a whirl.

  • An operating system should not only be powerful, but also simple to install, maintain, and upgrade. This is why I choose Mandrake over distros like Debian, Slackware, etc...

    I think the Mandrake people take a lot of pride in their work, because I've been following Mandrake since their 6.x distros and I have never yet had a complaint. With each Mandrake release, things just seem to keep on getting better and better. They offer such a diverse range of software. If it wasn't for Mandrake, I probably would never have tried and fell in love with XFce.

    7.1 was the best distribution that I have ever used, bar none. It was the ONLY distribution that would install on my obscure, no-name old P166 laptop. The Red Hat installs wouldn't recognize my keyboard so I couldn't proceed through the installation. The Slackware install wouldn't even start. I also tried Storm, Caldera, and others without success. (OT: Surprisingly, QNX RTP also installed on my laptop without any considerable difficulty).

    I will personally continue to use, and only use Mandrake. These people really have their shit together. Other Linux distros could take a lesson here.

    Oh, one more point. Mandrake seems to have the best, most frequently updated list of RPMs on rpmfind.net. This is of definite importance to me, because I don't want to have to compile from source unless required (mixing source compiles and RPMs just gets too messy), and I don't want to have to wait long after a new version release for an RPM.
  • Here is the original posting [mail-archive.com] from the Mandrake cooker mailing list regarding this issue.
  • Mount takes forever on large partitions too. I had mandrake 7.1 installed on a 40GB drive. It took about 5 minutes to mount the root partition every boot cycle. Now the same drive broken into 3 partitions mounts in 20 seconds total.
  • Of coarse it died. mandrakeforum is just a poor little machine with news for a few hard-core mandrake-fans. It can take several thousends of visitors/day, but not the hoard of slashdoters. One day... .-) Since I'm already writing this: I want to thank Roblimo for holding back a story until today. I am rather sure that he got a word on it at friday, because I got it at friday evening (cute, as if I didn't know already...) So at sutherday, I decided to give the hard core of mandrake users a chance to download 7.2 before slashdot effect kills all the mirrors, and I'm really happy that /. did not strike imediately. Thx, Rob!

  • Why, oh why do you announce product releases before they've been mirrored? It just means that the main site gets clogged, and nobody can get it. It took *days* to get Redhat 7 off a mirror, quite possibly because you announced it before the mirrors updated, and /.ers clogged the main site.

    So, next time you announce a release, could you please wait until the mirrors update? Thanks.

  • Thanks. I too did the expert install on the beta 3 and was not prompted with this question. However, now that you mention it, on the first beta it did ask me if I wanted 4.0 or 3.3.6

  • Review (Score:2)

    by RPoet ( 20693 )
    I've written down some of my first expressions [quit.net] with Mandrake 7.2.
    --
  • Actually Linuxnewbie.org [linuxnewbie.org] had news of this up on their front page well before this.
  • Well, I like eye-candy, so I like it.

    But some don't, so un-install Aurora, and that should get rid of it.
  • The trouble with upgrading a package at a time with a distro like Mandrake or Redhat is that they tend to put out point releases every month or two, and all the "leet new stuff" RPMs are built on these point releases or even on the upcoming development trees, leading to a big pain in the tush, having to suddenly install all sorts of other crap to get one thing..

    So what I do, is compile almost everything from sources for a long time, then install a new release every few months.

    Of course, I don't run a ton of services, so the reconfiguring thing doesn't affect me much.

  • FYI,
    Iam using Redhat 6.1 with KDE 1.1 and it already does it..Anybody know how/why ?
  • So what's the announcement that Robimo is going to make about his association with Mandrake?
  • I have installed mandrake 7.2 last night and i noticed that right out of the box ti recognized my promise ata100 controller and seen my hd's, cool great, note: my primary hd that i installed it on was on my onboard hd controller to avoid any booting problems, anyway after the installation went through i rebooted and during the botup process right after it detects my last hd on my ata100 controller the kernel halts with no error msges just freezes there. The only kernel that i could get to boot was the "hack" kernel and after i did that i had to dl kernel 2.4.0-test9 to get all my hw completely recognized after a new recompile. Anyone else have this problem or am i missing something?
  • I don't think "windows user-friendly" really sums up what this distro is all about. Mandrake has does nothing but innovate and improve as it has matured, just as the Linux kernel itself has.

    Great example:

    To my complete and utter shock, I was able to create a massive ReiserFS partition (yes, I know alloting 6 gigs to "/" is tacky) and then boot it after a restart. At that point I had full support for the second celeron cpu and onboard highpoint ata/66 controller on my abit bp6 motherboard. No compiling necessary. Everything worked with a minimum of effort on my part.

    So, how many distros can you name that are this feature-loaded? And that won't require 5 iterations of the "patch" command against the linux source code followed by a careful compile that may or may not break what you've installed? That's what I thought.

  • there was also a package that i remember saying "test based , cause user friendly us for wusses.

    I ove how laid back Mandrake is. They know that 90% of most people that will use thier distro are just regular shmucks like you and me.

  • MIRRORS FIRST! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why don't we let the mirrors get at it first??

    POST!!!

  • HERE'S WHY (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    According to the original posts and many other posts, the reason is simple: A mandrake system, just like any other unix systems, probably will go nuts in a short perios of time when the user run EVERYTHING as root.

    From the looks of it, most of these people just don't have the concept of admin/user and they probably have very little concern for stability and uptime. They want the latest releast to help them with things they don't know and will never want to learn. I'm not saying that it is a bad thing per se, ... But here's your answer.
  • Disclaimer: I'm a Linux newbie :-)

    I've just installed Debian 2.2, and here is my take.

    Installation is not as easy as, say Mandrake or Redhat, but it is not that difficult either.

    It can (as far as I remember) partly configure X for you, but else, XF86Setup is available.

    Debian does not support RPM's - it uses .deb packages. You can convert RPM's to .deb, I believe, but I don't think it is recommended. This shouldn't hold you of Debian - keeping a Debian system up to date is pretty easy! You only have to type "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" and your system is up to date - now is that cool a what!?
  • You've got to clear the mbr before you try to reformat under win2k. Just boot using a dos/win98 boot disk and "fdisk /mbr" that bad boy. Format away and then boot your linux partition using the boot disk that you (hopefully) made. Reinstall lilo onto the mbr with the "lilo" command. Everything should be golden.

  • Winmodems (Score:5)

    by lpontiac ( 173839 ) on Sunday October 29, 2000 @08:59PM (#665833)
    the low-cost motherboard in the desktop we used for our test had a Winmodem built in, and Joe said it was one for which Linux support is now available.

    From what I've seen in respective README files, all those Winmodem drivers are pretty much in alpha/beta and some (like the LT one) are *known* to be unstable. Maybe not conducive to the seamless, no-hair-tearing experience Mandrake attempts to provide?

  • I would rather have functionality then ease of you.

    thats like saying : "sure I could have a real car but I drive a go-kart because it's easy to handle and high on gas mileage"

  • What would it take for Slashdot to maintain a server for mirroring open source releases announced here? Then the release could be mirrored followed immediately by posting the announcement, with the URL for the Slashdot mirror. Particularly, I would think that Slashdot could mirror the major Linux distros and the GNU packages automatically just like some many other sites do. Forget trying to mirror every great free project on the planet. Just stick to the ones that every Slashdot reader is going to scamper off to get a copy of immediately.

    If this is too much to ask, then please folks, when you submit release announcements, take the time to grab a copy of the distro's mirrors page and paste it into the story.
  • Do you go on IRC under the nick of h3x0r? If so, maybe you should stop ...
  • I was wondering the same thing. I have *NEVER* used X as root. Hell, I never even log in as root. That is what su - is for! If you have an X environment even configured for root, you are wrong!
  • PCTel doesn't distribute drivers, they let their OEMs do that. You can find it from:
    ftp://www.pcchips.com.tw/driver/Linux/MODEM/PCTE L.ZIP
  • I guess it really depends what source base they used to build XFree 4.0.x ... From NVIDIA's linux driver FAQ:
    Note: currently released versions of XFree86 4.0.x DO NOT support the newer GeForce2 family of NVIDIA cards. This includes cards such as the GeForce2 GTS, the GeForce2 MX, and the GeForce2 Ultra. This has been fixed in XFree86's CVS repository, but will take a new release before binary distributions pick the support up. If you have one of these cards, you will need to skip attempting to run the "nv" driver at this point.
    Coutch - I want to die peacefully, in my sleep, like my grandfather, not screaming, terrified, like his passengers.
  • Who is following who now ?

    My printer (HP 710C) works in linux for the first time, KDE 2 looks really stable and I now have Reiser FS for my 40GB hard drive (formats in about 10 seconds vs. 1 hour with ext2fs).

    All of this out of the box that RH 7.0 does not do on my system !!

    This is actual freedom to inovate, Way to go Mandrake !!

  • Re:*PLEASE* wait for the mirrors! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    it's funny you mention that because I noticed this showing up on mirrors over 48 hours ago, in fact it was on at least 90% of the mirrors then, not the ISO images but hey those started showing up shortly after & I downloaded my ISO's off a mirror over 48hours ago.

    -RedElf "A Tree will fall on You!"
  • [slashdot.org]

    Mandatory first female collie sex post.

  • Windows is arguably a quite a bit more accessible via documented APIs than Linux is. Most of the "nifty" shareware utilities are just simple wrappers around a couple of core APIs. Whereas on Linux, many of the underlying configuration aspects need to be accessed by making a best-attempt at writing your own text parsing routines for the stuff under /proc, hoping that your parsing is robust enough to handle the variations that people with other configurations or other kernel versions. Windows unfortunately likes to reinvent new APIs to allow expanded access metaphors, such as WBEM/WMI, which has invented yet another way to access nearly every major configuration aspect that was previously available.
  • 1. stole thunder from the official announcement 2. they might sitll be mirroring 3. it might not be the real deal 4. makes slashdot sounds like some tabloid (oops, too late already) claiming "exclusives" 5. Pre-Announcement Announcement is not NEWS (for nerds) and definitely doesn't matter!!!
  • As far as I've understood it Winmodems are so cheap because its basically just a fancy port. Most of the _modem_ functionality lies within proprietary Windows drivers. I have no idea how easy/hard it is to reengineer, but I guess you'll have to build a software modem around it to get it to work at all.

    - Steeltoe

  • Workaround for CDRom Icon (Score:5)

    by __aahyzr9271 ( 43401 ) on Sunday October 29, 2000 @10:47PM (#665846)
    The first thing I found myself wondering when I loged in as root was, "Where's my CD supermount icon?" It wasn't there in root. Only users see it. Yes, you can do the usual command line mount/unmount, but isn't the point of Mandrake to be as close to 100% pointy-clicky adminable as possible?


    Here's a workaround in case they don't have that fixed by the time the CD offically goes to press:

    The easy way:

    As root, go the your user's desktop directory (for example, mine is in /home/scott/Desktop), and copy the Cd-Rom file to root's desktop (located in /root/Desktop , or you could just drag 'n drop it anywhere on root's desktop (if you do, don't forget to right click and select copy first)). If that doesn't work, you'll have to do it the hard way...

    The hard way:

    * In root, right click anywhere on the desktop, select New -> Filesystem Device
    * In the text box where it says Device.kdelink, change that to Cd-Rom.kdelink, and click OK
    * Select the Device tab
    * Under Device type /dev/cdrom, under Mount Point type /mnt/cdrom, and under filesystem type supermount
    * be sure to check Read Only, and to select the permissions tab and make sure that the User, Group, and Others can read from it, but only the user can write to it.
    Click OK, and you're done.

    A new Linux user trying to install (say) StarOffice on Mandrake 7.2 from a CD is going to be doing a fair amount of needless head-scratching. It was frustrating to pop in a StarOffice CD as a user and try to install it, only to get a "KPACKAGE has to run as ROOT" error message, then to log in as root and not find an obvious, E-Z method of reading files from a CD. Whether this is the fault of KDE or Mandrake I do not know, but it is a needless bit of hassle.


    I fully agree. When you're dealing with the average computer user (newbies, people with little computer experance, and poeple who just want to use thier computers), things that an expert user might consider "little things" do matter alot, espcially useabulty issues. What many power users so easily fail to realize is that not everyone has the same experance level and level of expertise that they have. While the instructions that I just gave may seem easy to most people here, try following them from a newbie's perspective.

    Oh, one more thing:

    One trick I started using whin I got tired of logging into root to install an RPM was to open a filemanager in superuser mode (on my system (man 7.1, KDE), [main menu icon] -> Applications -> File Tools -> Filemanager (Mode Super User)), and then click on the RPM to install it for there. I haven't tried it, but you may be able to accoumplish the same thing by setting Kpackage as SUID root.

    This trick works, but what I'd like to see is Kpackage (or whatever interface to RPM you use) ask you for your the root password when it's about to do someting that requires root access, or, even better, ACLs fully implimented in Linux.

  • Re:Winmodems (Score:3)

    by belbo ( 11799 ) on Sunday October 29, 2000 @10:52PM (#665847)
    The problem is that most of these drivers are either binary-only, or come with a tainted license or both.
    M. makes a point in not including these.

    tom, MandrakeUser.Org

    --

  • I was with you right up to the example. grep functionality has nothing to do with Linux!! To Linux, grep is just another application. Your example makes just about as much sense as asking how to access Linux' Quake 3 Arena functionality without executing its commandline, i.e. none. On the other hand, I'm sure a case could be made that grep-like functionality is useful enough to be packaged into a shared library, thus making it useful from other applications. Feel free to code it up.
  • Actually, I think you are halfway right.

    Odd kernel versions such as 2.1 or 2.3 are considered unstable, development kernels.

    -podious
  • I got it two days ago and didn't tell anyone it was out there. Oh well.
  • Excuse me, but I'm head os computer and information security at the 3rd largest cable company in the US and I can say that the Data Center version of W2K is a piece of shit. My Linux/SUN/BSD server outperform it by a long shot. And I could care less about any point and click GUI because they are not my desktop systems anyway. I don't use the TS services because the usernames and passwords in a mixed envirament (NT 4.0, UNIX, AS400s, Tandom mainframes, etc..) are going over the network in clear text and some half ass encryption protocol. Talk what you know.
  • Yes, people log on as root and run X as root [Gasp!] What we teach new sys admins and what we do are two different things. JB
  • For my home machine, I generally use Mandrake's cooker [linux-mandrake.com] branch. Since I am often downloading packages, I was interested in trying the various ftp clients available. For a while, I was using gFTP [seul.org], which was easy to use, but not always stable. Before then, I often used Netscape, but it is a total sloth at FTP. Then I tried lftp [lftp.yar.ru] one day and was shocked; it was usually one or two(!!) orders of magnitude faster than any other client I'd tried (This on my university's T1, so I have the bandwidth.) When other clients would give me 6-80 Kbps, I routinely get 500+ Kbps from lftp (to the same server, of course).

    So for those of you who are comfortable with the original command-line ftp, and have high bandwidth, I recommend you try lftp. It has tab-completion, bookmarks, wildcarding, etc. I'd be interested in hearing other people's recommendations for ftp clients.

    PS. Yes, I use MandrakeUpdate as well, but I like to check for new packages.
  • The previous release of Mandrake was Mandrake 7.1, which was released June 6, 2000, which was over five and a half months ago. The previous release before that was Mandrake 7.0, which was released January 14, 2000, which was five before Mandrake 7.1. While it doesn't have the exhaustive testing cycle of Debian, there is an extensive beta and release candidate cycle. Mandrake manages to stay on the cutting edge with its releases while still maintaining stability, and if someone wants to sacrifice stability or security, they can always download a less tested version of software, Mandrake-packaged that is tightly integrated with the rest of the system.
  • It should be setup automatically during an install of the OS. So have any ideas about that?
  • a new release every month?

    i would like to know where you get the idea that mandrake releases anywhere near that often. are you counting their beta releases? i have been using mandrake 7.1 since at least june when i upgraded from 7.0. im pretty sure it's been out since the middle of may. funny i never heard about the five differnt releases they made between 7.1 and 7.2
    <Sarcasm off>

    seriously, though, the mandrake folks make a release more or less every six months, which is pretty close to the release schedule of the other major distributions. the notable exception to this, of course, is debian, which seems to manage to get a new release out the door once every other year or so. (no wonder debian users are so enthralled with "apt-get update". i would be too if i had to wait that long for my distro to come out with a new release)

    as far as upgrading mandrake, you have a couple of options:

    1) MandrakeUpdate. this seems like some sort of apt-get thing i imagine (having never used either one) it automatically updates any updates for your installation. i have never used it, as i prefer to do my upgrading manually, so i have some control over what is happening. the one downfall of MandrakeUpdate is that it doesn't know how to handle non-mandrake updates. for example, if you have the helix-gnome mandrake packages installed, it will get quite confused, and probably wont work at all.

    2. network update. radhat has for a long time had the ability to install/update via network (ftp/http/nfs) naturally, when mandrake branched off, they retained that capability. if you want to upgrade over the network, you just download the floppy image, boot up, and run the network update. it detects what packages you have installed and downloads/installs the updates.

    3. download the RPMS. just decide what RPMS you want, download them yourself and do 'rpm -Uvh *.rpm'

    4. download/buy the cd. download (or buy) the whole cd image, and run the update program from the cd. or the install program, if you want a clean slate.

    all in all i have to say good job to the mandrake guys. 7.1 is i think the best linux distro i've ever tried, and i hope 7.2 will be as good. my only significant peeve with 7.1 that i can think of is the way the mangled netscape's key-bindings. i can understand them wanting to change the default bindings to be like the windows bindings ( i remember saying once upon a time that i was going to do that very thing myself) but they could have found a way to make that an option. and more importantly, they could have been consistent. why was alt-F remapped to ctrl-F, but alt-N was left unchanged? to me, this is far more confusing than the fact that the alt-* keybindings are inconsistent with most other apps and with netscape on windows. it seems like it would be easier to adjust to using alt-v for netscape instead of ctrl-v, than to figure out which commands were alt-* and which were ctrl-*. (iirc i think the commands in the File menu are alt-* and the rest are ctrl-*. even with a reason behind it, this still seems like a very arbitrary division) oh, well. just one of several reasons i never have (and never will) installed a netscape rpm.
    --
  • I might add

    linuxconf-auth

    to that list. Lauinch it and it will prompt for the password, when start the app if sucessful. VERY handy.

  • Re:Winmodems (Score:3)

    by jcc ( 55702 ) on Monday October 30, 2000 @05:21AM (#665858)
    Unfortunately, the reviewer did not say which winmodem his low-cost box includes.

    I have a low-cost box that includes a PC-Chips HSP modem. PC-Chips has gone a long way to support Linux for their modem chipsets. There is a driver with source code available (pctel). I got mine working on Mandrake 7.1, and Corel has worked with PC-Chips to include user-friendly support for these modems in CLOS-1.2.

    A word about performance: for several years, Linux hackers have said they don't really care about winmodem support because they use cpu cycles that "real" modems don't need. In my experience with the PC-Tel HSP modem chipset, this is really not a concern. The performance impact is minimal. On my box, which is by no means high-end (K6-2-500) The modem would use only 3%-5% of the cpu. And, the data throughput is faster that using the same modem under Windows.

    I think we should put our support behind companies that support us, and don't just say that winmodems are no good because some of the drivers are binary-only.
  • heh... have you tried upgrading to rpm-4.0?

    the rpm package format changed from 3.0 to 4.0, (hence the change in major version number) and all of the rpm-4.0 packages that i have found are in rpm-4.0 format. so how to upgrade it?

    hmmm.... seems we have a problem here, doesn't it...
    --
  • This trick works, but what I'd like to see is Kpackage (or whatever interface to RPM you use) ask you for your the root password when it's about to do someting that requires root access, or, even better, ACLs fully implimented in Linux.

    Hmm.. I've got RH 7.0 with Helix GNOME installed.. That's the behavior on the GNOME side of the world.. When (as a normal user) I start up GnoRPM, up2date, helix-update or sysctlconfig, I get a nice popup asking me for the root password, then the software operates normally...
    --

  • Netscape 4.x isn't open source either, so why don't you exclude that from the distribution?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Real Player / Netscape Plugins For PDF (Score:3)

    by breser ( 16790 ) on Sunday October 29, 2000 @10:53PM (#665863) Homepage
    The reason they weren't installed was because both of these items are not Open Source software and as such can not be included on the Mandrake GPL CDs. The only ISOs that are ever available for download are the GPL CD ISOs. Since the box set isn't available yet you couldn't have used it.

    So to me it makes perfect sense that you didn't get RealPlayer or Adobe Acrobat. Ohh and BTW as far as I know the only Netscape Plugin for PDF is the actual Adobe program.

  • Why don't we let the mirrors get at it first??
    Because this is /.
    --------
  • I think it depends on the type of graphics cards you are using. For some brands, 3.3.6 is chosen automatically, since support in 4.0.1 for them is considered flaky or even non-existent. There's no use in being able to choose an X version which won't work ;-)

    tom, MandrakeUser.Org

    --

  • Lookout for the Wal*Mart Distribution! (Score:4)

    by breser ( 16790 ) on Sunday October 29, 2000 @11:06PM (#665866) Homepage
    Before you moderators moderate this down read the whole post.

    There has recently been some discussion on the Mandrake cooker mailing list (I'd link to it but apparently the mail archive doesn't have it up yet), about the fact that Wal*Mart is selling a version of 7.2 that is labeled as 7.2 but is actually a prerelease version with many bugs. I strongly recommend that everyone hold off buying boxed copies until Mandrake has let us know that this issue has been resolved. At this time no one from Mandrake has actually responded to this issue!

  • But it's true ;-). More on MSEC [linux-mandrake.com].

    tom, MandrakeUser.Org

    --

  • Yeah, this car analogy is getting tired. *grin*

    Don't most car manufacturers make you bring your car into their shop for regular maintenence and any warrantied repairs if you don't want to violate your EULA, er, lease or warranty?

    Perhaps we should be comparing Linux to bicycles or motorcycles, which to my mind are what all real tinkerers (or maniacs-- not neccesarily exclusive) drive.

  • Re:Icon and root (Score:3)

    by jilles ( 20976 ) on Monday October 30, 2000 @05:41AM (#665879) Homepage
    "Why this hassle about configuring systems in an X environment?"

    Very simple, it is easy. Editing config files by hand is only an option if you know how to do it. Learning how to do it is time consuming, and will in many cases not deliver you significantly more performance. Example: I want to share a directory over the network with a windows user. I can either learn how to configure samba using the config file (prepare for some HOWTO browsing) or open linux conf, add a new share, click OK.
    What is efficient for you depends on the context you are in. In my case the last option is to be preferred because I really don't want to be bothered with all the details of SAMBA configuration.

    So if you are like me (which you obviously are not), you'll love mandrake because it does all the boring configuring for you. After installation you are presented with a system with correct display settings, a working sound card, a working network card, automatically mounting floppies and cdroms and convenient tools to administer your system.

  • ReiserFS is the way to go for large drives or for any data really. I hate to fsck.

    Using ReiserFS just to avoid fscking up your filesystem when the power goes out? Once the new Tux2 [tux.org] phase tree patch to ext2 makes it into the kernel, ext2fs will be "atomic" to the point where the need to fsck with your partitions is dramatically reduced.

  • What functionality that you need is missing on Mandrake?
  • Root permission isn't, and shouldn't be necessary for mounting CDs on a desktop based distro like Mandrake.

    Nor do they encourage users to log in as root [or type `su -', cause that's damned confusing. You click DrakConf [on everyone's desktop], which prompts for the root pw and then prsents you with a neat m,enu of admin tools.

    The issue is that Mandrake should have created KDE file association from RPM files to gnorpm-auth or `kdesu kpackage', rather than kpackage. That's actually the KDE peoples fault. Not to say the Mandrake people shouldn't have tried to fix it.

  • Some helpful links ... (Score:5)

    by belbo ( 11799 ) on Sunday October 29, 2000 @11:30PM (#665890)
    The Demo and Tutorial Center [linux-mandrake.com] will have some graphical demos (duh ...) of LM 7.2 as soon as it will be announced officially.

    I'm currently updating my own MandrakeUser.Org [mandrakeuser.org] for the new stuff in 7.2. Soon, there will be an article by Till on using CUPS.

    Official documentation for 7.2 [linux-mandrake.com] will be available online, of course.

    The newsgroup is alt.os.linux.mandrake [os.linux.mandrake]

    Mailing lists [linux-mandrake.com] (English, French, Italian, German). Most of them are archived at mail-archive.com (links on the same page).

    Good luck ;-)

    tom, MandrakeUser.Org

    --

  • The ltmodem module worked fine for me up to 2.2.14 & looks like being fixed in 2.2.18 from AC's comments on latest 2.2.18pre, but was broken with .15 - .17...
    This post in the archives of linmodems.org [linmodems.org] has the details (of the prob).
    As for Mandrake not supporting the drivers, I recall one of the developers asking for details, or access to a box with one, on Mandrakeforum (I informed him that it would only work with a really dirty hack @ the time).
    --
    Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
  • I wonder : why these end-user oriented distro do not set-up automount by default? It would be much more easy for the user coming from windows world.

    I remember that the version of RH which I tried a few months ago (6.2?) had it, and it seemed to work; it event fired automatically either the file manager (for normal CD) or gnomeRPM (for RH Installation CD).

    So why Mandrake did not pick up the hint? I don't have much a use for such a featrure, but any windows user would appreciate it. Does currently automount implementation have any flaw?

    P.S. I DO NOT like the way Linux distros are trying to imitate Windows in 'dumbifying' user, but this is another thread.

  • Mandrake's package manager is good too (Score:3)

    by oingoboingo ( 179159 ) on Monday October 30, 2000 @01:04AM (#665896)
    Everytime a story about a distribution is posted, invariably the same comments about the superiority of debian's apt-get package management scheme are trundled out. has no-one here ever heard of, or even used the excellent urpmi utility that is included in recent Mandrake releases?

    it acts in a very similar way to apt-get...you provide it with a list of package sources (file, FTP, NFS etc etc), which it then uses to build an index and a list of dependencies. installing new packages is a one command affair...dependencies are automatically managed and installed if necessary. urpmi can also be configured to allow non-superuser installation of RPMs from a specified list of 'safe' packages

    urpmi has saved me loads of time when installing RPMs...why do people continually overlook this tool when comparing distributions and continue blather on about apt-get (and the fucking dreadful dselect)?
  • With Konqueror, I have the thing that has always been missing from Linux. A fast, stable browser that works reasonably well. Even works on 128-bit encrypted sites. I can throw that piece of junk Netscape in the trash bin. And mozilla remains far too buggy for everyday use.

  • It's trivial to get your SB16 to work in slackware. Edit /etc/rc.d/rc.modules, scroll down to this line:

    ### Sound support ###

    ...and uncomment the appropriate line below that.

  • One trick I started using whin I got tired of logging into root to install an RPM was to open a filemanager in superuser mode (on my system (man 7.1, KDE), [main menu icon] -> Applications -> File Tools -> Filemanager (Mode Super User)), and then click on the RPM to install it for there. I haven't tried it, but you may be able to accoumplish the same thing by setting Kpackage as SUID root.

    This trick works, but what I'd like to see is Kpackage (or whatever interface to RPM you use) ask you for your the root password when it's about to do someting that requires root access, or, even better, ACLs fully implimented in Linux.

    Or use sudo. Sudo configuration is geeky in the extreme, not to mention somewhat anal, but it's just great to use. You use the command 'sudo kpackage', and sudo will either prompt you for root's password or will remember it for a period of 5 minutes or so, or however you configure it.
    --

  • I also downloaded 7.2 before the /. effect took full force, and I'd like to comment on the PDF issue. While it's true that Netscape doesn't have a pdf plugin automatically installed (for license reasons others have noted), Konqueror does have it. And not only that, Konqueror is about 3 trillion times better than Netscape (about equal with the latest Mozilla). Just try it, it's great.
  • You're new around these parts, aren't you? :)
  • You have to compile xpdf with decryption-support and it will work!

  • cups and hp-712c problems (Score:3)

    by lyapunov ( 241045 ) on Sunday October 29, 2000 @09:12PM (#665924)
    I have installed and run betas 1 and 3 of 7.2, and have had a great deal of difficulty trying to get my printer to work with cups. The problems is the 710 series printers implemented something called printing performance architecture. The folks at sourceforge were nice enough to build some filters (the pnm2ppa project) to work with printtool. Now that Mandrake has ditched printtool and replaced it with cups none of my old tricks worked. I know that I am not the brightest light in the harbor when it comes to linux, so maybe I was doing something wrong. I did however get it to work via the Print Don't Queue (PDQ) project that is also hosted at sourceforge and the pnm2ppa project has a filter for PDQ. It is a little clunky but at least it is a working fix until I can resolve the issue with cups. I have not yet had the chance to download the new distro yet, so I am not sure if this problems has been resolved yet.
  • I must be really out of the loop: Since when were _any_ winmodems working for linux? Seriously, I thought that would take hardware companies being nice and releasing massive amounts of specs (and isn't alot of it hardcoded into windows itself) or a MASSIVE amount of reverse engineering?

  • Mandrake 7.2 impressions (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, I got mandrake 7.2 before all the mirrors got /.

    I'm using it now to type this message. My general impressions are it's a bit more polished that 7.1 was; however, my first install failed, after going to the 2nd cd, it just froze on Penguin Command (while installing). After a reboot, and re-install (unselecting Penguin Command to be safe) everything worked great. Had to play with the network settings a bit after installation to get the default gateway set properly, other than that, everything seems to work fine.

    Gene

    www.erachampion.com [erachampion.com]

  • Okay, Mandrake has a feature called supermount for quite some time. It works better than automount because it allows much seamless access ro read/write media than amd does, especially floppy disks. The drive light goes off, you pull it out. Same as Windows. You press the eject button, put a CD in, and can acces it. Same as Windows.

    In 7.1, at least, supermount doesn't work correctly with IDE Zip drives. It'll mount the drives fine, but won't let you eject them again!

    I had to manually convert mine back to automount.


    --

  • I'm not a mandrake user, so I don't know whether to congratulate these people for getting out a new release every month or to deride them for doing so. At the very least, this has got to be driving the retail dealers absolutely crazy.

    BTW, how do you Mandrake users upgrade? Do you need to download and burn the ISOs, or can you upgrade your machines over the network a la debian's apt-get update?

    -p.

  • I hear it coming --- "Mandrake is like windows, man!" , "That's for wimps dude, get your BSD." I credit is due to Mandrake for having a truly user-friendly distro (esp. on install). Sure, it is the first and only distro I recommend to Linux newbies and I have stuck with it even after spending time with other distros. I've only had success with it compared to other distros, clean installs and upgrades --- too bad these suckers aren't public. I'd buy their stock in a heartbeat.

  • hilarious install option on 7.2 beta 3 (Score:3)

    by lyapunov ( 241045 ) on Sunday October 29, 2000 @09:26PM (#665943)
    Under the expert install you have the option of six security levels; paranoid, high, medium, low, poor, and my personal favorite "welcome to crackers". Can anyone tell me if the kept this in the final version?
  • A little further nitpick, a prerelease version is based on the previous version number, so Wal*Mart's Linux would be based on Mandrake 7.1 and ought to be labled as such.

    Prereleases of 7.3 will be based on 7.2.

    If Wal*Mart had labeled the distro Wal*Mart Linux ( any version they damned pleased) there would be no issue even it was just a straight rip of Mandrake.

    If they had labeled it a Mandrake prerelease, there would be no issue.

    What they DID, however, was release an unstable prerelease version as the final stable version.

    They are in trouble, not from Mandrake who has no real recourse, but from the various consumer protection agencies.

    Wal*Mart is guilty of falsly representing a product.
  • I said if you don't WANT KDE. In order to use Konquerer you have to have the KDE libraries installed. Some people still are so religious about KDE that they don't even want the libraries installed.
  • I have been working and slaving to instal Mandrake 7.2 all weekend (over FTP because I didn't have access to a CD burner). These are the errors and problems I had (and why I switched by my previous distro). I'm a little bit of a newbie to Linux (though I've installed and used it a lot, I don't know very much about it), but I have a ton of experience with installing/maintaining systems.

    The first few installations failed with some error like "hdlist not found" after clicking "cancel" when I wanted to make a change to the Networking item I chose or doing other things like that.

    The second complaint of mine was that the base installation was HUGE. I only have a 1.3 Gb hard drive and I had to spend 45 minutes selecting individual packages to install so that I could get a useful install. Even then the smallest install I could manage was 800 Mb when I can easily get a 400 Mb install on other distros.

    It found my USB mouse with wheel quite nicely, but although it found my sound card it couldn't get it to run (it kept giving the error that it didn't know what to do with some specific component [I have a standard SB32, nothing fancy or non-standard]). Other distros find and run my card easily using sndconfig.

    I needed to install old libg++ and libstd++ 2.7.2 (not 2.7.8) and tried with a few "compatibility" packages listed in the install. None of those worked and I was never able to find it using Mandrake Update. I also was never able to fully use and understand Mandrake Update.

    ControlCenter crashed on me and told me to email the developer to inform him of the bug. I was just changing the mouse to have "focus follow mouse."

    The system NEVER was able to leave X properly. If I tried to shut down X and go to a "failsafe" session, it would flash a full screen of red and white characters on my screen until I shutdown the computer. Whenever the machine would shutdown, it did the same thing. Pretty much, I could never run in any other runlevel than the one for X (5?). That was a BIG bug in my opinion.

    All in all, I really did not like the distro even though it did flawlessly install KDE 2.0, USB, and X4.0 (though I chose to install 4.0, I don't know if it did or just put on X3.x).

  • Main mandrakesoft site isn't open for "normal people", it is "mirrors only" to avoid this kind of problems.

    And mirroring started on friday, so they should have had enough time to syncronise until monday.
  • Actually I downloaded my copy 2 days ago. Those of us in the know got them before the servers got swamped. I was actually quite surprised that /. waited for the mirrors to go up before posting the story. There are plenty of mirrors now and you should probably not go to the main site looking for them.

  • I've been following the progress of mandrake with rsync and rpm -Fvh. All in all it's a very nice distribution... BUT I've had more X lockups, crashes(!) and problems with the stuff that's released (and I don't mean the betas or releas candidates, I know they're just that, not complete) than I had with ALL the RH distributions from 5.0 to 6.9(pinstripe).

    They include ReiserFS support. It's a very nice file system, fast and the journalling is sweet! But, I've gotten 2 kernel panics with it. (i've filed a bugreport with makdrake's bugzilla, but there's been no response (yet)

    There are also problems with x4.01 in Mandrake that I didnt' have with X4.01 under RH6.2 (with the rpm's from linux.3dfx.com), including X randomly restarting. That's happened three times already.

    Klyx misbehaves

    MandrakeUpdate chokes if you've got helix gnome installed. In fact, if you install helix gnome, the apps won't appear in the kde or gnome menu's, since Mandrake uses their own menu system

    I'm having some problems with php4 under Mandrake7.2 (it worked thoughout the beta site, and only broke with their final update)

    I'm not sure if they've solved their linuxconf problem yet, but there's been a lot of complaints on the cooker lists about that. I had to add it to inetd.conf myself to get the web interface to work

    BUT, there are a lot of great things about Mandrake 7.2 as well. They have included Webmnin, and set that up very nicely. It's a peach to use.

    When it works, their unified menu system is very nice. They've also included blackbox, and a lot of other window managers and desktop environments. It makes it easy for people to try what they like.

    You can import fonts very easily with their mandrakefont tool. In fact, they've got a lof of nice mandrake tools for controlling everything from runlevels, to configuring X.

    Their 2.2.17 kernel includes USB support, so my Visor syncs without a hitch.

    They include the alsa drivers (which I've not tested yet, but they probably work).

    They include grub as a bootloader. Of course, I use xosl and lilo still, and that's very nice.

    So, in spite of the problems, it's a very nice disrtibution and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it!

  • I think it was a bit of both (some released specs or partial specs, and there is still a lot of reverse-enginerering going on). Lots of info here [o2.net].

    --

  • Why do you people keep just blindly upgrading your systems every time that a new distribution version comes out? Why can't you just download the packages that you need or want to upgrade and then install just thouse. Personally I am tired of blindly upgrading cause I want to have this or that software. I know that I want some of the packages from redhat 7.0 or maybe mandrake 7.2 but I am not going to go through the hastle of upgrading the entire system, reconfiguring every package from apache to sendmail all over agian (I'm smart I save config files that I modify do you?).

    If kde is all you want then why not just upgrade to rpm 4.0 then upgrade glibc and the kernel and then upgrade qt and kde. It is an rp0m system so you should be gien a list of dependancies that you need to upgrade. I find that upgrading just the packages that I want to and the ones that they depend on that I am much happier this way. I don't need to upgrade everything there is no reason to.

    I think that rpm is lacking in a few areas. And someone mentioned apt-get, I think debain is lacking a ease of install so don't even go there!

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • No kidding!
    I bought one of these on a whim, and decided to try an upgrade at home. Bad Idea.
    I am still trying to sort the mess out.

  • It does not. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've checked. the /etc/rc.d/rc.natportman by default is left out of the install. Also, by default /etc/rc.d/rc.hotgrits loads but ONLY if you run chkconfig --add mypants first.
  • I've been using Mandrake for about a year now and I've found that there is practically nothing not to like about it. It installs very easily, is easily adminable, and yet doesn't dumb down the system at all in my opinion. I occassionally use the graphical admin tools and they don't seem to interfere with console based configuration in any way.

    Mandrake isn't just a good distro for newbies ... I'm using it to run an IP masquerading router and web server (on an old Pentium!) and a pretty powerful development workstation as well. It seems to perform quite well in both functions.

    I also appreciate the fact that Mandrake optimizes their RPMs for Pentium-class processors. I've noticed that the Pentium packages for GCC and other heavy number/text crunching programs tend to noticeably outperform the 386 packages on my system.

    Another thing that Mandrake has really done well is hardware detection. I was amazed when I installed Mandrake 7.1 and didn't have to manually configure my Ultra/66 card, it was autodetected! The only things I wish they'd support better are my Lexmark 3200 printer and Aureal Vortex sound card :-(

    "If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,

  • Figures, I just downloaded and burned 7.2-beta3 2 nights ago.... mabye I should go compile the latest 2.4-test kernel to hasten along the release of the stable 2.4... :-)
  • You're starting a distribution war. heh.

    Personally, I like Debian. I find the package management pretty slick, and quite easy. The packages available are MOSTLY up to date, as long as you run the unstable dist (which sometimes leaves you with buggy apps, but usually nothing that an update in a few days wont fix). Basically, in Debian, you install the basic stuff off floppy or CD... then you log on to the net, and download all of the rest of the stuff (you pick what you want, and it takes care of almost everything to get it installed). Then every once in a while, you update your list of packages, run an update, and there you are all up to date. Your efficiency is limited mostly by your bandwidth.

    Otherwise, Debian is fairly nice and raw. You get to configure X yourself, you're free to hack conf files (there is no gui that you're encouraged to use, but you can use one if you wana). Debian provides mechanisms to make kernel building easy, but it wont die if you chose not to use it.

    It's quick on bug/security fixes, and if you use the stable dist, it's pretty rock solid.

    Debian has served me well for the past few years :)

  • Icon and root (Score:3)

    by Leto2 ( 113578 ) on Sunday October 29, 2000 @09:57PM (#665999) Homepage
    Icon? Logged in as root?

    Do those two imply that people not only actually log in as root (which you shouldn't, you should use "su" or "su -" if you need the environment), but even run a whole X session as root?

    Even if root permissions is neccessary for installing packages or mounting CDs, wouldn't it be better to put that one admin user in group "admin" or "wheel" and make kpackage suid?

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