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Mandriva Businesses

Mandrake 8.1 Released 416

Posted by michael from the 586-goodness dept.
Loke and several others wrote in with notes about Mandrake Linux 8.1. Release notes are available, or download an .iso, or just order it. Looks like it includes KDE 2.2.1, which is pretty impressive...
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Mandrake 8.1 Released More

Mandrake 8.1 Released

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  • More details about the release... (Score:5, Informative)

    by joestar ( 225875 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @09:39AM (#2358006) Homepage
    Mandrake 8.1 is called "Vitamin". It comes with a bunch of new features such as MandrakeFirstTime that lets users centralize their Internet parameters and subscribe to the new MandrakeOnlineServices (personalized updates advisories, depending on your system). Also this is AFAIK the first Linux distro to offer the journalized file-systems XFS, Ext3, ReiserFS at the same time! Last but not the least it offers the beautiful KDE 2.2.1 (with antialiasing in standard) and GNOME 1.4.1. While the previous releases were very oriented to end-users, this new one offers excellent features for server use.

  • Japanese support? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PeterClark ( 324270 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @09:40AM (#2358010) Journal
    My father-in-law lives in Japan and is very interested in breaking free of M$. The one thing that is really slowing him down is easy, out-of-the box Japanese support. That is to say, he wants to be able to create word processor files in Japanese--he's American, so he understands English just fine, but getting KWord or Star Office to understand Japanese text has not been easy for him.

    He also has an ATI Radeon, which the beta version of 8.1 didn't seem to catch.

    :Peter

    • Re:Japanese support? (Score:4, Flamebait)

      by Stunky ( 323500 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @09:43AM (#2358026)
      Suse has a japanese version of it's linux distro. I still think it's the best.

      http://www.suse.com/us/suse/news/PressReleases/Jap anese.html [suse.com]

      Stunky

    • Re:Japanese support? (Score:4, Flamebait)

      by teg ( 97890 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @10:03AM (#2358156)
      Red Hat Linux 7.1 has Japanese support out of the box, and is one of the leading distros in Japan. We have developers in Japan, and it shows.
      • great I have to download a japanese version of redhat just so I can veiw kanji ?

        thats where I think many distros fall down I want english as well as japanese and German

        just being able to veiw japanease chars is a pain let alone printing them

        anyone know an easy way to veiw CJK in a email+ browser ?

        regards

        john jones

        • great I have to download a japanese version of redhat just so I can veiw kanji ?

          No, the distribution is the same. The difference between the CDs is just the default intro screen before you select languages, and AFAIR also the text installer. Graphical install in Japanese works fine with the standard Red Hat Linux distribution - and if you select support for Japanese, you can view it without any problems in e.g. mozilla.

        • Oh, viewing should work fine, it's printing I'm worried about. But printing in KDE has improved much lately, with some luck it may work fine.

          As I said, I don't speak japanese (and I haven't got reports from our CJK developers yet), so just go and try it.
      • Well, if the level of support in RH 7.1 is good enough for you, I guess LM 8.1 will do too.
        • We have Japanese developers and translators at our Japan office, and Red Hat Linux is one of the biggest distributions in Japan - I've not seen any signs of Mandrake doing the same. AFAIK, Red Hat Linux is the only distribution in widespread use in Europe, the US and Japan.

    • Re:Japanese support? (Score:4, Informative)

      by deno ( 814 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @10:19AM (#2358245) Homepage
      CJK support in LM 8.1 should be much better than in 8.0, but chinese was the primary target, rather than japanese.

      Unfortunately I don't speak any of CJK languages, but if/when you give it a try, please drop a note on mandrakeforum.com.

      thx!
    • Just another data point: MacOS X has extensive support for Japanese; it's been a major goal for Apple to make OS X support for Japanese as good as it is for English.

      - j

  • Mandrake is a really nice distro (Score:5, Informative)

    by gunnk ( 463227 ) <gunnk.mail@fpg@unc@edu> on Thursday September 27, 2001 @09:48AM (#2358058) Homepage
    I've been running 8.1 RC-1 for about a week. Yep, I've had a few bugs (the graphical login makes me login TWICE before it lets me in on my ThinkPad). However, KDE 2.2.1 is sweet, running XFree86 4.x.x is a HUGE improvement, and the whole thing feels more integrated than other distros I've dealt with such as RedHat (i.e.: the software packages are more likely to "play nice" with each other). Yes, it IS easier for novices to use, but that doesn't make it any less powerful than the distros that are a pain to install, configure, and maintain. Contrary to the view of some folks, Mandrake is not producing a "beginner's version". Hats off to Mandrake for a great distro!
    • Ah, we still have that "Mandrake is ONLY for beginners" FUD around? How amusing. ;-)

      But then again, wasn't that what people were saying about windows years ago? ;-))

  • Bugs Fixed? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by blitzrage ( 185758 )
    I've heard from the Mandrake support lists that 8.1 is really buggy and has been bothering a lot of people. I'm hoping they got those bugs worked out and stable before releasing it. I'm currently using 8.0 and love it, but am weary of upgrading to 8.1 from all the problems that I've heard about. More than likely I'll just upgrade all the stuff manually. It's nice to see KDE 2.2.1 in there though. How much more memory does it use now though :)

    • ahem... (Score:3, Informative)

      by deno ( 814 )
      May I suggest that you might have heard that BETAS are buggy (and such), not the final version. It's somehow hard to belive othervise, considering the fact thet:

      1) 8.1 just came out
      2) I haven't heard anything of the kind so far.

  • Linux bloat :( (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ishark ( 245915 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @09:50AM (#2358065)
    I'm vey happy 8.1 is out, since I'm a Mandrake user (running 8.1beta right now :), but I can't close my eyes to the fact that the distributions are getting bigger and bigger and, what's worse, the demand on hardware are much higher.


    Even if Mandrake is very much desktop-oriented, this should not necessairly mean requiring a monster. I'm using a K6/2 350Mhz and the CPU power is fine. Not blazing fast, but ok. On the contrary, the 64Megs of RAM are way too little. I don't use GNOME/KDE (I prefer plain WindowMaker), but at the moment the situation is:


    total used free shared buffers cached

    Mem: 62240 60456 1784 1056 1124 15232

    -/+ buffers/cache: 44100 18140

    Swap: 66524 27508 39016


    27M of swap is not the end of the world, except that I'm using old recycled disks, with a throughput of 3-5 Mb/sec. And with this disks, you can FEEL the system swapping.


    What suprises me is that I'm running the same stuff I was using with the old releases, but nevertheless RAM usage is going up!!

    Even if RAM is cheap, I don't see any reason to go the Microsoft way. Featurithis is not a need.....
    Please keep this in mind, all you software developers...better many small utils which do stuff than one big monster....


    PS: I can't consider Mandrake a server distro, there's too much bleeding edge stuff. This is nice for the desktop, but stability is affected. I'd stick to Debian for a server.

    • Take a look at the startup scripts (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @09:57AM (#2358117) Journal
      They're usually in /etc/rc.d and most distros start things that aren't needed. Also, if you have a hackish bent, go to the source directory and "make xconfig" to see how the kernel was built. Are there drivers compiled in that aren't needed? Bloat can be fought!
      • They're usually in /etc/rc.d and most distros start things that aren't needed. Also, if you have a hackish bent, go to the source directory and "make xconfig" to see how the kernel was built. Are there drivers compiled in that aren't needed? Bloat can be fought!

        Startup scripts that aren't used get swapped out and dont slow the system down because they stay swapped out.

        The kernel should be less than 4 Megs in total, IIRC. Probably much less, even with a default kernel, especiialy if you are using modules.

        But looking at swap going up - is the distribution presumably using the 2.4.x series kernel? It is 'orribly proken as far as the virtual memory subsystem is going. They are working very hard on fixing it (I subscribe to the kernel mailing list, and a good 10% or so of all mails are on the topic of WTF can we do?).

        I was running a prerelease version of 2.4.10-pre12 which behaved beautifully for the 4 days I had it going before I installed the proper 2.4.10 version, which seems a bit more broken again.
        So what I am saying, is hang in there - the kernel is getting better - but it may be a while. It is amazing how an identical kernel on an identical setup makes one person really happy, and is as slow as heck for another person.

        But as soon as I finish my thesis, I am moving to FreeBSD, just to check it out. I suspect its VM is a lot less b0rked.

        TimC.

    • Re:Linux bloat :( (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MrEfficient ( 82395 )
      64 megs just isn't enough now days. I'm still using Windows 95 here at work and my system is really bogged down with only 64 mb of ram (mostly because of the apps I use, not the OS). I would say that 128 mb is the new minimum. And if you're going to try to run the latest greatest software (like the Mandrake 8.1 distro), you're going to need 256 or better. Don't expect to be able to keep upgrading to the newest software unless you upgrade your hardware as well.


      • MrEfficient writes: I'm still using Windows 95 here at work and my system is really bogged down with only 64 mb of ram (mostly because of the apps I use, not the OS).


        I'll agree, it has to be the apps. Win95b is zippy on my p75 laptop with 16 megs of memory. Added bersirc, miranda icq, editpad, opera, and a lightweight freeware word processor I found, and its adequate for most of my needs. I'm thinking of throwing linux on there in a bit, but find myself hesitating because of several reasons. One is bloat. For coexistance, linux would have to be installed in under 400 megs of hard disk space (including swap) to give win95 room. Also, considering its an old Toshiba 400CS, there might be hardware incompatabilities. Then there is the entire issue of doing a network install over a pcmia card from a cd drive presented as an ftp file source. Would I get a usable linux system complete with gui that would run at a reasonable speed? Maybe. It would require hunting down a wm with a small footprint, then rebuilding the kernal with all of the unneeded things removed. I'm not saying I won't do it someday, I'm just saying that someday won't be soon.


        Just my two cents.

      • you're going to need 256 or better.

        Either (A) you're overstating your case, or (B) Linux distributions have finally become much more bloated than Windows. I've done serious software development with 128M under Windows 98.

        I think people don't have a real clue about memory.
        • I think I'm just overstating my case :o)

          I'm thinking in terms of being able to do almost anything you want to do without wanting for memory. I think 128 would be just fine, but with memory as cheap as it is now why not beef it up. You can get 256 mb for around $80 US. I remember paying that much for two 8 mb simms in 1996.

        • >I've done serious software development with 128M under Windows 98

          telneted to a linux box no doubt

          virtros

  • A Bold Statement (Score:3, Flamebait)

    by omnirealm ( 244599 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @09:51AM (#2358073) Homepage
    In the release notes, we read:

    MandrakeSoft is proud to announce Mandrake Linux 8.1 as the newest alternative to Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

    Wow. It's hard to find two operating systems as different as MacOS (pre-X, like the versions that videographers would use) and Linux. Pushing Mandrake as a "alternative to Microsoft Windows" or "Macinstosh" may be a little premature at this stage.

    I think it would be more accurate to call Mandrake an alternative to RedHat, Debian, SuSE, etc. But not MacOS or Windows. Not until I can install fonts by simply copying them into a directory. Not until my TV-out works on my Matrox g450. Not until my wife can open up the PowerPoint files that her professor has on the class web site.

    When we jump the gun like this, and people (I'm talking people like my parents, not my fellow engineering students) try installing it themselves (as an alternative), people in general will get a bad taste in their mouths when they perceive that they have less functionality from their computers than they had before.

    • Re:A Bold Statement (Score:5, Informative)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <`gro.daetsriek' `ta' `todhsals'> on Thursday September 27, 2001 @09:58AM (#2358123)
      Dunno about he other issues, but DrakFont lets you just click the "Install windows fonts" button, and it finds and installs all fonts on your windows partition... Can't get much easier than that. I believe you can also choose a specific directory to install them from if you want.

    • Re:A Bold Statement (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gunnk ( 463227 ) <gunnk.mail@fpg@unc@edu> on Thursday September 27, 2001 @10:03AM (#2358151) Homepage
      A think it is an accurate statement. Linux in general IS an alternative to Windows and MacOS. Certainly the systems have differing capabilities, but just as you named a couple of things that Linux may not do that Windows or Macs do, that doesn't mean the reverse isn't also true. There are lots of things I can do on my Linux box that I can't AFFORD to do from Windows. I make my graphics for my web page in the Gimp -- what dabbler could afford to buy Photoshop? Likewise, I can run my own Apache web server to host my page if I want -- with the ability to do gobs of CGI scripts to boot. Running MS's personal webserver on Win 9x is a poor alternative to that. The point I'm making is that the OS's are all ALTERNATIVES to one another. The best choice for you is the one that has the most functionality FOR YOU.

      A bicycle is an alternative to a car. No, a bicycle can't go 70 mph down the freeway. Then again, my car can't take me offroad through the woods. They are both forms of transportation, but the have different capabilities.
    • ...and don't forget star office for those MSOffice files!
    • For power point I use Star Office.

      You have to remember that what most people want out of an operating system is the GUI. They don't care what is running under the hood. That is why I think the statement is accurate. You have the KDEs and GNOMES that look like Windows, but at the same time they are skinnable to look like mac.
    • Not until my wife can open up the PowerPoint files that her professor has on the class web site.


      Ill take issue with this concept. MS purposefully breaks their file-format standards to A) encourage a needless upgrade cycle & B) keep others from being interoperable.

      It would be ridiculous to think GNU/Linux (whoever) should set this is a goal.

      DO you think that maybe your wife could educate herself, and her prof to understand that they have adopted an unwise technological paradigm? MS stearing PPT to be what it is makes it useless to anyone wise enough to understand that it is being used as a marketing/business tool and has NOTHING to do with technology, software or anything else of cluefull relevance.

      Using PPT, when its major goal is not being a good presentation package but instead being a money machine should tell you what you should choose... StarOffice, CorelOffice, KOffice or anything else that is not engineered to F-you.

  • I just installed RC-1 a week ago. Is there a list of the changes between RC-1 and the final? It doesnt appear to me to have any significant ones.. If this i true I'll burn the 8.1 final images, but won't bother re-installing.

    • Re:Changes from RC-1? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by deno ( 814 )
      Bug fixes. If you don't notice any annoying bugs, don't bother upgrading.

  • Mirrors (Score:3, Informative)

    by pavo ( 70713 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @09:59AM (#2358129) Homepage
    Come on people, we need more mirrors. Post em here!

  • Stop linking to download sites (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fat_mike ( 71855 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @10:04AM (#2358162)
    Could Slashdot please quit doing this. Those of that read this site generally know where to go to get downloads of linux distros. All you are doing is killing the site.

  • Very nice, but still something missing... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mnordstr ( 472213 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @10:12AM (#2358215) Journal
    I've been using Mandrake, loved it.
    I've been using RedHat, loved it.
    I am using LFS [linuxfromscratch.org], married it.

    You say something is good in this distro, something is bad in that distro. Make your lives easy and get the most out of your machines. Make your own distro! I did it and now I'm running the very latest, the very best, and only the things I want to run. Nothing more, nothing less.

  • I just installed LM 8 (Score:5, Funny)

    by jhoffoss ( 73895 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @10:30AM (#2358312) Journal
    GODDAMMIT! I downloaded the isos for 8.0 last night and installed it this morning. At the end of this install, the pc boots, I login, test the network connection by trying to go to slashdot. Set the gateway, get to /. and see THIS as the first story. Just wonder-fucking-ful. Oh well.

  • ATTENTION Ximian Desktop Users! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Zero__Kelvin ( 151819 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @10:35AM (#2358348) Homepage

    An important point here ...If you are a Ximian Desktop user, do not upgrade yet. Ximian has install for up to Mandrake 8.0, but no 8.1 yet. When trying to upgrade to 8.1-RC1 I had to install ximian desktop to get Gcombust working for some reason, so I could burn the .iso images, and I was blown away by Ximain Desktop . Alas, I upgraded without checking to see that Ximian was not supporting 8.1 (which I should have figured anyway, since 8.1 was still in beta, but you never know.) I am now anxiously awaiting Ximians 8.1 support, because my life will never be the same again until they do 8^{ Just a friendly FYI!

  • Upgrading? (Score:2, Funny)

    by cjsnell ( 5825 )
    Does anyone have any information on how to upgrade a
    Mandrake box w/o toasting the existing
    configuration? Forgive me, I'm a FreeBSD user who
    is accustomed to 'make world'. :-)

    Chris

  • Why GTK+ for the setup tools? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by marm ( 144733 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @11:08AM (#2358554)

    One thing that I have never understood about Mandrake is why all the graphical setup tools are written using GTK+ rather than Qt?

    It's plain that Mandrakesoft have tried very hard to make them look the same as the KDE Control Center, using a very similar theme to the KDE default highcolor style, and with KDE as the default desktop, I don't understand the choice of GTK+ at all.

    Using Qt would make it far easier to integrate these setup tools into the KDE Control Center and provide a completely consistent look and feel across the whole desktop. Perhaps more importantly, it would reduce bloat. GTK+ is not a small library, and having to load it in addition to the Qt that KDE uses increases total memory usage quite considerably. If the setup tool used Qt, then they would use the same shared copy of Qt as KDE.

    Both SuSE and Caldera (both of which also ship KDE as the default desktop) have Qt-based graphical setup and configuration tools, and they integrate seamlessly into the KDE Control Center, giving users a single place to look for all their configuration settings. Why is Mandrake different? From an engineering (and consistency) point of view, the choice of GTK+ just doesn't seem logical to me.


    • I have asked the same question to Mandrake many months prior to 8.1. They said the Mandrake Control Center would be integrated into KDE CC next version. Lo and behold, it isn't as of 8.1.

      Mandrake does alot of good things, they push features and new code. However, the Mandrake management is not what I would call highly organized. For gods sake, the French management handed control over to a US group (which they later fired) that wanted to turn Mandrake into a E-Learing outfit.
      Just look at Mandrake's marketing and look and feel. It pretty much completely sucks! They recently had a poll concerning the Mandrake logo. 30% of respondents said that the Mandrake logo and look and feel is Childish. And it is. Its amazing that this distro has gone has far as it has with a loopy, drunken looking Tux on the front of all of its boxes. Why they bother to put out a "Mandrake Corporate" product when clearly no one takes Mandrake seriously is beyond me.

      Mandrake does little or no stress testing of the distro like the kind that Red Hat does. If they did, they certainly wouldn't be shipping with a 2.4.8 kernel. That kernel has a famously broken VM that will only result in bad quality PR for Linux. Does Mandrake care?

      One good OEM event: HP recently started selling boxes with Mandrake as an install option.

  • Mandrake. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by iomud ( 241310 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @11:14AM (#2358586) Homepage Journal
    The upgrade treadmill they have people on is rather striking, they service they offer is compiling all your software for you and selling it every few months. Are they really adding anything new that can't be gotten anywhere else? no. Do some people like it that way? yes. Essentially they're just adding new software updating versions etc and saying "here's our latest greatest distro" which is fine, but people need to recognize it for what it is. Every couple months is a "new distro!" no it's not a new distro, it's the same stuff that was in the last just updated.
    • Ok, you try and get the average person to recompile the kernel to get the latest versions and fixes. You try and get them to install one of three different journalling filesystems. You try and get them to do an install of the latest version of XFree86.

      If you can manage to do these, then Mandrake's possibly not a distribution for you. Mandrake's for people that can't do these sorts of things and wants to be free of MS and for people that can that don't want to bother with doing it. To call it an upgrade mill is silly- you DON'T have to buy the distribution if you don't want to (you CAN upgrade it and the whole thing is available via download as the baseline is GPLed in the first place...) It's just easier and in many cases cheaper for someone to purchase the thing off the shelf.
  • From what I can see on Mandrake's website, this is a release candidate, not a final.

    Don't get me wrong, I really like Mandrake as a distribution. I like that they are quite a bit less conservative in their distributions than RedHat or Slackware tend to be.

    Mandrake 8.1 looks like a great step forward though, especially with their single-user install options.

  • Mandrake and Debian (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kaypro ( 35263 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @12:32PM (#2358997)
    Only read if you completely understand the following rule.

    I AM NOT TRYING TO START A FLAME WAR!!!

    All will admit (ALL!) that Mandrake is the best of the lot. But for some reason I find Debian to be cleaner and quicker. But out of the box, Debian has no journaling fs support or support for my ATA100 card. Can this be done in Debian? Of coure. I don't think anything can not be done in Debian. But if I have to spend two days doing it.... then it just aint worth it. Hopefully SID release will resolve some of these issues, so for now....Mandrake it is.

    It's alway this way. Mandrake has excellent hardware support, but it's loaded. Debian is clean...but less out of the box hardware support.

    Such is the troubles of a geek.

    Kudos to the two best OS Dist available.

    Mandrake and Debian!!!

  • nVidia RPMs for 8.1 (Score:5, Informative)

    by belbo ( 11799 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @01:14PM (#2359264)
    Until nVidia offers them, you can get them via MUO [mandrakeuser.org].

    tom (mandrakesoft)

  • Mandrake improves at an alarming rate... (Score:3, Informative)

    by cornice ( 9801 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @01:43PM (#2359441)
    I keep seeing complaints like:

    "Mandrake is too bloated and I'm a linux expert so I should know."

    Actually if you're a Linux expert, especially a lazy Linux expert then Mandrake is quite nice. It ships with a lot of nice stuff and it's highly configurable at inatall and after. The kernal is very modular. The install is very tweekable. In fact Mandrake 8.1 is the only distro that I have been able to get to work correctly with ReiserFS as root on an ATA100 drive along side another ATA66 along side a SCSI software raid along side a SCSI CD writer and an IDE CDROM. All that with pmfirewall and freeswan working fine INSTALLED AS AN UPGRADE. Yes I had to tweek a few things but they were fairly minor.

    Considering that I got to choose what I wanted to install, what services I wanted to run at boot, what runlevel I wanted to start at and what window manager I wanted to use (each preconfigured with menus for my installed components) Mandrake 8.1 is a dream. Plus Mandrake ships with some nice config tools and MandrakeUpdate so that I can easily update over the net. I admit that I edit config files by hand on occasion. This is not MacOS by any means. I also use webmin for some tasks and tweeks. That aside I think Mandrake 8.1 is a very friendly but powerful distro. It's not just for the desktop and never really was.

    If you don't have the patience to roll your own distro (the only true way to escape Linux lib dependancy hell) and you don't have time for something like Rock Linux then I think that Mandrake should be considered along with Debian as the Lazy Linux Expert Distro TM.

    Oh, and BTW, those complaining about Mandrake not running well on Pentium 120s with 64 MB of RAM... Why bother leaving the Linux 2.0 or 2.2 world at all? You don't see Win95 users complaining that they can't run WinXP - OK maybe you do. Anyway these people fall in that category and should actually use one of the many mini distros that are perfect for such a machine.

  • Hope it's better than 8.0 (Score:3, Informative)

    by magi ( 91730 ) on Thursday September 27, 2001 @04:02PM (#2360404) Homepage Journal
    I've had a lot of bad experiences with Mandrake 8.0 (as with most other Linux distros I've tried). Well, some good experiences too, but the bad ones are more annoying. Most problems are with the package tool that tries to imitate APT's functionality, but fails miserably.

    For example, you type "urpmi kdebase" (or something like that), then it suggests about 50 additional packages, as it should, and starts downloading them. After downloading for half an hour, it tries to install them, but runs into RPM dependency problems or file conflicts. Installation fails. Ok, you resolve the conflicts manually, and try to "urpmi kdebase" again. It removes all the packages from local "cache" and downloads them all again for half an hour. Aaaaagh.

    The software manager GUI totally sucks. It can perform operations for half an hour, but doesn't display a progress meter of any kind (just a "busy" indicator that flashes sometimes even when the program is not busy). The only way to get some status output is to run it from command line and watch the output of wget that the software manager uses internally... If the transfer gets stuck, you won't know about it. All operations take an eternity, and usually end up in conflicts, especially with the Cooker RPM repository. It's really frustrating.

    It has dozens of other small problems. Most of them are just annoying, some are really confusing, some are just broken. For example, it uses the framebuffer console driver by default. Well, when I type "startx", it gets jammed, and only *reset* helps.

    When I installed 8.0, I had to re-install it three times, I think. Once because in the last installation phase, it tested X, and it was ok, but when the test exited, my screen went blank. *sigh* I also noticed - too late - that installing the 2nd CD later with the software manager simply doesn't work. Takes eternity, produces conflicts, and all installation operations all slow as hell. I found it much much easier to re-install everything again than to struggle with the software manager.

    Most other issues were mostly GUI-related useability problems. Many things are just confusing, not simple enough, or don't work as smoothly as they should.

    Not that other Linux distros are much nicer. RedHat still misses ReiserFS, getting updates (such as KDE) takes quite long, and it's up2date sucks even more than Mandrake's urpmi. Debian might be nice, but its installation is hell. The APT-system seems to work much better than other package systems, but using it is everything but easy (and I'm not really a computer newbie). I'd rather do something productive than use days just learning how to use a package system. Corel Linux's installation was great, but it didn't have updates, and couldn't really be upgraded with Debian packages safely. SuSE...well, miscellaneous problems, but not terribly bad, about equal to Mandrake. The control center program...what was it again...oh, the "YAST2" (can't you just call it "control center"???) was rather bad - sluggish, couldn't configure my SB AWE32 sound card in any way, etc, etc.

    Yeah, I reported some of the Mandrake 8.0 problems, but not all (writing even a few reports takes quite many hours).

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