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Review of Linux Mandrake 9.0 350

Posted by CowboyNeal from the newer-is-not-always-better dept.
CoolCat writes "It seems that Mandrake 9.0 has been surpassed or at least catched up by the latest versions of Red Hat and SuSE. OSNews has the review of the new Mandrake version and they have hit a number of bugs and problems. In fact, a number of Mandrake users in the OSNews comment's section agree that this release has been buggy and not a big step from version 8.2 or their competition. I use Mandrake for years and I really hope that the next version will bring us back the good ol' Mandrake we knew..."
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Review of Linux Mandrake 9.0 More

Review of Linux Mandrake 9.0

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  • Going downhill.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smd4985 ( 203677 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:17PM (#4474710) Homepage
    It was only a few months ago that others told me that Mandrake was the Linux way to go. After having checked out RedHat 8 and SuSe, I guess Mandrake has fallen behind. Hopefully they'll regroup and start churning out better releases - competition in the Linux distro world is always good...

    • Re:Going downhill.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by joestar ( 225875 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:34PM (#4474834) Homepage
      I agree competition is good, but I disagree when you write Mandrake has fallen behind RH or SuSE! Recent move of RH and SuSE on the desktop hide the fact they have limited knowledge in this area while Mandrake has worked for years in this area. The latest Mandrake provides a great user experience, and very automated settings, but at the same time, an experimented user will never be frustrated because with Mandrake you can always get more options if you need them. Furthermore, I'm sorry but RH & SuSE have just a new look (even if RH has _unified_ the look&feel), whille Mandrake provides _real_ desktop options such as supermount (transparent access to removable medias) or the dynamic desktop. These features _really_ make user's life easier, it's not just vaporware like SuSE or Red Hat.

      • Re:Going downhill.... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by bsharitt ( 580506 )
        I think I disagree with youm and agree with the parent more. While Mandrake isn't exactly in the dark ages, it is losing it's edge as the desktop leader a bit. RH8, and those desktop distros like Lindows, Lycoris, and Xandros are getting their distros to look more like unified operating systems, and not overwhelming the user with options. While Mandrake isn't as bad as some, it's still the breed of Linux we saw around 2000 and 2001 whe it started taking more ground. Now I thing we are seeing it go further with distros like RH8, Lycoris, Lindows and all those, and I'll bet Mandrake 10 will be along those lines as well, or maybe it will stay the same and join the ranks of Debian, Slackware, and Gentoo to become an old schoold hacker oriented disto instead of a begineer desktop one.

        • Re:Going downhill.... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by woogieoogieboogie ( 598162 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:58PM (#4474982)
          Mandrake can be either a pointy clickety type install or you can do the old school text based install.

          I think Mandrake has done an excellent job of creating tools which make Linux easy to install, maintain and use.

          having a pretty unified desktop is useless if the administration tools require extensive reading of man pages just to change your resolution. mandrake is the leader in easy to use configuration tools which are a blessing to experienced linux users as well as anewbies.

        • Re:Going downhill.... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by 13Echo ( 209846 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @09:18PM (#4475078) Homepage Journal
          My biggest complaint about Mandrake was that it always seemed somewhat broken. Apps seem to not function properly, and there are a lot of weird config issues. Fortunately most of my system hardware worked right out of the box, making it easy to install and configure, but I've not had a Mandrake install that I was ever completly happy with. Back I went to Slackware (where everything works perfectly, but devices take more config time) and banged on it for a while until I knew it inside and out.

          A lot of Mandrake never really seemed practical to me, but it has its own niche and followers. I don't use their software, but I became a Mandrake Club member eairlier this year to help support them. They did help me migrate to Linux after all, even though I didn't quite find that their software was right for me.

          I agree with you. Mandrake seems to be caught in the middle of a spot where they want to appeal to everyone. Their installs are just too broad and there is a lot of useless stuff that gets installed in a base installation. Lycoris is a good alternative for beginers, but really seems behind on their libs since they fine tweak their software so much. They seem too dependant on certain finite specifics. They still have a one-up on Mandrake for the ease of use category, and they make it a point to not overwhelm you with lots of crappy apps. Please correct me if I am wrong though. I haven't used Mandrake much since the 7.x series, and don't know how much it has changed.
          • A base install is about 61 mb. A typical install will run closer to 2 gigs. Btw, i could not reproduce Eugenia's problems with software apps.

          • I agree... (Score:4, Informative)

            by Andy Dodd ( 701 ) <atd7NO@SPAMcornell.edu> on Friday October 18, 2002 @09:01AM (#4477644) Homepage
            For one: People have been bashing RedHat for the changes they've made to KDE.

            Wonderful hypocrites - The GNOME implementation in Mandrake 8.2 has to be the butt-ugliest desktop I've seen. I'd rather be running twm - This is coming from a hardcore GNOME user.

            For another: Mandrake consistently tries to push the limits of the hardware and software. It's *too* bleeding-edge, which is probably why you experience it as "broken" - I've had the same experience. I remember installing Mandrake on one system - It tried to perform some weird "hard drive optimizations" that rendered the system unbootable 50% of the time and horrendously unstable when it did boot. I installed RedHat and it was rock-solid. (To their credit and RH's detriment, RH always enables DMA if available in their installer. Normally this is a good thing, but both RH and Mandrake should contain checks for Intel Triton/Natoma chipsets which have broken UDMA support and drop into multiword DMA which works. To Mandrake's detriment, while their installer didn't have problems, UDMA was turned on as soon as the installer finished.)

            Overall, while RedHat may be a bit "behind" Mandrake as far as the "latest and greatest", RedHat usually seems to do a better job of QC and provides a more polished product.

  • Basic rules of grammar... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MasonMcD ( 104041 ) <masonmcd@ma[ ]om ['c.c' in gap]> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:18PM (#4474722) Homepage
    "catched?" Do forks need to fly in you eyes before you edit?

  • By Eugenia Loli-Queru (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Flamester ( 568764 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:20PM (#4474739)
    Isn't that the same person who trashed SuSE?

    Does she like any distro?

    Any relation to that Mikey guy who hates everything but Life cereal?

    If a Life Linux distro were released, would she eat it?
    • She likes BeOS, that's all. And Windows XP, perhaps.
    • She must like trashing linux, Mandrake this time, even though she gives it 8/10 and 7/10 marks with few positive comments in the article, and compares it to Windows(tm) for Ease of Use(tm).

      Strange. When I installed Windows ME it was a real-pain in the Buttocks(tm). NT2000, and XP are "better" but come with what she probably considers "crappy" default themes, no compiler, other Window Managers (Explorer).

      And she mentioned Slackware! I thought she was some kind of User Interface guru, knowing what is best for Joe User and such.
      It is like comparing Apples and Oranges and Watermellons (in no particular order).

      Slackware makes an excellent rescue disk. The other distos...not so much, and Windows, get a Clue(tm).

      "Well, you bought all those smoke alarms, and we haven't had a single fire."
      -Homer Simpson
      • Slackware is just a feature rich as any other distro out there. Im sitting here with my flashy kde setup and all the good jazz.

        I also run Slack on my laptop as well.

        Ive used RH and Ive used mandrake. But when it comes to control and simplicity, slack cant be beat.

    • Re:By Eugenia Loli-Queru (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ender81b ( 520454 ) <wdinger@@@gmail...com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @09:01PM (#4475004) Homepage Journal
      Eugenia does have a tendency to trash most *anything* she reviews. Sometimes it can be annoying yes but often times she brings up great points and nobody can accuse her of being biased (she did like Red Hat tho). Often times she explains it as she tries to look at the whatever as though a typical end user would - not a geek who understands and knows about many of the issues facing linux. I find a number of points she brings up quite useful/relevant:
      • General UI crappiness - inconsitent layout/design, confusing menus (to a NORMAL END USER, not us geeks), multiple settings locations (really i despise this about all modern linux distros). She praises the few that get it right though, such as red hat with bluecurve (according to her at least).
      • Stability Oh yes, 'linux' crashes. Sure we will say no it is just X that crashes but does the end user care/know? No they don't, and no they don't want to go into console to kill x and start it over again, instead they will just reboot. To be honest X crashes more on me than Win2k/Xp. Doesn't mean I don't like X any less just an observation.
      • The Many and Varied issues with X - The most common of these, and the one that makes me shudder with hatred, is the only way to change your refresh rate is by going through and editing a set of .conf files (yes, yes I know this was just added to the CVS tree a few weeks ago but it isn't here now now is it?). This is a feature windows has had for nearly 7 years now! . Also, some of us use fixed-frequency monitors which means our computer is unusable until we can get through and edit these files. Personally my SGI monitor will work for about 10-15 minutes at 60hz (needs to run at 85hz) before shutting off. I hate having to go in and edit these files where as with windows it is a few clicks away. And many, many more problems. Not that X doesn't do some things great (terminal server anybody?) but it isn't perfect by any means.
      • Too Many Programs - us geeks love having 13 web browsers. Other people would rather not care. She makes an excellent point with respect to the 7 terminal clients included with Mandrake. 7???? 1 or 2 at most, leave the rest to be installed by those who want them.
      I think people who hate Eugenia's reviews the most are those who are unwilling to admit the huge flaws present in most linux distros today. BTW, I use debian at home for my desktop (apt-get rocks my world), it's not like I love windows but it does do quite a few things better than linux. And some things alot worse for that matter.

      • Criticism!=Bashing (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Sean Clifford ( 322444 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @09:07PM (#4475036) Journal
        I'd love to mod you up; you're right and your post is damned insightful. When someone does a review of a product they're *supposed* to bitch about all the warts and blemishes of the product and point out the gee-whiz stuff too. Eugenia does just that.

        When someone criticizes a product, most folks think they're bashing it. It's not like you ever hear how Nokia's phones suck on a CNN segment, but you sure do hear how cool they are. That's true with most "reviews". We should hail Eugenia for her thoroughness, not bash her for unvarnished opinion.

      • I agree with most of your points, but I seriously disagree with Eugenia. She doesn't review the product, she bitches about how she doesn't like the color scheme. These two are different, and the reviewer's personal taste should not interfere with the review.

        In this case, the review is basically an editorial about the author's personal tastes, which is not good for that site's credibility. Sort of reminds me of Linux and Main's KDE bashing.

        Also, some of your points are valid, and some are simply opinions on taste. I know a lot of windows users who tried Linux, and the number of programs is something they _really_ like. People like choice. The same applies to inconsistent menus - people don't care that much. The settings part is a bigger problem, but most distros are finally starting to get it right.

        Overall, I'd say the review is overly negative and ignores many important aspects of the distribution. Note (in the comments section) how Eugenia rudely brushes off someone who says that Mandrake integrates well with Windows networks. Finally, she seems to be testing the distro on flaky hardware, with no less than 8 other OSs installed, and in expert mode, yet she tries to review it as if she was a dummy. That just doesn't seem fair to me.
        • Not saying I particularly like how she reviews things (I mean, come on, installing it on ONE machine?) but I can always count on the fact that she will give her total unbiased opinion - even if it is dead wrong - and to me that is worth its weight in gold.
      • I hope this isn't redundant and you folks need to realize that I haven't kept up with this woman, but from what I've seen, she really just don't know what she's doing in some places. From her review on Gnome 2 and her experiences with Gentoo, it seems to me that she tried to tweak things her way and blames the system she's reviewing when she messes up.

        Just an observation.

        • Re:By Eugenia Loli-Queru (Score:4, Informative)

          by swv3752 ( 187722 ) <swv3752&hotmail,com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:00PM (#4475392) Homepage Journal
          You are right on. Like when she installs and fails to do as instructed like move the scroll wheel for her mouse.
          • I upgraded to 9.0 (from 8.2) and had the same mouse problem, and I did move the wheel. That was one of my two biggest problems.

            The other big problem I had was I jumped the gun and moved up to KDE 3.0.2 while still running 8.2. Mandrake migrated my KDE 2.2 settings and not my 3.0.2 settings. They were very similar so it wasn't a big deal to make some changes except for the KDE address book. That's one KDE app that needs work! I also learned after much study that KDE 3.0 stores the addresses in the file std.vcf which is very different from 2.2.

            On the positive side, 9.0 found and fixed my sound card problems, which had been flaky for some time. Also, 2.4.19 is the first kernel to fully support my motherboard IDE chipset, so, for me at least, 9.0 solved more problems than it created.

    • The Eugenia Loli-Queru Linux distro drinking game: (Score:5, Funny)

      by kreese ( 618457 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:42PM (#4475630)
      Preparation: several kegs of beer, a lot of glasses, and a browser open at osnews.com

      Participants: as many Linux, er, "fans" as possible.

      Method: someone reads the review out loud. Best that they are a designated reader, as things tend to get messy. Then...

      Scull one glass every time:
      - BEOS is mentioned
      - Eugenia replies to comments within three minutes of them being posted
      - the words "my", "Celeron" and "533" appear in a sentence
      - Eugenia refers to herself (this alone should make most pass out by the end of the first page)

      Scull two glasses every time:
      - the linux on desktop argument is exhumed
      - some sly comment is made about tightwad companies not paying for mp3 licensing fees
      - you hear a complaint about not a given distro being newbie friendly within 20 seconds of hearing a shell command line...er, command quoted

      Bypass the glass and drink straight from the keg every time:
      - you suspect that complaints about the distro's UI are overwhelming the substance of the review
      - the review doesn't complain about nvidia at all
      - somebody exclaims "what the f**k is she talking about!?"

      and

      Eat your hat if:
      - Eugenia refrains from responding acidly to comments in her reviews
      - you understand what the major fundamental difference is between a distro marked as 7.6/10 and one marked 7.8/10

      BTW, if you get an opportunity to eat your hat, call a taxi, you're done for the night.

  • The truth about Mandrake 9 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    GREAT review. RIGHT on target.
    At last, someone had the *guts* to come out and write about all these happenings.
    I have switched to Red Hat 8 since Mandrake 9.0 was released.
    • So did I... I ran into a few bugs. The nail in the coffin was when I installed the nvidia drivers and it broke xfree86. RedHat 8 has been working beautifully... I'm a member of the mandrake club and even preordered a DVD too... Oh well.
    • It's not a great review, it's a review especially done to be published on Slashdot, because it's controversial, and Eugenia is very good to write such articles! It reminds me of David Coursey/ZDNet. Eugenia, you're ready for ZDNet :-)
      • I agree with the controversial bit. She spent a lot of time complaining in the article about what it should be used for, and then gave it realativly high marks.

        I assume 9/10 is the max. I doubt any reviewer, escpecially her, would give a linux distro 10/10. Just the thought of Joe User would make it impossible.

        The real problem is it confuses users who haven't updated or picked a distro yet. Someone who used VAX or Unix in the past would like to try it out right...? Home Users take their experiences to work? Microsoft Terminal Services license fees?

        Ah, forget it...

        CNet for her. Maybe she can interview Steve Ballmer about .NET

        "Man : You must be stupider than you look.
        Homer : Stupider like a fox!"
        -Simpsons
    • I agree whole-heartedly. I was thinking about switching to Redhat...then I switched to Debian. Best thing I ever did in my life...besides switching from Winblow$ to Mandrake in the first place.
    • I switched to Debian when I couldn't get the beta Mandrake 8.2 to install. Never looked back.
    • I have switched to Red Hat 8 since Mandrake 9.0 was released.

      Although I've had a few problems with MDK over the past couple years (insane locations for simple things like all the .hidden-mdk-directory type of thing), I'd never go to RH. Call me what you will, but I've tried RH on several machines over the years, starting on 6.1 and up to 8.0 (mostly laptops, but...), it never wanted to work right, and MDK was always there for me to just simply run.

      I haven't tried 9.0 yet, so I can't really comment on it (crappy old CD-R, I can't burn over 650M... :-( ).

      I run Gentoo now, but I'll never stop promoting MDK for the n00b or just simply for people that need a box Just Simply Running(TM).

      P.S. The RH revsa I've tried were both ISO burns and bought CDs.

  • How often have they installed mandrake? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mabonus ( 185893 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:23PM (#4474755)
    ...because all my mice have a wheel. Clicking in the right option, it would make my mouse jumping like crazy all over the screen making the installation impossible to continue.

    Correct me if I'm wrong here, but in 8.2 there was a little tag saying "ROLL THE MOUSEWHEEL", and if you neglected to do that, the mouse would jump all over the screen. Does mandrake have a bug here or did the reviewer just forget? I kinda wonder how thouroughly the reviewer went through the rest.

    • Re:How often have they installed mandrake? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by npietraniec ( 519210 ) <npietran.resistive@net> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:33PM (#4474830) Homepage
      I was bitten by that bug. I selected a different mouse, when it loaded the driver to test, the mouse didn't work. Instead of reverting back to it's previous state, the mouse continued to be screwed up no matter what I did... Until I rebooted and started over.
    • My wheel mouse requires moving the mouse wheel a lot, with the cursor jumping all over the screen. Then it suddenly gets everything reinitialized and it starts working properly.

      It's been that way in Mandrake since 6.0ish. Not one iota of difference in this bug in all that time.
    • What's with the Linux 3-button mouse drivers, anyway? You always have to roll the wheel to get it to detect the mouse. Even then it takes a few seconds -- mine always lurches to the top-right corner of the screen before it starts working right. Got the same thing when I installed RH7 and MDK8.
    • I don't know what she's done, but my logitech wheel mouse works without any problem in my own mandrake 9.0 install. I think I did scroll my wheel though.
      • Actually, I tried Mandrake 8.2 on 2 machines, with the same mouse (MS Intellimouse Optical, 5 button), and got different results. Seems to be a motherboard issue.

        1) On the PIII, ASUS CUSL2-C i815, the mouse would go crazy (and stay that way) regardless of scrolling the wheel or not. I had to do the install with the keyboard until passing that part, then the mouse would work just fine. IIRC I also had to choose a mouse driver that was not the obvious choice (can't remember which) for it to work.

        2) On the Celery, motherboard manufacturer unknown, i440 chipset, the mouse would be fine, and I mean totally fine whether I scrolled first or moved first, and I could choose the correct profile for it.

        Both of these machines got re-installed several times over the course of a week, and the mouse behaviour was consistant for both.
    • I've always been amazed at this installation step. Why doesn't it just ask the user if they have a wheel and be done with it? The fact that they made the mouse jump all over the screen was always an oddity as well. My mouse always worked after this point, though, I never got stuck like this brain-dead reviewer. They could have made a call to the famous hide_mouse function though, to prevent the crazy mouse jumping action...

    • Re:How often have they installed mandrake? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by swv3752 ( 187722 ) <swv3752&hotmail,com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @09:36PM (#4475223) Homepage Journal
      She did not read the instructions. It does say that. BTW, if it is a usb mouse, it works fine. She did not mention the first time user tool. That inclines me to think that she shared her home directory with other Linux installs. Or else it is because she did not use a *DM. That might also be the cause of her login problem. I switch to a virtual console and I login immediately. What newbie would not use a graphical boot?

      I think she does not know what she is talking about.

      • Re:How often have they installed mandrake? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by idletask ( 588926 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @03:55AM (#4476858)

        She did not read the instructions

        Who does?

        I've been working for Mandrake for almost two years, and I commited to rewriting the manual from scratch when I first arrived. I was also the one who suggested that there be a dialog at install time to add users...

        Back to the manual anyway. I made a lengthy chapter on the installation process, giving a few hints here and there, trying to explain stuff and all... Explained Unix philosophy, the command line, how to access it, detailed a good number of utilities and even got as far as to "describe" ext2, kernel compile (yes, even that), SysV init and whatnot. I wanted users to *read* the darn thing, I thought it to be good to have an easy-to-use distribution giving the ability to empower the users.

        Blah. I asked for internal peer review and got nearly none. When the manual was first out and I reread it afterwards I found quite a few errors and/or bad explained things. No bug report, either internally or from the users. They wouldn't even read the install manual to begin with. Either becuase they just didn't want or it sounded arcane to them, I don't even know. That was two years of frustration, I can tell you. I was left with the impression to waste my time (and the company's resources).

        As for a UI designer, when I left there was none. There were graphic designers, but that's not quite the same. And my calls for real ergonomy work (and in particular a common look'n'feel for GNOME and KDE...) were redirected to /dev/null. "No, first let's add some functionality, it's more important". Read: Mandrake Control Center. For which I asked that it be integrated in a way or another to konqueror/gmc (at this time). Yeah, that sounds like some OS, but hey, people are used to that.

        As a result, RedHat has begun on this front first, albeit after a LOT of time, raising criticism from KDE/GNOME fanatics. But the end user doesn't give a <beep> about KDE or GNOME, he wants (unconsciously that is) consistency. Choice is nice, but end users *DON'T* *CARE*. Mandrake is now doomed to react. If it were only for me they would have acted first on this front, especially since they have KDE *and* GNOME developers.

        Anyway, Mandrake is not the first to blame. KDE and GNOME are, for they are still being developed separately and are too proud to look at the FACTS. A previous article [slashdot.org] I think clearly points to where the fundamental problem lies for Mandrake.

  • Buggy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by scotch ( 102596 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:25PM (#4474765) Homepage
    And I thought 8.2 was buggy - if 9 is worse, that is some serious bad news. I was surprised with 8.2 - I thought 8.0 and 8.1 worked really well, even some of the betas I tried. But with 8.2, I had consistent problems with galeon and mozilla freezing, the gnome control panel wouldn't always start, evolution would freeze on me. Konqueror and other kde apps would just freeze. I always thought that there was something wrong with my setups - perhaps Java or javascript for the web stuff, but the same problems occured on 3 different isntalls, 2 of them fresh, 1 an upgrade, and I tried to upgrade pieces that were obvious candidates for being broken. Other people didn't see the same problems, as far as I could tell.

    I decide to go back to redhat - 7.3 is better than 8, IMO, but neither one has the crashes or hangs I saw with Mandrake 8.2.

  • *Very* surprising review... (Score:5, Informative)

    by joestar ( 225875 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:25PM (#4474768) Homepage
    I didn't get _any_ problem that she mentionned in the review... WindowMaker works for me and everything else! She also mentions "nano" which didn't run correctly. But Nano is not even part of Mandrake 9.0!!! To my understanding, she has something against MandrakeSoft, that's all...

    I find Mandrake 9.0 just *great* and beautiful, the best Mandrake ever actually. Even on the desktop, SuSE & Red Hat are not as powerful as Mandrake. When I plug a USB scanner or camera under Red Hat 8.0, I don't have any icon showing up on my desktop...

    By the way, there are two (really) interesting news about Mandrake today:

    1) Mandrake was awarded "best distro of the year" by Linux Journal Readers (read on http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6380 [linuxjournal.com])

    2) MandrakeSoft today published their new results (for latest fiscal year), which show an increase of nearly 30% for revenues!
    http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/investors/news letter/sn021017 [mandrakesoft.com]

    • Re:*Very* surprising review... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tosta Dojen ( 165691 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @09:00PM (#4474996) Homepage
      I installed Mandrake 9.0 a couple of weeks ago; here is my take:

      Installation was a breeze for me. I used 'Expert mode' and had no difficulty with my Logitech Cordless wheel mouse, though I did have to select it manually; it detected as an unwheeled mouse, as I recall. Like the reviewer, I also experienced a failure in the auto-update feature of the installation, though in my case that was due to incorrect network settings I had specified. Had I set those correctly, I probably would have been able to auto-update during install, but I can't say for sure. As for partitioning, I would have liked the ability to type in a number for the partition size instead of moving a slider. The slider wouldn't give me exactly what I wanted.

      I have had no trouble with slowness on my single 500 MHz Celery, so I know not of what the reviewer complains. I do know my machine is running faster with Mandrake 9 than it was on Redhat 7.3. All of the applications I have run have worked perfectly, with the occasional exception of Mozilla, but I've upped that to the 1.2alpha, so I expect a few glitches.

      Personally, I like the default KDE look; different strokes for different folks, I guess, but to me, improving the 'prettiness' of the GUI is not an issue. Usability, certainly, and the usability is fine. The reviewer just seems to have something against KDE.

      With my previous install, (RH 7.3), I had significant slowdowns at times, and plenty of application crashes at random times. For me, Mandrake 9.0 has been nothing but great.
      • You can specify the specific size. You have to click in the box with the number and type in what you want. My celeron 366 works fine, so I find the mention of slowness surprising. I also have no problem with Everybuddy.
  • I have a Mandrake 8.2 box that's been upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1, back to 8.0, and then to 8.2. There's a lot to like about it (a good installer, good config tools) but a lot of the user-friendliness gets in the way -- every time something doesn't work the way I expect, it has to be traced back through a string of aliases, scripts, tools and other tweaks.

    Now, the Linux I love is Yellow Dog [yellowdoglinux.com]. It's RPM-based, but with apt-get updating, doesn't have dozens of dependencies for every package, and while it's updated regularly, the overall system layout is reminscent of "classic" Linux installations. Think Red Hat 5.2, or something like that.

    So, I've got this Athlon/NVIDIA box, that's been through Red Hat 7.2, Mandrake and SuSE. (Debian wouldn't install, for some reason.) If Yellow Dog won't run on it, what's the closest x86 distro to it?

    • Don't give up on Debian so fast! Why won't Debian install for you? Where does it have the problem? Did you use the bf2.4 kernel when you booted from the installation disks? It uses the 2.2 kernel by default, which is missing support for a lot of newer hardware.

      I have an Athlon/NVIDIA as well and I just switched from Mandrake to Debian a few months ago. Debian has been a dream so far. Better than Mandrake ever was. So powerful, and remarkably, it is EASIER to use. Most of all, it is more stable.

  • Article is flame bait (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:28PM (#4474791) Journal
    I mean, I personally think Red Hat is the cat's pajamas, but this is just disgusting.

    It seems that Mandrake 9.0 has been surpassed or at least catched[sic] up by the latest versions of Red Hat and SuSE.

    This is designed to do nothing more than start Slashdot flamewars.

    Let's leave the opinions for the comment section, m'kay? The only bit of objective info in there was the link to the review.

  • I've had no problems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geekd ( 14774 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:28PM (#4474795) Homepage
    I've been using Mandrake 9.0 download edition since the day it came out, and I think it's great.

    I haven't had any problems. It's snappier than past versions. I hear this is because it's compiled with gcc 3.2, which is nice to c++ than previous gcc versions.

    The install went faster than in the past.

    I don't see what there is to complain about. It's not a quantum leap better than 8.2 was, but it is incrementally better.

    I am told the 9.0 designation was because of the gcc 3.2 thing.

    Hard to bitch about a quality, free product. (that's quality AND free, not free of quality, smartasses :-)

    • Nod,

      Started installing new distro's last week.

      Still working on Redhat, seems to hang a lot on installation, not sure why yet.

      Mandrake was a pain requiring me to go out and buy 700MB cds rather than the 650's that I normally use, but installation went without a hitch.

      * Stepping on soapbox *
      Suse, turned me off with their proprietary software a while ago, I won't use them again. Mandrake seems to be more focused on the community and Redhat has done a lot to contribute back to the community... Suse is just trying to make money off my work...

      Anyway, I have multiple servers registered with Redhat for their Redhat network and I am a registered, ie paying member, of Mandrake... Both run me about $5/mth which is reasonable and I feel I get good quality from both.

      I won't be using Suse or any of the Unified Linux platforms as long as I can help it...

      * Leaving soapbox *

      • Blah, didn't say much in the last message.

        The installation packages have changed a bit, so I am missing some of my old packages under Mandrake but for the desktop it works fine for me and accomplishes what I need it to accomplish... Having the QT Libraries and several other KDE libraries upgraded has helped a bit...

        I don't know that Mandrake satisfies the hardcore Linux users, but I'm a system admin and all I want from my desktop is basic functionality... My servers on the other hand are hand rolled for their tasks... I wouldn't use Mandrake nor Redhat for them... But that's a different story...

      • Re:I've had no problems (Score:4, Insightful)

        by BradleyUffner ( 103496 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @09:00PM (#4474994) Homepage
        "Mandrake was a pain requiring me to go out and buy 700MB cds rather than the 650's that I normally use, but installation went without a hitch."
        I thought the 700MB ISOs were kind of odd too. They had 3 total images available for download. the first 2 were 700, the last was around 450 if I recall. Wouldn't it have been easy to hack 50MB off the 1st 2 CDs and stick them on the 3rd? That would have made the entire thing fit on the same number of 650MB CDs. I also noticed that RedHat did something almost the same.
        • The last CD was the "internationalization" disk, and they wanted to keep it that way so that the english speakers wouldn't have to download the extra ISO.

          Personally, I only buy 700MB blanks. They're nice for mix CDs, you can fit like 2 or 3 extra songs on.

      • This is slightly offtopic, but i've been dying to say this for some time now...

        I keep seeing people who say they *had* to buy 700meg cd's to burn the isos... That wasn't an option for me as i have an ancient HP-650 cdr (650megs only). So, if (and i suspect a lot of us are doing this) you are dual booting your system there is an easy solution. Download the isos to your existing windows partition and unpack the files to a common directory (lots of freeware windows apps out there, i used isobuster).

        Then just make a boot disk (.exes to do so are included with the mandrake distro) and select the hd.img. This allows you to do your install from a hardrive instead of a CD. Reboot to the floppy, correctly guess the partition your windows install is sitting on, and select the directory with the files in it... Install goes quicker, no switching of disks is required, and no CD-Rs were wasted...

        Of course if you are looking for a good excuse to convince the wife that a hardware upgrade is absolutely necessary... disregard all i've said and get a spiffy new burner.
    • Well, I agree for the most part :)

      I should say that I upgrade my linux distro but rarely (I skipped 8.2 entirely), mainly because I know it's going to take me a week to reconfigure everything exactly how I want it, and rebuild much of the software that I use from source. I therefore don't expect to be able to stick a fresh distro in the CD-ROM drive and have the "best linux ever" smiling back at me half an hour later. And I should say that if I went to re-install windows (at least Win98 which is the "latest" version of windows that I personally have experience with - I haven't used windows for years :) I wouldn't expect to have everything working first off either.

      What I can say is that - having spent a week tweaking and re-compiling - Mandrake 9.0 is a big improvement for me. It's fast (yay gcc3.2!!) and seems extremely stable for the most part. While I have encountered some bugs - not the ones mentioned in the article, mind you - they've only been fairly minor ones. The only major problem I had was that the new drakfont didn't like installing some Windows fonts [sourceforge.net] that I had extracted to a folder ... but I just got drakfont from my old Mandrake 8.1 and it works fine :)

      It seems that there are always bugs in new releases, especially the .0 releases (redhat 7.0 anyone? and what about this [slashdot.org] recent story on RedHat 8.0). BUT ... the thing that's different with this particular Mandrake release is that it had no less than four Release Candidates, not to mention (I think) about three betas. Why weren't these problems picked up?

      And the only answer to that, I think, is that a lot more people need to get involved in these beta releases and report these bugs. All of those complaining now (and I guess that includes me :) should have tried out the betas and made sure that the newbies - who don't instinctively know how to make things work - weren't faced with these silly, needless bugs.

  • I can feel the flames already, but here goes...

    I've been a redhat user since 6.0, and after trying LFS and deciding I needed a desktop, I gave Mandrake 8.2 a try. It was buggy, not all that fast, and frankly I think the blue and gold colors are ugly(which is 50% of the reason I didn't like it :))

    I was expecting a lot more based on all the good reviews I had heard. After that I tried the redhat beta (null) and never looked back.

    I guess it might be nice if you need your 3d card to work out of the box, but I was looking for a desktop with more 'finish'.

  • Eugenia Loli-Queru -OSNEWS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nex6 ( 471172 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:45PM (#4474910) Homepage
    Eugenia Loli-Queru, reviews are very PICKY, and i find them sometimes leaving stuff out or just a rant session.

    MDK 9.0 has built in support to join MS domains in the installer, real clean works great.

    she didnt even know antil a post posted it,

    i would take her review not as a final word but:

    "with a grane of salt"

    her hardware and setup a far from normal,

    and she installs the os one time on ONE machine and that become the """"review""" of it.

    she should install it a few times ussing different
    methodes each time and fully explore the OS, taking in to account the target of the OS, and other factors. and not just some multi page rant like some idiot.

    the more a read Eugenia Loli-Queru the i find her
    lacking, to be fair, some stuff she says is REALLY good,

    but some stuff is really BAD.

    MY 2 cents

    end rant

    Nex6

  • Disappointed with MandrakeSoft (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Max Threshold ( 540114 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:47PM (#4474916)
    I thought after all the problems they had with 8.2, they'd clean up their act. Their excuse on the Cooker mailing list for the quality of 8.2 final was "publisher deadlines". Maybe they need to get another publisher who understands that if it ain't ready, it ain't ready?

    I haven't participated in Cooker development since the 8.2 betas. I got fed up with trying to contribute because they had no bug tracking system. All communication between developers and testers was on the Cooker mailing list, and it was sloppy and clumsy at best. Fixes were frequently overlooked and contributors got upset because they thought they were being ignored. During beta 2 I pointed out that the curl-config script was missing from the libcurl-devel RPM; during the RC I mentioned it again, and still it went to press without it. So I had to build my own libcurl to build an app against it. I had all kinds of problems just installing 8.2 final on my system; KPresenter always segfaulted on my laptop and wouldn't even start on my desktop; the Xenophilia RPM was entirely missing from the distro because they "forgot" to commit it; and countless other problems. So I went back to 8.1.

    Lots of people on the Cooker list were calling for Bugzilla, but the developers insisted that the mailing list works just fine. Can anyone tell us if they've come to their senses? If not, the heck with 'em.
    • Lots of people on the Cooker list were calling for Bugzilla, but the developers insisted that the mailing list works just fine. Can anyone tell us if they've come to their senses? If not, the heck with 'em.

      Beta testing Mandrake 9.0 was one of the worst testing experiences because of this system. I hate subscribing to mailing lists...why do I need to hear about bugs which I am not interested in hearing about. The only person that needs to know about a particular bug is the maintainer of the package and any people who have requested to be CC:'s. MandrakeSoft needs to give their head a shake.

    • MandrakeSoft beta testing (Score:4, Informative)

      by zenyu ( 248067 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:31PM (#4475555)
      Lots of people on the Cooker list were calling for Bugzilla, but the developers insisted that the mailing list works just fine. Can anyone tell us if they've come to their senses? If not, the heck with 'em.

      They have bugzilla now. I tested rc2 & rc3 this time around, and while the cooker mailing list had way too much traffic for me to keep up, they fixed most the bugs I complained about. Most serious was the inability to run the drak tools and urpmi...which they fixed. There were some little things, and the kernel was also unstable on my laptop. This they didn't fix but the linus kernel works, so I just switched to that.

      I think they should have done a couple more release candidates, but I'm gonna test some of the beta's next time around so they at least get urpmi problems fixed before the rc's go out.

      I like the decisions they made with the UI, I reconfigure the menu anyway so it's good to have every app there to begin with. I also install all the non-server packages since there is plenty of space and it saves me the effort of installing the things I need later. But, I know a co-worker that would have just prefered starting with that what do you want to do today menu they added; he's a business guy who hasn't tried Linux in a couple years so he's prolly as close to that mythical "regular user" as you're gonna get. He doesn't need 7 terminals, while I use 4 of them regularly.
  • In fact, a number of Mandrake users in the OSNews comment's section agree that this release has been buggy I read the first page of comments and don't know whtat some of those readers are smoking. Can't burn 700Mb isos on anything? I burned all three of them with the cdrecord on Debian Potato. In short, don't just blindly agree with the comments says, use your own common sense.
    • This was a big problem I remember when people were trying out the release candidates 1,2,3 with Mandrake 9.0. I assumed that this problem had to do with people (newbies) trying to burn the isos on 650MB CDs. But I'm not sure... It was a non existant problem from what I remember, when I was beta-testing 9.0.

  • Installed on one of those Gateway iMac clones (Score:3, Interesting)

    by woogieoogieboogie ( 598162 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @08:50PM (#4474937)
    Se got a demo profile 4 to evaluate. I was supposed to Install Win 98 and evaluate the machine for company use but I figured that it would be a good test to show TPTB how easy modern Linux distros were to install. I installed Mandrake 9 on one of those Gateway iMac clones http://www.gateway.com/home/products/hm_dtp_prf4.s html [gateway.com] and it was the smoothest linux install I have ever done. The only glitch was that Mandrake installed the wrong monitor with X, so I had to change it, but win 98 did it on the same machine also. Win 98 thought it was a laptop.

    Haven't had a lot of time to play with M9.0, but if it isn't ready for primetime, M10 will be.

  • Lame article, but there are a few bugs (Score:5, Informative)

    by GrouchoMarx ( 153170 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @09:07PM (#4475032) Homepage
    OK, the author of the article clearly wasn't reviewing the product, she was whining. There is a difference. She convinced me of that when she started complaining about how "the default KDE isn't pretty enough for me". Lady, get a grip. I happen to think it looks quite nice, and I've left it at the default settings for the most part. So there. :-) (Besides, um, what default Desktop? The first time I logged in I was asked "which environment do you want" and given the choice of KDE, GNOME, WindowMaker, and the assorted others I had installed. What's she talking about?)

    Still, though, there are a few problems that I've found in the past few days since installing Mandrake 9.

    Firstly, during the install, it hung for a long time on the kernel-source package, for reasons I do not understand. After I went to bed and woke up, it finally gave me the option to skip that package. It finished the install, then doubled back to package selection and went through the whole thing again, save for that 99% of everything was already installed, so it only took a few minutes (I selected a few extra packages :-) After that the install went smoothly.

    Secondly, UserDrake when run on its own works fine, but if run through the Mandrake Control Center it will not clean up its temp files when closed, which will prevent it from opening next time. (It uses them as lock files.) They can be deleted manually, but it is annoying.

    Thirdly, GAIM keeps imploding when I try to send an IM to someone. I think it may be a bug in the MSM module, since it only started after I installed that. :-) A friend of mine said the package is buggy and I should recompile from source, but I'm trying to avoid touching the command line for as long as possible, just to see how long I can last doing that.

    Fourthly, several of the OpenGL games, for some reason, still manage to lock my system up cold. I do not understand why, though I'm not sure if it's a Mandrake problem specifically. I have an ATI Radeon 5000 video card, which at least in 8.2 was, somehow, the ONLY Radeon card in existance that lacked OpenGL support. :-) (If someone can explain why BZFlag kill the entire system but TuxRacer works perfectly fine, please let me know.)

    Fifthly, I STILL like Mandrake 9. I've yet to have to visit a command line to do ANYTHING since the system was installed. (Though I may have to so that I can get GAIM working.) The Mandrake Control Center is light years ahead of Linuxconf and the assorted other collection of poorly implemented "tools". KDE 3 is also sweet. (I've not tried GNOME 2 yet, I confess.) I LIKE having the distribution come with everything I could possibly want. If I don't like it, I won't install ir or will uninstall it. Duh. (Note to reviewer: In the install you can pick which terminals to install. You must have chosen to install all 7.)

    Distro to end all Distros? No. But still overall quite nice.

  • Overview (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Espectr0 ( 577637 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @09:07PM (#4475034) Journal
    Mandrake has always been a distro that if it works on your system, then it's excellent.

    Some people have lots of problems and can't even install the thing, and for others (like me) it works perfectly
  • I noticed a lot of softwares are usually buggy at X.0 versions. The newer versions like X.1, X.2, X.3, etc. are much better.

    Hasn't anyone noticed that with Linux distributions?

  • On one hand, I've often been told that it's usually a good idea to wait until release version x.1 before diving in.

    On the other hand, I've noted that prominent critics in press tend to decry that which is good in the first place.

  • Web Master at OSNews is a hypocrite (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @09:42PM (#4475269)
    I don't know how many read over there, but geez. Just last week She went off on people posting Microsoft specific flamebait as an attempt to start arguments in her message boards. The problem is that she singled out a post that almost everyone agreed was asking a relevent question for the topic. She misunderstood the question and decided to mod the post down to a point where it wasn't visible in the main discussion. Then, to cover up her tracks she mod'd down any post that pointed out her mistake.

    She, against her posted useage guidelines, used profanity against those she thought were starting flame wars. She also said she would never post in the forums again. That lasted all of about 12 hours. By that time she had taken down her big "I've Had IT!" rant on the front page (with all of her ultimatums) and just started acting like the whole blow-up had never occured.

    She, of course, fails to admit that her review style is specifically designed to startflame wars.

    IMHO she's a hypocrite from start to finish. If it isn't BeOS then it isn't worthy. If it's Microsoft it's worty of defense but only as long as it's not compared to BeOS stuff.

    • I can't say this surprise me too much. Her reviews are more aimless complaining and ego-tripping than useful. It's important to point out the drawbacks of a product in a review, but I find it hard not to come away from Eugenia's feeling like the research was hasty and her focus mostly on the obscure or unimportant.

      Quickly perusing her posts on the message board, you find gems like this (in response to someone pointing out that booting from XFS without a /boot partition did work): "It did not do it for me."

      Not informative, no indication that she'd made any attempt to justify the conclusions she so eagerly jumped to in her review, just a rather petulant sounding "I'm right".

      I know I'm getting close to flame territory, but her poor research, reactionary attitude and need to impress tarnish an otherwise decent site. OSNews would do well to find another reviewer, or at least run her articles through an editor.

    • I have to agree with you (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kiwi ( 5214 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @04:29AM (#4476937) Homepage Journal
      First of all, I would like to say that I appreciate all of the effort Eugenia has gone to to make OSnews a reality and maintaining OSnews. I have posted there and have enjoyed many articles which OSnews has.

      I think Eugenia started off with an excellent web site; it has been a balanced look at various OSes in a while. In the last few months, I have been noticing that Eugenia has been getting more bitter. The quality of her reviews has been going down to the point where I feel that her reviews are really not up to the standards of a professional journalist.

      Of course, Eugenia is not a professional journalist; I feel that Slashdot is irresponsible linking to her site from their front page. Makes me lose respect for Slashdot; these kinds of links makes Slashdot look like amateur.

      OSnews was best when it was a small, low-traffic site for BeOS users who had not fully accepted Be's demise; I think it has gotten too big for what it is.

      OSnews and Slashdot have really fallen in to the same trap: They both post flame-bait articles so that more people will post here. While this increases the posts and makes Slashdot appear to have a more active community, these kinds of posts are of a low signal-to-noise ratio.

      Right now, my favorite site is Libertonia [escomposlinux.org]. It's uses the same scoop engine that Kuro5hin has, which I consider far superior to slashcode, but doesn't suffer from the kinds of far-left politics which plague Kuro5hin; most articles posted are similiar to the kind of fun stuff Slashdot posted in Slashdot's early days.

      The only catch is that Libertonia is in Spanish; while Spanish has more native speakers than English (or any other language besides Hindi and Mandarin Chinese), most of them do not have the kind of disposible income to be waste time ohhing and awwing over geek toyz.

      - Sam

  • PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEARN PROPER ENGLISH (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The slashdot editors (and I use that in the absolute loosest sense of the word) REALLY need to take a college composition or ESOL course. PLEASE. I can overlook the casual misspelling here and there, but "catched up" is downright irritating!

    Taco, Hemos, I will proofread your stories for free. Honestly. Just ask me!

  • Mandrake was on par with Red Hat a long time ago (Score:4, Funny)

    by TwoBeans ( 618082 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:04PM (#4475410)
    It should be obvious. Mandrake's swooshy star-logo is as "hip" as Red Hat's "groovy" fedora dude.

    But each logo conveys a different message. Mandrake proclaims that it's the friendly bright and shiny distro. Bringing to mind such beloved images as educational Children's television programming.

    Red Hat is the sleek nouveau distro. See that man leaning against the street lamppost? The one with his head tilted downward, the red fedora casting a shadow over his face to obscure his features? That's Mr. Red Hat. He's a fashionable man about town. But uncertainty comes into place. Is he a private eye? An undercover G-man? Maybe even a member of a rum-running cartel in prohibition-era Chicago.... Mystery is Red Hat's forte.

    -2B

    Why yes, a bulletproof vest. - James Rodges, Murderer, On His Final Request Before The Firing Squad
  • I'll stick with Lindows. Lindows is Debian-based distribution which offers an excellent set of GUI-tools, and is easy to install for the newbie. Also, it will be around in 5 years from now because Lindows has a REAL business strategy, which means making people pay for their product and not offering it for free for download online, while still complying with the GPL.

    Also, Lindows knows what it wants to be. I wants to be a GNU/Linux distribution for the average desktop user.

    That said, I'm not a newbie and I don't need hand-holding. I personally use Debian, because of its great track-record for stability, and because I can freely obtain it. Any graphical tools which I like in Lindows I can also get in Debian, either by download or by buying the Lindows CD and putting those apps on my computer.

    Despite sticking with Debian, however, I really think that Lindows is a great thing for Debian GNU/Linux. Lindows can be to Debian GNU/Linux what OSX is to FreeBSD: an easy-to-use OS designed for ease of use for a new user (a diplomat between the world of power-users and newbies). Also, I'm excited about how Lindows is being sold pre-installed on very cheap computers. This is great, because many people just need a computer for very basic needs, and Lindows helps one buy a computer for under 500 dollars. This might be just the thing GNU/Linux needs to get newbies on-board.

  • My Personal Experience (Score:3, Informative)

    by fishlet ( 93611 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:32PM (#4475912)
    Well I'll throw in my own personal review for anyone who wishes to compare notes.

    Overall I'm pretty happy with Mandrake 9.0, although I was upset that it featured a few new annoyances. Heres my list of pro's and con's so far that I've noticed:

    Pro's
    ------
    My HP printer FINALLY works right.
    KDE3 installed by default.
    A couple of nice new apps (Mr. Project)
    Control Panel much better (in some areas)

    Cons
    ------
    OpenOffice is broken. Spell check does not work.
    Some packages that I still need were removed and I had to get them elsewhere.
    - libdvdread
    - libvga
    - libdvdnav
    MySQL will not launch on startup even though I set it up to.
    Setting ENV variables in /etc/profile no longer work.
    xscreensavers not visible on the KDE menu anymore.

    Aside from the annoying glitches, the printer support and default KDE install are worth it for me. But I hope they fix this stuff in the next release.
    • Regarding MySQL not starting on startup, I found that for some reason, Mandrake put the kill script (K90mysql instead of S90mysql) in runlevel 5. Go to /etc/rc5.d and change the name to S90mysql and you should be good to go.

  • Linux "journalism" sucks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by InodoroPereyra ( 514794 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @12:48AM (#4476264)
    I got sickened reading this article. It is plain biased. Period.You see, most Linux Sites root for some Distro or Desktop environment. And what is worst, they flame the rest of the Desktops/Distros. This is plain childish and unprofessional. The reviewer is attacking Mandrake constantly through her "review". Look at her conclusion for one example:

    Mandrake 9 seems to be a bit out of focus. The OS itself has no clear focus of what it wants to operate as. A Server? Desktop? Workstation? All? No one really knows what the actual market of Mandrake is.

    And she goes on but I already feel like vomiting.

    You know where I go to read reviews ?. Slashdot, users comments. You get real smart people telling you their real stories. People who really know what they are talking about and have no reason to bias one way or the other. And the good reviews get modded up. Peer review. I just don't understand however why this "review" in OS news was posted in slashdot, especially since the submitter of the story is clearly trolling .

    On the Issue of Mandrake 9.0 . I installed it in three machines: home desktop, laptop, office workstation. It all went fantastic, and I have never ever been happier with a distro. It is saving me lots of time in administration, it is pleasant to use, I just love it. Almost everything works out of the box. It autodetected local and network harware, I crossed mounted disks through NFS, etc, all without effort from the Control Center. Software Installs and upgrades are a pleasure with the RPM front end. Simply outstanding. But you see, I don't need to flame or trash or bitch other distros to simply state that I became a happy Mandrake user.

    It would have been much more productive for slashdot to post a pointer to the several "first impression" reviews of Mandrake 9.0 on the net, which are much more balanced than the one in OS news (see distrowatch.com section Mandrake), and encourage people to write their own reviews. I have lots of cool stuff to say about Mandrake 9.0, but I ended up biting for the troll. Oh well :-(

  • Reporting bugs...a challenge (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Air-conditioned cowh ( 552882 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @12:51AM (#4476274)
    When Mandrake set up hurdles for reporting bugs my first though was, "well, if they don't want to hear about them, they ain't gonna find them, they ain't gonna fix them!".

    This was an effort to cut down on people reporting non-bugs and taking up valuable resorces, apparently.

    It took me a lot of searching throught their website to find the bugzilla and even more effort to be granted posting rights.

    There are about 400 bugs in the bugzilla last I checked. I would have expected thousands for an operation this size. Mozilla has thousands because they actually welcome bug reports. If I report one it is usually checked within a few days as real/imaginary/dup etc. and most important, Mozilla is rock solid.

    Perhaps spending valuable resources sifting through thousands of bugs for just a few real ones is actually quite a useful part of quality control.

  • My experiences (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nzhavok ( 254960 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @04:11AM (#4476905) Homepage
    After moving to Germany I found I wasn't using my P166 box which was previously my net gateway, I decided to upgrade it from mandrake 7.2 thru 9. The main reason for the upgrade was to get a later version of PHP for my web dev work, one which didn't need a recompile for session.use_trans_sid but thats another story...

    • The Upgrade
    • did not cleanly upgrade from Mandrake 7.2


    apart from removing MySQL *sniff* it seemed to break quite a few confs. This wasn't really this surprisong as I didn't expect it to work in the first place.

    So I decided to install this, now I only ssh into this box and it has no monitor / keyboard / mouse. Since moving country I didn't even have a mouse serial mouse for the box...

    • The install
    • It's frigging impossible to change the filesystem options in the graphical install withput a mouse. The tab order just doesn't bloody work.
    • The text install didn't let me select the packages, and yes I used an expert install.
    • I now have a box which will only be used for apache which a full X/kde/gnome install which is completly useless to me.
    • the secuity features of level 4 "server" prevent apache from reading users home dirs!
    • I *still* can't get samba working (then again this is my first encounter with iptables over ipchains)


    And before anyone comments that mandrake is a desktop OS balh blah blah if I'm going to use it for a server, blah blah blah, the disks were here when no others were :)

    BTW German keyboards suck "QWERTZ" WTF is up with that? (ALT GR)Q to get @, jesus!!

  • Internationalization aspects not mentioned (Score:3, Informative)

    by Taz4Linux ( 538401 ) on Friday October 18, 2002 @11:28AM (#4478796)
    MDK9 allows you to select a primary and a secondary language at the initial install phase itself. This is particularly important to me because this is the first time Tamil (a language spoken in South India, Singapore, Malaysia and SriLanka) is available 'right out of the box' in a major distribution. This is the first Indic language available in a linux distro. This is a great step forward in terms of simplifying deployment and training of computer technology without the language barrier. -TY

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