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Mandriva Businesses Linux Business

A Galaxy of Possibility: Mandrake 9.1 ProSuite 171

Posted by timothy from the switching-is-better-than-lashing dept.
uninet writes "Our last consideration of Mandrake Linux was early this year when my colleague Eduardo Sanchez thoroughly reviewed Mandrake 9.0. In that review, Sanchez noted the numerous advances made in 9.0, but also reported some serious flaws that somewhat limited his enthusiasm. With that considered, we were anxious to find out if 9.1 could again return Mandrake to the amazing quality achieved in release 8.2. See what we found (including a look at features exclusive to the ProSuite edition)."
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A Galaxy of Possibility: Mandrake 9.1 ProSuite More

A Galaxy of Possibility: Mandrake 9.1 ProSuite

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  • Pretty content-free article, IMHO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:18PM (#6854592) Homepage Journal
    Other than the fact that is has a neato-keeno wizard to do some configuration chores, the article does little to explain how Mandrake is different or why it is a better choice.
    • Also, it is reviewing the Pro version, so the average user buying or downloading the non-Pro version really doesn't have much idea what to expect as far as app support goes.
    • Although he only hints at it in the first paragraph, IMHO the #1 improvement over Mandrake 9.0 is the bugfixes. 9.0 looked great but it had all kinds of wierd freezes, CDROM supermount bugginess and devices not being detected. I installed 9.1 and everything just works.

    • Agreed (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 )
      Agreed. Here's something crazy... How about TESTING the phone support? How about going step by step on a couple of implementations (SAMBA, Squid, Apache) a SOHO may implement? Shit, how about load testing? Stability? Building a home-brewed WAP w/ authentication? Something.. Sheeesh.

    • Indeed! Not so much as a mention of what kernel version (specfically if it is up to RedHat9 in terms of hyperthreading support). Seems likes the author attaches a bit too much importance to the eye-candy side of things to me.

      • From the article:
        Not surprisingly, specification wise Mandrake Linux 9.1 is pretty much on par with the rest of the industry. For those of you wanting a few details, the following are included: Linux version 2.4.21, glibc 2.3.1, XFree86 4.3, KDE 3.1.0, and Gnome 2.2.0. In other words, pretty much everything is similar to the other distributions that came out this spring.
        Jeremy
    • I thought it was pretty clear, although perhaps not, that this was part one of a two part series. Specifications, speed tests, etc. will be in the second, more technical portion.

    • Other than the fact that is has a neato-keeno wizard to do some configuration chores, the article does little to explain how Mandrake is different or why it is a better choice.

      They said it comes with a cute Gnome and KDE Theme that are almost the same except the colours are off. BUy it now for only $199! :)

      I agree, this article told us absolutely nothing about Mandrake 9.1 or why it is any better. Personally, I think Mandrake has a long way to go. They are supposed to be the Linux flagship for the d

  • I won't use Mandrake (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:22PM (#6854612)
    But... if someone wants to make a fork, call it Womandrake, and includes lots of hot chicks throughout, I'll be there in a minute.
    • <voice of homer>mmmmmmm, womandrake... glrargharhghah....</voiceofhomer>

    • Re:I won't use Mandrake (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Its been done [distrowatch.com].

      Though its not called Womandrake, it does come with porn-get instead of RPM.

      • Though its not called Womandrake, it does come with porn-get instead of RPM.

        Sadly, Lesbian GNU/Linux appears to be a hoax, like mslinux and Jesux. It is too bad. I think the porn-get is something that could be worked on. There are some apps in sourceforge to help get porn, but really this is something that has not been properly refined. I think it would be neat to work on some Free Software that grabs Free Porn from the net and maybe even displays it or launches the requisite apps. It shoudl be cr

    • Hmm... makes sense. And then, instead of Mandake ProSuite, we can have Womandrake ProStitute.

      (That's how I read it as I was scrolling past anyway.)

      -a

  • Pro Sweet (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hilleh ( 561336 ) <hilleh.email@com> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:24PM (#6854625) Homepage
    I'm glad we have such a professional Sweet of software availiable to the users. This is so Suite!

  • A little late? (Score:5, Informative)

    by OctaneZ ( 73357 ) <ben-slashdot2 @ u m a . l i t e c h.org> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:24PM (#6854627) Journal
    Well seeing as Mandrake is in freeze for 9.2 gold (rc1 is out) [mandrakelinux.com], isn't this a bit late?

    • Re:A little late? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by uninet ( 413687 )
      As I reported in the article, Mandrake 9.2 ProSuite won't be out for sometime still, thus the rationale for the article still being valid.

  • eeek (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IIRCAFAIKIANAL ( 572786 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:27PM (#6854637) Journal
    And speaking of server wizards ("drakwizard"), that's another feature we really appreciate with Mandrake. Mandrake's server wizards help to ease the setup of server processes on the system. These easy-to-use step-by-step tools make the initial setup of a web, DNS, DHCP, Windows file sharing (Samba) and other useful servers a painless task. We were able to configure the included Apache web server in just a few moments.

    Keep this up and Linux might be just as easy to use as Windows. Having everything come on one DVD is a nice touch too - something I wish would catch on more since DVD-Roms are almost standard these days. No mention of the price though (anyone who says $699 gets an automatic -1, Cliche :)

    • Re:eeek (Score:3, Informative)

      by IIRCAFAIKIANAL ( 572786 )
      No mention of the price though

      Oops, says it's not even out yet. Anyhow, it's $345 for:


      By entering the ProSuite Subscription Program today, you will get your 9.1 version box and receive the complete set of CDs for the two next versions when they become available.

      This is an excellent opportunity to stay in touch with the latest versions of the Mandrake Linux ProSuite Edition !

      Support:
      Support included with 9.1 version only:
      Support coverage, please see the 9.1 Mandrake Linux Prosuite description

      Offer de
    • Having everything come on one DVD is a nice touch too - something I wish would catch on more since DVD-Roms are almost standard these days.

      not in corperate.

      you have to pull teeth to get a DVD drive in a desktop... Laptops are easier, but not much.

      corperate does not want drones using dvd at all, the added cost is not even existant anymore but for some reason at the deployment center when I order machines, dvd drives are a "written request item" still.

      It may be the norm for you, but corperate wise, it i

    • Easy to use (Score:3, Informative)

      by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 )
      I've tried so many linux distros over the past couple of years, trying to get a good workstation and a good server set up here. And after dealing with so many badly-implemented wizards and guis, the easiest one (hell, the only one) to get working and keep working was Debian.

      Those guis and wizards need to be FLAWLESS. If the are not, you'll need to go to the command line and config files anyways, and those GUIs will just obfuscate you from what you need to do.

      Mandrake, which is supposed to be among the e
      • Those guis and wizards need to be FLAWLESS. If the are not, you'll need to go to the command line and config files anyways, and those GUIs will just obfuscate you from what you need to do.

        Mandrake, which is supposed to be among the easiest, was a nightmare to configure properly by comparison, because when the wizard fucks up (which it did numerous times), you don't have a clue what to do with the damned thing.

        You got that right. Particularly broken is the DrakeConnect wizard. That one sure needs a lot of
    • I used to use Mandrake exclusively for desktops and laptops. But at the company where I work, RedHat (7.2-7.3 for servers and 8.0-9.0 for desktops) is pretty much the standard (for Linux boxes, of course). But I have to say, I've become somewhat of a RedHat convert. I'll tell you why. The interface is cohesive throughout. Maybe I'm just not used to running a pure KDE or a pure Gnome desktop anymore, but everything just works with RH. My most recent experience with Mandrake 9.0 was just a couple of wee
      • My most recent experience with Mandrake 9.0 was just a couple of weeks ago.

        Just out of my own curiosity, did you choose 9.0 because you happened to have a couple of year old CDs lying around with it already on them, or did you go out of your way to get a year old distribution off of an out of date mirror? I only ask because 9.1 has been out for over six months, and would be at least as easy to download and burn images of.

        I don't know that 9.1 would have addressed all of the issues that you ran into with
        • It would not have been any harder to download and burn 9.1 CDs. Consider this, however: the Mandrake 9.0 CDs were downloaded and burned well after the beginning of the year, yet 9.1 was not released. Do you really think it's realistic to assume users download and burn CDs more than once, maybe twice a year? I don't. Other posters have said that they consider the rapid release what you are of both Mandrake and RedHat is too much, and I tend to agree.
          Honestly, how would you feel if you paid for softwa
          • I would think that it would be reasonable that when I choose to install an operating system, and compare it with another operating system that I would use the currently available software that is freely available.

            Now I grant you that 9.0 is the current RH edition. however Mandrake 9.1 came out at approximately the same time. IIRC within a month of each other. A quick check to make sure, and RH9 was released March 31, Mandrake9.1 came out March 25th. Within a week of each other, and Mandrake 9.1 came out fi

  • Mandrake 9.2 coming out soon! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by anonymous coword ( 615639 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:27PM (#6854638) Homepage Journal
    I'm currently running Mandrake Cooker and its coming on nicely over the last few weeks. Some things to look forward to is the new Gnome 2.4 desktop (along with loads of new apps), Kernel 2.4.22 (and an optional 2.6-test kernel for the adventureous!), KDE 3.1.3, which is now very stable. If you like gnome, but don't like Redhat's version, then Mandrake 9.2 is for you!

    It's also very stable, unlike my experiance of 8.1!
    • Speaking about their (MDK) new up-coming distro - will they include OpenOffice.org 1.1 to final release. OOo should be ready till then, and if we are talking about desktop for me it's one of most important Linux (in general OSS/FS) software piece. Even more important then new GNOME or KDE. They should include it or wait some time and then include it. If, they don't that will turnout that Mandrake 9.2 will be the distro without new OOo and all the others wich do have OOo will be the ones with OOo. If you kno
    • How has Mandrake treated Gnome? Is it good?

      I tried SuSE on a spare machine a while ago, and their Gnome support was, well, lackluster. They had somehow managed to make it slower and buggier than the release it was based on, whereas Redhat's Gnome version always has a bit of added spit and polish, making it even slightly better than the official release.

      • I've never noticed any problem with Gnome, but it's not what I usually use, and it's not Mandrake's focus. (Part of the way they differentiated themselves from Red Hat originally was by using KDE rather than Gnome.)

        I think that their Gnome may be closer to a stock version than Red Hat's, but it's more likely to include cutting edge versions. Sometimes bleeding edge.

        I found 9.1 to be much better than the 8.x versions, which tended to suffer from QA problems.

  • Where's the beef?! (Score:3, Funny)

    by wfberg ( 24378 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:30PM (#6854648)
    Eduardo Sanchez will return to provide another thorough review of the base Mandrake Linux system. His review will consider, in depth, installation, administration, usage, and performance of Mandrake Linux 9.1.

    OK. So there IS no beef? I thought that was supposed to be a spoon.

    (Wasted another good, what, 3 minutes of my life RTFA - those kids should take classes and learn about paragraphs, beginnings, middles and endings.)

  • Linux Mandrake 9.1 Guide (Score:5, Informative)

    by mandrakewilson ( 686178 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:36PM (#6854675) Homepage
    http://mandrakeuser.cjb.net [cjb.net]

    New web site up on how to set up mandrake 9.1 to ease the configuration pains of the new linux user. Written and catered for the moderate computer user. It covers how to get and install mandrake and add in most of the needed applications. Covers most of the major software included in the distribution, other freely available applications, newbie command line tutorial, how to handle some common and annoying bugs peculiar to each application.
    This HOWTO [cjb.net] is my first contribution community, and since I found newbie documentation wanting, I wrote one myself. It is for the impatient user who wants to reduce their startup time, and would apply to other distributions and mandrake versions [mandrakelinux.com] as well.

    Written from a user's point of view [cjb.net], it covers how to get [cjb.net] and install Mandrake [linuxmandrake.com], add in most of the needed applications [cjb.net], a newbie command line tutorial [cjb.net], and how to handle some peculiar bugs [cjb.net] to each application. This guide might spare you a lot of googling [google.com] for answers as it's all placed on one convenient website.
    PART I [cjb.net]
    1. Introduction
    2. Indispensable Tools for the Linux User
    3. Useful links

    PART II - Mandrake Installation [cjb.net]
    1. Getting Mandrake 9.1
    2. Installing Mandrake 9.1
    3. Going through the install sequence
    4. Using Mandrake
    5. Nice things to add easily
    6. Configuration with Mandrake Control Center
    7. Configuration with Gnome Control Center
    8. Important Configuration of Menus and MIME Types
    9. More Advanced Configuration

    PART III - Linux Shell and Apps [cjb.net]
    1. Navigating around terminal
    2. Shells -- bash, csh, rsh, sh
    3. Environments and Paths
    4. File Permissions
    5. Editing files
    6. Linking
    7. Finding Files
    8. Using grep
    9. Basic bash scripts knowledge
    10. Running Remote X applications
    11. Mounting Remote File Systems
    12. Language setup for man pages
    13. Handling Print Jobs

    PART IV - Software Packages [cjb.net]
    1. What are packages?
    2. Specifying Sources For Online Downloading - Mandrake Mirrors, Texstar, PLF
    3. Packages to be installed from Mandrake CDs - Mesa, mplayer, Timidity, pan, gaim, mozplugger
    4. Packages to install from Texstar - Macromedia Flash, nano, Real Player
    5. Mplayer and Codecs
    6. Other essential packages- Open Office, Sun Java, Adobe Acrobat 5, BitTorrent
    7. Setting up SMB share for Windows
    8. Using vncserver for remote desktop applications
    9. File Sharing - p2p networks - Limewire, edonkey, lmule
    10. Running M$ Office under Linux.
    11. Games - SNES, MAME, WineX

    PART V - Advanced FAQ [cjb.net]
    1. How do I get DRI 3D acceleration to work?
    2. Mandrake Fonts Deuglification and Anti-aliasing
    3. Email Clients and Web Browsers (Handling mailto: and http:)
    4. Full Mozilla Plugins Configuration (Quicktime, Java, Flash, Mplayer)
    5. Konquerer Plugins Configuration
    6. X Windows xmatrix screensaver
    7. How to adjust the sound volume permanently

  • Anyone know if this is the same Mandrake distro available in the Linuxworld Magazine DVD-ROM? If not, what is/isn't included?

    I'm currently using Redhat 9 on an Inspiron 5100 but that whole no MP3 and DVD support thing along with KDE cripplage bugs. I know there's downloadable stuff to get mp3 and DeCSS going but how 'bout out of the box? (anyone know how to get noatun on a RH9 to play mp3s?)

    Lastly, I guess, is -- would anyone recommend a jump from RH9 to MDK 9.1? Are the updates easier? Does one have

    • Re:Is It Worth Jumping To? Yes! (Score:5, Informative)

      by joestar ( 225875 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @08:12PM (#6854856) Homepage
      Besides its installer, there are two things that, in my opinion, make Mandrake a great distro compared to Red Hat:

      1) its calpability to install/uninstall software easily with the urpmi tools, from multiple sources - for instance, just type (or use the rpmdrake app): urpmi the_app_I_need and urpmi will automatically search for the other packages needed for this app (dependencies) and install them if you accept. The power of this tool is that if you added a FTP source (or multiple FTP sources) in addition to your DVD source for insta,ce, it will look for the missing libs/missing apps in all these sources. This is very convenient.

      2) the Mandrake Club applications sources (60,000 packages!) which can be added to the URPMI sources. It provides many many many apps, including most common commercial software (FlashPlayer...). Just select an app in the list (or use the search utility), click on install and it downloads and installs the app. This is powerful actually.

      Additionnally, using the "PLF" (plf.zarb.org) source of apps (unofficial) just provides direct download and install access to all codecs needed to play all videos formats (AVI, MOV...) under Xine and other video-players for instance... Maybe not very legal, but convenient for the least.

    • Personally, I'd say if they either got rid of their pain in the ass security application (msec... should be m-suck... sorry, I digress), or allowed you to totally turn it off, I would say go for it, it's a pretty good distro. But if they still have it set up where you have to use their security thing, then I will avoid this distro like the plague. Don't get me wrong, I really really like security. But I have my own firewall scripts and monitoring. I don't want their stuff running and messing around with

  • Mandrake ProSuite 9.1 also awarded by InfoWorld! (Score:4, Informative)

    by joestar ( 225875 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:53PM (#6854762) Homepage
    InfoWorld recently compared Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, and Turbolinux for a use inside a corporate environment. The result was that the 4 all products were excellent, but the Mandrake Prosuite 9.1 ranked first with the best overall note. Additionnally the ProSuite is by far the less expensive product (around $200). You'll find this 3-page article at InfoWorld [infoworld.com]. And the Mandrake 9.1 ProSuite is available for purchase directly from MandrakeSoft at MandrakeStore [mandrakestore.com] (Mandrake Club [mandrakeclub.com] Members usually get rebates on most Mandrake products).

  • #1: Mandrake consistently number 1 in userland (Score:5, Informative)

    by sniggly ( 216454 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:55PM (#6854774) Journal
    According to most polls including the one on open for business mandrake is the most widely used distribution. Throughout the years Mandrake has gained the reputation of being a consumer oriented, fun & easy Linux. Even where RedHat, SuSe and other distro's have caught up with mandrake in user friendliness the perception persists.

    I run mandrake on a ti powerbook g4 (apple) and the support from the mandrake ppc community is excellent. (Stew Benedict deserves mentioning). Mandrake PPC is on a slower (annual) release cycle.

    I hope mandrake can stay the most popular linux distribution, it earned it through dedication to user friendliness and keeping to the spirit of open source arguably better than RedHat and SuSe.

  • Mandrake on the fly (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kgbspy ( 696931 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:55PM (#6854777)

    I upgraded (yes, upgraded) my RedHat distro to Mandrake 9 on my Thinkpad this morning in the car on the way to work. Yes, it really was that easy, and sitting in traffic has never been so enjoyable.

    It picked up the Thinkpad's cs46xx soundcard, allowed xfree to run in 11x8, and although it skipped past installing the bootloader without giving me any say in the matter (installing lilo straight to my MBR instead of putting grub on the Linux boot partition, like I would have preferred), it didn't completely destroy my MBR and refuse to boot my XP NTFS partition like RedHat did.

    The whole install was incredibly quick, even on a P2 366 - all in all about 30 minutes, finishing just as I pulled into the office. On the down side, the installation procedures are a little more inflexible than that of RedHat or SuSE, and KDE 3.1 seems to be broken(?).

    On the whole, after a couple of hours of tooling about, it seems to be an excellent release.


    • Isn't that, oh I donno, really freakin' dangerous? :)

      DJCC

      • Damn straight.

        But it's also a good indication of:

        a) how slow the early morning traffic moves in my neck of the woods (ie, not at all)

        and b) how easy it is to install Linux (and in particular, Mandrake) these days

        Actually, the only OS that I've found that was easier and faster to install was AIX. Oh, and maybe MS DOS...


    • On the down side, the installation procedures are a little more inflexible than that of RedHat or SuSE, and

      KDE 3.1 seems to be broken(?). On the whole, after a couple of hours of tooling about, it seems to be an excellent release.

      This kind of thing staggers me. How on earth can you say a release is "excellent" when something as fundamental to it's use as one of the main desktop environments is "broken"!

      This kind of comment seems to come from Linuxophiles a lot and it baffles the crap out of me...

      • That really depends on what you're using it for - I don't depend heavily on the X-Windows side of Linux. Most of what I use it for is done in ssh/lynx/etc, or its capacities as an excellent server that I can access remotely, and as such I don't mind whether my desktop environment is KDE, Gnome, IceWM, or whatever, just so long as it's there if I ever need it. I would hardly say that it's fundamental to my use of Linux. If KDE doesn't work, I'll switch to Gnome. Doesn't bother me a mite at all, so as far as
    • I upgraded (yes, upgraded) my RedHat distro to Mandrake 9 on my Thinkpad this morning in the car on the way to work. Yes, it really was that easy, and sitting in traffic has never been so enjoyable.

      A lot of other replies in this thread assume that the parent poster was installing Mandrake while driving. If so, he probably should be concentrating more on the road. Before anyone else chimes in with condemnation, consider this--maybe the guy carpools. Maybe he commutes in with his wife. Maybe he is a sl [slug-lines.com]

  • What kind of self-respecting Linux distribution review lacks screen shots of the installer, package manager, default desktop, and some web browser.

    Clearly this review is inferior. I suggest we find someone else to do it right!

  • Um... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone else read that as:
    "A Galaxy of Possibility: Mandrake 9.1 ProStitute"
    Had to do a double take...

  • I like Mandrake.... but.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dalroth ( 85450 ) * on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @09:03PM (#6855151) Homepage Journal
    I like Mandrake a lot. We're currently running 9.0 and 9.1 on a few of our machines, but we're slowly moving over to Debian based distros. I'll give you a quick run down of why.

    1. We're sick of RPM. We've hard RPM break on a few machines already (I think the RPM database becomes corrupted if I remember correctly). Needless to say, it's hard to upgrade your machine when your package manager goes kaput. APT/debs are SO much easier to deal with anyway.

    2. Too much crap! Literally, Mandrake has TOO MUCH crap these days. I know Debian is hardly innocent, but the dependency train for whatever reason seems to be much more palatable when using Debian as opposed to Mandrake. Maybe it's all the package/package-dev combo packs that the Mandrake/RedHat people like, I'm not entirely sure. It's just too much honestly. Let me install mySQL and be done with it.

    3. The big reason (for me personally), the Mandrake security model is totally whack. Once upon a time, Mandrake used to just run a nightly script which would email an audit of your system to the Administrator letting you know what was wrong. That's all it did, and that was nice. Now there's a set of different (horribly documented) security models that have all sorts of (horribly documented) behavior. I don't mind the security model idea, what I do mind is my system doing things for me (such as changing file permissions) without being explicitly told when and why this is going to happen. This has caused major problems for us on a few occasions and it's simply unacceptable. Maybe we haven't looked in the right place for the documentation, but I've tried to find it in the past with little success. I should have to go reading scripts to find this out.

    What I've found is that with Debian I have a much better idea what's going on inside our systems. There are no surprises, things so far just straight up work the way we expect them to. We're competent programmers and system administrators, so this is great for us. If I were a newbie, I would definitely still recommend Mandrake. Whatever the security scripts are doing, it IS making the system more secure, but sometimes you don't want that.

    If I wanted Mandrake to do one thing (short of switching to .debs) to get me back on the Mandrake train: Please explain in absolutely explicit detail the difference between your security modes. You *HAVE* to do this during the install process as well. If I'm rebuilding my firewall, for instance, I don't have the option to go out to the internet to find out what these things mean. This is a very important critical decision that should not be taken lightly. The only way we can properly make that decision is if the knowlege is made available to us when we need it most.

    Bryan

    • Re:I like Mandrake.... but.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Graabein ( 96715 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @09:56PM (#6855484) Journal
      Sounds like what you really want is FreeBSD. Seriously, give it a try, you'll love the ports collection and the easily available documentation.

      As for your gripe about the security setting: If in doubt, just select "standard", the default setting. After you have finished installing the system, log on and fire up Mandrake Control Center. You can change the security level there and also exercise fine grained control over each level. The install program really should tell you this though, so you don't sweat over it.

    • The program thats changing your file permissions is msec. You can change the directories and files it works on in the control panel. I'm pretty sure theres an option in the security settings to adjust when it runs. Now for the bad news both of them seem broken in 9.1 and in 9.0 I couldn't change more than one thing at a time without it breaking.

      9.1 seems to be a lot buggier in than either 9.0 or 8.2. I really hope 9.2 doesn't have these kinds of problems.
    • I can certainly tell you that when I tried to recycle an older Powermac 7600 system as a Linux-based web and file server, I had much better results using Debian than Mandrake for PPC.

      I know most people on here probably never bothered with the PPC versions of these distros - but for those who do, it seems like the distros that support PPC do it as almost an afterthought.

      With Mandrake for PPC, I couldn't even get a working X environment (and I was simply trying to use the built-in video Apple supplies on al
      • I can certainly tell you that when I tried to recycle an older Powermac 7600 system as a Linux-based web and file server, I had much better results using Debian than Mandrake for PPC.

        The Dog [yellowdoglinux.com] is your friend. Moof! Did an install on a Wallstreet PowerBook last Saturday, and after a little fiddling it was smooth sailing.

        However, Debian PPC is good for older PPC Macs that Yellow Dog Linux won't run on. And of course, there is Debian 68K. There will NEVER be a Yellow Dog 68K.

    • Re:I like Mandrake.... but.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by InodoroPereyra ( 514794 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @10:45PM (#6855758)
      I really think you haven't discovered the great advantages of urpmi, rpmdrake et al.:

      1. We're sick of RPM. We've hard RPM break on a few machines already (I think the RPM database becomes corrupted if I remember correctly). Needless to say, it's hard to upgrade your machine when your package manager goes kaput. APT/debs are SO much easier to deal with anyway.

      Allright, I never had such a problem, and I used RPM based distros for years (RedHat and now Mandrake). Most problems that I saw reported in mailing lists about RPM going belly up are user problems: using --force to force installation, messing with the database, using experimental or third party packages, etc. If you stick to your distro you are most likely ok. Plus, there are tools to rebuild databases. Oh, and I've seen problems with debian database too (disclaimer: I love the debian project)

      2. Too much crap! Literally, Mandrake has TOO MUCH crap these days. I know Debian is hardly innocent, but the dependency train for whatever reason seems to be much more palatable when using Debian as opposed to Mandrake. Maybe it's all the package/package-dev combo packs that the Mandrake/RedHat people like, I'm not entirely sure. It's just too much honestly. Let me install mySQL and be done with it.

      This is called granularity, and it is not a problem if you use a front-end to RPM, such as urpmi. Simply fire up the mandrake control center, then Software Manager, search for mySQL and you'll see a few packages. Click on what you think you need, and the software manager will select for you the packages required by dependencies. It is that easy. Separating _dev_ packages from the binaries is great. That allows for a minimal install for people who don't care about compiling stuff. What's wrong with it ?

      • You have some points, but you have clearly never tried to use their updater on a slow machine. Even on a fast machine it's a slow process. On a slow machine, it can take literally minutes to do a screen redraw. I don't really understand why. It doesn't appear to be doing as much as Synaptic does, but it is really quite significantly slower. As least as much slower, proportionally, as Synaptic is over apt-get.

        Personally, the only trouble I've had with the Mandrake Updater in the 9.x series is the speed

  • Upgrading (Score:3, Interesting)

    by prashantp76 ( 469026 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @09:07PM (#6855170)
    Interesting reviews, but ...
    I for one am tired of seeing a new distribution every 6 months from Mandrake and RedHat.

    My problem is upgrading - the distributions support it, but basically end up reinstalling the whole system. I'd rather they only came out with one major release per year, which was very stable and easily upgradeable.

    I don't care if it doesn't ship with the latest and greatest KDE and kernel!

    • I for one am tired of seeing a new distribution every 6 months from Mandrake and RedHat.

      And I am on the flip side and think they need to keep it up. I want to be set free from the mire of Microsoft and Linux is getting closer to useable as far as I'm concerned with each iteration from the main vendors. (With some backsteps along the way)

      I want them to keep working on it until I am happy with it. And then I can simply not upgrade. You could do the same if you're happy with the one you have.

  • This story is about news of a review that doesnt exist yet? Ok........
  • I found that ZeroConfig would not work on my Dell Latitude (Laptop). ZeroConfig worked on my Desktop though with Mandrake 9.1. However, another extremely annoying feature was that you if set your desktop to "double click", konqueror would not obey the rule when set to "Detailed List View", it would still use the single click. So, I'm backed to good ole reliable redhat 9. Byte
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I am running it on a box here (at home) and it is very polished, however, with that being said, having a nice operationg system isn't necessarily going to win converts.

    Guaranteed my Karma will fall through the floor and I'll be labelled the ultimate Anti-Christ, however, Mandrake can make the operating system as pretty as they want, but, if the big name vendor software titles just aren't there, people aren't going to move over.

    I've chatted to other Mac (being one myself) users and most would be more than
  • you read the title as:

    A Galaxy of Possibility: Mandrake 9.1 Prostitute

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