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Mandriva Businesses

Mandrake 10.1 Community Released 209

MohammedSameer writes "Mandrakesoft released MandrakeLinux 10.1 Community, As usual it's only available first to the club members The new release features Kernel 2.6.8.1, Xorg-X11 6.7, KDE 3.2.3 with 3.3 as an install option,"
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Mandrake 10.1 Community Released

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  • Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by poofyhairguy82 ( 635386 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @11:43AM (#10267619) Journal
    As usual it's only available first to the club members

    Does this actually matter? How many Madrake Users get their ISO's from Mandrake anyway? Torrents will probably have 10.1 within the day.

    • Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nos. ( 179609 ) <andrew@nOSPAm.thekerrs.ca> on Thursday September 16, 2004 @11:45AM (#10267658) Homepage
      I guess the thing is, if you like Mandrake, then become a club member, not so much to get first dibs on the ISO's, but to support Mandrake itself.
      Personally I don't use Mandrake (nothing against them), but there could be other benefits to being in the club.
      • I know a LOT of people that would like to become a member but can-not flit the bill for it because they REQUIRE a full year payment.

        Students, out of work LUG members, etc.. cant come up with that $100US+ for the absolute basic membership.

        People would love to join mandrake club at a monthly payment rate. but they just do not offer it. (Granted, membership will surge only on release date's but it's an influx of money that they would not get otherwise.)
      • Yeah, you get access to some commercial and club-only software packages, and you can vote on which packages should go into the next release. Gives the user a nice say in what their distro becomes.
      • Personally I don't use Mandrake (nothing against them), but there could be other benefits to being in the club.

        The Mandrake "club" is the very reason I switched my g/f over to Debian despite Mandrake's easy config tools. Unless you become a "premium" member you really don't get anything more, and their number of supported packages is dismal.
    • Re:Does it matter? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by opkool ( 231966 )
      Right now, Mandrake 10.1-Community is already out there for anyone to use it. Yes, you either need to do a network install or create your own ISOs.

      But in about a week (give/take a couple of days), ISOs (or an official .torrent) will be available at all official mirrors.

      So Club Members get a "download without slashdot effect" time, with noce download speeds using dedicated .torrents.

      Peace.
  • Club membership (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zorilla ( 791636 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @11:43AM (#10267620)
    My experience has been that you really need to be an enthusiast of this distro to bother installing the Community version of it. For some reason, I ended up with the Comminity version of 10.0 when downloading it via BitTorrent, and boy did it need some work. KDE crashing every ten seconds, weird bugs like the SDL segfault when the wacom tablet module (evdev) was loaded, etc.

    Point being, don't try this out as a stable release. Only try it if you have time to kill and really want to see what Mandrake has done with their release this far. Otherwise, wait for the Official ISOs when they become availible to the public.
    • by Linzer ( 753270 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @11:57AM (#10267808)
      I've been running the development version for a little time now, and AFAICS all show-stopper bugs have been properly squashed by now. It has been running quite smoothly for a few weeks now. However, as parent says: don't use it if you want something rock solid, wait for 10.1 Official. But if you want all the shiny brand new stuff, a streamlined install with an excellent hardware detection, and are not afraid of a few weird things happening now and then, then give it a try!
      • > But if you want all the shiny brand new stuff, a streamlined install
        > with an excellent hardware detection, and are not afraid of a few
        > weird things happening now and then, then give it a try!

        Wow, finally a Linux distro that can compete with Windows.

    • I've been using Mandrake since the 7 days. Traditionally X.0 is buggy and the .1 and .2 releases are much much nicer. I wouldn't worry about it so much, just don't use it on anything royally important (which you shouldn't be doing anyway if you haven't tested it).
    • Re:Club membership (Score:3, Informative)

      by opkool ( 231966 )
      I've tried MDK-10.0-Community and several of MDK-10.1's Beta and Release Candidate.

      In my experience, even MDK-10.1-Beta-1 was more stable than MDK-10.0-Community .

      Peace
      • In my experience, even MDK-10.1-Beta-1 was more stable than MDK-10.0-Community .

        That good to hear, although I don't see how it could possibly have been worse. 10.0-Community, in what has to be the most spectacularly weird autoconfig bug I've ever seen in all my time with Linux, somehow managed to confuse my PC Speaker with my sound card, and proceeded to attempt to pipe all sound through it. It was the single most gawdawful noise I've ever experienced in my life.
    • I didn't notice any huge bugs with 10.0 Community, but I did have a hard time upgrading 10.0 Community to 10.0 Official once it was released. I did find these instructions [blueyonder.co.uk] with some googling. I agree with the parent too, wait for Official if you want a stable release.
  • Anyone here in the Club? Is it worth it? I ran Mandrake but have been debating the value of it. Thanks ...
    • Re:The Club (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Been a silver member for better than two years, IMHO it is worth it.
    • Re:The Club (Score:3, Interesting)

      by CmdrGravy ( 645153 )
      I was in the Club as a basic member but forgot to renew my membership - I will though.

      Yes it's worth it, largely just to support Mandrakesoft though, I have used them since 7.0 when it was the only distro which recognised all my hardware. You also get to vote for various things you want packaged and access to rpm mirrors.
    • Re:The Club (Score:3, Interesting)

      by grunt107 ( 739510 )
      I am a member and I like having the access to the Betas and early releases. I have a 'test' computer that I install various distros and see how they behave. My big server has MDK10 on it - no real reason. I also have the SuSe, Knoppix and MDKMove DoDs (Distro on Disk) that I pop in the laptop when I need to get 'Net.
    • Re:The Club (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @12:08PM (#10267924) Homepage Journal
      It kind of depends upon whether you think supporting Mandrake is a good idea, and whether you think that the OS is worth paying someone to continue working on their favorite distribution.

      I have been a Club member in the past, and probably will be again. Asside from the default USB drivers not supporting the Via USB 2.0 chips, easily fixable by replacing the usb-uhci with huci-ohc (or something like that), I have had no significant problems with the 10.1rc1 package.

      If you think that it is worth purchasing, to the point where you would pick up a copy at your local computer superstore whenever they get around to carrying it, joining the club gets your money to the developers at a much higher percentage of what you spend.

      There are other advantages as well, which you can read on their web page if it really interests you. If not, then the above probably won't be of much interest either.

      -Rusty
      • Re:The Club (Score:3, Interesting)

        by JSkills ( 69686 )
        Thanks dude. I've been going back and forth on Linux distros for a while now. I've found Mandrake to have some real merits, so if it's what I settle on I probably will follow your advice and do the Right Thing.
    • I'm about to renew. (Score:5, Informative)

      by biendamon ( 723952 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @12:10PM (#10267948)
      I'd say club membership is worth it, if you happen to prefer Mandrake as your primary distro. I appreciate the dedicated mirrors for club members quite a bit. Makes patch times much faster.

      I also like the repositories for software that are available to club members. I have yet to find a piece of software out there that someone didn't turn into a Mandrake RPM, and the club mirrors seem to have it all. Sure, you can find them other places, too, but all in all it's nice to have everything in one place.
  • when i went from 10 - 10.1 i started having problems with my wireless card. about every other reboot it would not be recognized. at one point it was just totally gone so i did a reinstall. the problems started again. so i switched to suse 9.1, which is great. however i miss having the cooker urpmi stuff. apt will do.
  • Former MDK user... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chuck Bucket ( 142633 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @11:52AM (#10267734) Homepage Journal
    I started with MDK with 6.0 (*after my time with Red Hat 5.0*) and really loved it. After years of playing with it on the desktop and using it for an MP3 FTP server, I got tired of the RPM depenancy hell and I made the jump to Slackware. A few years of playing in Debian and now Gentoo, I feel I've learned a ton more than I did before, and with YUM and apt-rpm I think it may be time to install/try out this latest version on a sandbox for desktop testing.

    I used to enjoy seeing what they 'smoothed out' over the prev release. The MDK Club turned me off as Deno started getting stinky about support for 'non-users' but I understand they're just trying to make a dollar (or euro in their case).

    Regardless, nice to see a major Linux Distro still in the running.

    CCBB
  • by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @11:53AM (#10267749) Journal
    I would like to see a partial distro, a yoper like base, less packages, more configuration.

    Then a hole chunk (SuSE like) impors of packages. All required development for simple confmakemakeinstall's and perhaps simple walk throughs for these common actions. For newbies trying to get onto the bandwagon, this would be a diamond!

    What was the thing you got stuck on at first? write it down, and think how you could solve it for another newbie.

    Out of interest Moore's Law finally buried? [slashdot.org]

    Ok enough shameless plug, it was for a good cause.
    • There is always Debian.

      Install an absolutely basic Debian distro, skip dselect and tasksel, and apt-get what you want and need for your basic distro, then build up from there. If you want to invest a lot of time in configuration, but build a system completely tailored to your wants and needs there's Gentoo and LFS [linuxfromscratch.org] - depends on how much support you want to find, how much time you wish to invest, and how much package management infrastructure you want.
      • actually debian would be my favoured, my amiable french amie's love to do a 1 disk boot and install from the net. Never tried it - and I am the first to admit I have limited package knowledge about making a neat and tidy well balanced system.

      • I wanted to say thanks, and I like the roll your own linux approach of LFS, and looked into it a while ago, but never saw benefits to me personally (I am a user, I develop, but since I am developing outside the space of the OS, I am still just a user)

        Still, I have gotten SuSE 9.1 installed in some pretty cool places, some schools and even a monastary!

        The only problem was, after a simple install, trying to do a confmakemakeinstall I realised SuSE doesn't install the 'bare bones' make system required to, ba
  • by tongue ( 30814 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @11:54AM (#10267761) Homepage
    Ok, I see that improved laptop support is one of the touted features here. My question is, how good is it?

    I just switched back to windows (rather painlessly, thanks to the excellent QtParted [sourceforge.net] and, strangely enough, a windows ME boot disk [for an XP machine--needed to restore the MBR]). I can't tell you how greatly it pains me to do so--as far as i'm concerned, linux is ready for the desktop, and has been for some time. ACPI-based laptops though, are another story. I've been trying for weeks to get my battery life to come close to what's possible under windows, and while the Software suspend [sf.net] project seems to work for a lot of people, i could never get it to work on my laptop (or maybe just my kernel). I've tried various distributions, from suse to xandros to straight debian to knoppix and even the simpler ones such as DSL [damnsmalllinux.org] and none of them allow me to really use my laptop for more than about an hour (give or take a quarter) without plugging in, which is just unacceptable for my purposes.

    So i finally gave up and dropped the linux partitions and reinstalled the boot sector (oh how that final 'fdisk /mbr' pained me!) but at least i can spend three and a half hours at a coffee shop without needing an outlet. cygwin takes the edge off, but its a bit like methadone if you asked me.

    so anyway, for anyone who's tested and/or used the new version of MDK on a recent laptop, what's your experience with the ACPI support? Battery life? Suspend functionality? dare i ask--functional keys? (yes, i know that's not really related to acpi, but mandrake is generally pretty conscientious about things like that, i thought perhaps they might have integrated a solution.)
    • Fedora wasn't in your list. I've used it since FC1 on my laptop and its always worked great. If I were you though, its probably worth waiting a month for Core 3 to come out, alot of improved acpi stuff.
      Regards,
      Steve
    • sure, laptop support is lagging for linux. but it does work.

      the only thing i haven't gotten yet to work on my laptop is the freaking via video driver. im using the vesa ok right now. no hopes of dri/drm at the moment.

      wireless works good using ndiswrapper, software suspend is actually quite old, i think it's in the main tree, at least it was in the kernel sources for my distro. now, swsusp2 (the maintained rewrite of software suspend i think) isn't in my distro's kernel, but patching it in wasn't too h
      • thanks for the info... I haven't had any problems with the hardware for the most part, except as you noted, the 3d support for the video isn't really there (radeon) but i have read instructions on how to get it to work on xandros's forums, although i never tried it.

        i haven't used a redhat distro in years--does fedora have a livecd-style version?

        heavy processor use is obviously going to tax the kernel, but for average use i'd like to see at least 2.5 hours of battery life, preferably closer to the 3.5 i g
        • my laptop is an averatec 3225. i honestly haven't timed the battery life under either os. i'm using gentoo linux. i had a radeon 7000 video card on a desktop and it worked fine for 3d (quake3), though i think the rage 128 card i had in another machine got better framerates.
    • ACPI works well on my desktop (as does software suspend, only one problem so far) but there are reports of laptops suffering beacuse of a lack of nolapic support [mandrakelinux.com]. It's also worth noting that many machines come with poorly programmed BIOSes and need updates or extra code to have working ACPI. Why not try a LiveCD distro to test with until you find out you have support? It may also help if you pick a big vendor and report the issue to them so that they can track it and have you test fixes...
    • 10 is good on a laptop. I use it exclusively and with the right settings you get pretty darn close to full use out of the battery.

      now, it STILL depends on the laptop. My dell D800 does great and the Video card is supported as well as the wireless g built in. but my older dell use bizzare brand hardware and no linux on this planet works worth a damn on it.

      It depends lots on your laptop, if you buy a laptop with linux in mind it's painless (and if you got cash, get a powerbook. best linux support for a lap
    • To extend battery life you need to use one of the CPUFreq modules to clock down your CPU and its voltage. For Intel these are the SpeedStep ones. AMD also has their own. Then install a simple power management daemon like powernowd which will upclock your processor only when it needs to. There are also the laptop-tools which will spin down your harddrive and keep Linux from flushing its buffers to it when it really doesn't have to.

      Neither of these things require ACPI support, I believe.
    • by chundo ( 587998 ) <jeremy&jongsma,org> on Thursday September 16, 2004 @05:09PM (#10271793)
      I've got Mandrake 9.2 running on my Dell Inspiron 8600. Works great. A couple things I had to tweak though:
      • It screwed up the acpi detection on install, so I had to manually add "acpi=on" to my lilo.conf
      • Installed acpid [sourceforge.net] to capture events from my hardware buttons / functional keys. All buttons work for me.
      • Althought suspending to RAM (sleep mode 1) works, it didn't shutoff my screen or backlight before doing so. I had to write a custom script to do that.
      • Suspend to disk doesn't work for me. At all. Didn't spend much time on it though since it's not a big deal for me.
      • Installed cpudynd [mnm.uib.es] to manage CPU power consumption. My laptop easily lasts 3-4 hours on one battery, with WiFi.
  • by Chuck Bucket ( 142633 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @11:55AM (#10267774) Homepage Journal
    One of the best resources in the Mandrake community has been an individual called Texstar who ran a Linux news site called www.pclinuxonline.com and also in his spare time created RPM packages for Mandrake systems. Texstar's packages became justly famous and were widely used. Thanks to his efforts, many reallly nice RPMs were made available to the MDK commmunity, and eventually went into 9 and 10 from what I've heard. This kind of 'community support' is what I'm most happy with.

    Thanks Texstar!

    CB@#$
  • Xorg 6.8 has already been released with some interesting features and enhancements (including the drop shadow and translucency eye candy!). I wonder why it wasnt included.
    • Re:Xorg-X11 6.7? (Score:4, Informative)

      by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @12:14PM (#10268004) Homepage Journal
      Because it wasn't released until after the freeze on updates for this release of Mandrake perhaps?

      Just because something has a new version out doesn't mean that people putting together a distribution are going to alter the package contents to add it. Gnome 2.8 is out too. It's not in Mandrake 10.1 either. Why not? Because 2.8 was released yesterday (or this week) the freeze for 10.1 happened several weeks ago, about the time that 10.1Beta1 came out I am pretty sure.

      -Rusty
    • Xorg 6.8 has already been released with some interesting features and enhancements (including the drop shadow and translucency eye candy!). I wonder why it wasnt included.

      My guess would be because the ATI drivers don't support it (though I have yet to get them tow work with 6.7).
  • Xorg 6.8? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Chuck Bucket ( 142633 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @11:58AM (#10267819) Homepage Journal
    Also, it's easy to update to Xorg 6.8 for MDK users, and I think it's worth the trouble, especially to see those dropshadows. I'm somewhat surprised that MDK didn't wait for 6.8 to go into 10.1, but the dropshadow business isn't completely stable outside of GNOME, and they have to make a cut off soon.

    Regardless, MDK users can update rather easily, just update your YUM repository!

    CBV
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Oh, sorry, perhaps I'm not as knowledgeable as I thought I was. I'm seeing 'yellow halos' around some windows after a time in XFCE, but not GNOME (yees, running Metacity). Maybe I need to recompile xcomp as I heard there are some new patches that give more realistic shadows.

        PCB$#@
  • by gsasha ( 550394 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @12:03PM (#10267868) Homepage
    If their claims hold water, that is...
    1. Centrino wireless support integrated, Wi-Fi roaming.
    2. ACPI support - finally! I'm sick with rebooting the laptop.
    But, good as it sounds, I'm still waiting for the Official.
  • by jlseagull ( 106472 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @12:03PM (#10267870) Homepage
    This problem is common with the 2.6 kernel and has been verified in Mandrake 10.0 Community, Red Hat FC1, Red Hat FC2, and others.

    Read about it here [mandrakesoft.com].

    Basically, if you touch the MBR with a 2.6 kernel bootloader, XP or Windows 2000 is gone, and can't be restored. So backup your MBR first by using

    "dd if=(input device) of=/(output dir)/hda-img.mbr bs=512 count=1"

    where if=(input device), should point to your first drive, eg. /dev/hda, and of=(output dir) should point to where you want to save the bootsector as a file. Restore the MBR by reversing the input and output.

    Even if you do this to restore, your Windows partition may still be toast, depending on how much you messed with the partition table.
    • by Dot.Com.CEO ( 624226 ) * on Thursday September 16, 2004 @12:28PM (#10268196)
      This is most definitely NOT a problem with the 2.6 kernel since things work fine on both gentoo and Suse with a 2.6 kernel. It is most likely a problem with the implementation of grub or lilo in these distros. And, in my opinion, it is totally unacceptable.
    • by egghat ( 73643 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @01:03PM (#10268669) Homepage
      If I understand things correctly, you shouldn't be hit by this bug any more especially with a new distro like the new Mandrake.

      Read more about this here, especially about resolving this when you have been hit (you won't lose any data):

      Fedora Mailing List post [redhat.com]

      Bye egghat.
      • It's especially the new distros. Older versions of Red Hat and Suse have no problems. The Mandrake 10 Community installer goes in and puts the bootloader into the MBR without even prompting the user, thereby ensuring the system gets hosed.
        • This thread is about Mandrake 10.1, not 10.0. 10.0 was affected, 10.1 isn't. SuSE 9.1 was affected, 9.2 won't.

          We often talk about OS being faster when fixes need to be done. And more than 4 months after the detection of this rather serious bug there simply won't be any new distro which still is affected.

          But you're correct, older distros (kernel 2.4 based) aren't affected as well.

          Bye egghat.
    • Go back and RTFB.

      This is only an issue with a certain combination of BIOS and chipset (nForce2). I have both 2.6.x (x86) and 2.6.x (x86_64) set-up on my machine booting via GRUB and also loading Win2K on an NTFS partition.

      Stop the FUD.

    • by hitmark ( 640295 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @02:51PM (#10270111) Journal
      oh man, not this old story again.

      what happend was that the bios didnt agree with itself if it should use chf or lba mode to set the gemoetry of the disk. windows relys on the bios info when it creates the partitions. then along comes the linux kernel, pokes the disk directly, finds that the geometry info used to create the partitions is wrong and goes about cleaning up. then windows comes back and finds non of the info it expects and in good old windows fashion trows its virtual arms in the air and gives up. the files are all there, the partitions are all there, its just that the partition table isnt of the type windows expects and therefor windows fails.

      its just like ripping a disk with win2k or later on and stick it into a diffrent computer. on boot you will most likely get a bluescreen with a error as windows rely on its old hardware list to boot drivers, and when said drivers fail there is no fallback. linux on the other hand build the list every time it boots and therefor will not have mutch of a problem with the move.

      complaining that this is a linux error is like complaining that there is something wrong with firefox when you try to access a page designed with ms frontpage. most likley a visit to the w3c validator will show so many error that you will be surprised that it renders at all.

      the problem is that windows have become so mutch a "standard" that when something goes wrong it have to be the odd boy out there is the problem, not the devil in drag down the road.
  • by Chuck Bucket ( 142633 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @12:05PM (#10267889) Homepage Journal
    pretty good mirror (speed wise)
    http://ftp.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrakel inux/de vel/iso/10.1/

    I'm going to see what new things are out on the Desktop.

    CB
  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @12:11PM (#10267967)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Anyone know how Mdk's finances look right now? They've been in some trouble.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Mandrake seems to be pulling itself up by it's bootstraps financially. Which is great - because I think Mandrake is Linux's great hope to take on MS.

      And they're doing that by doing what MS does - but based on a stable OS. With Mandrake you can get install your desktop from a couple of CD's, with about as much tech knowhow as you need with windows. With Mandrake you get a nice looking desktop right out of the box. And now with Mandrake you can spend $25 a year and get a windoze like auto-security-update

    • by opkool ( 231966 ) on Thursday September 16, 2004 @03:50PM (#10270975) Homepage
      See the results for yourself here [mandrakesoft.com].

      In short: MandrakeSoft is out of "Chapter 11" (March 30th - 2004: Mandrakesoft Exits Bankruptcy). MandrakeSoft is back making profit. MandrakeSoft shares are back being actively traded.

      Quoting latest report [mandrakesoft.com]:
      ----
      During the third quarter of 2003/2004, Mandrakesoft produced a consolidated revenue of 1.50 M and a gross margin of 1.25 M, a respective increase of 39.1% and 66.7% compared with the same period of the previous fiscal year. The gross margin is the highest on record, and quarter by quarter there is an acceleration in its rate of growth (Q1 +29.8%, Q2 47.7%, Q3 +66.7%)

      During the quarter, the company registered an operating income of 0.17 M (0.04 per share) compared to an operating loss of 0.47 M during the same period of the previous fiscal year. The net income increased to 0.19M (0.04 per share) compared to a net loss of 0.37 M during the previous fiscal year.
      ----

      So it's all good.

      Peace!
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 16, 2004 @12:58PM (#10268610)
    The first rule of Mandrake club is that you DO NOT TALK about Mandrake club.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    I didn't know they were being held hostage.
    I blame Microsoft.
  • losetup -e AES

    was broken in 10.0

    Chatter on the mailing lists refered to the 2.6 kernel not supporting the encryption modules--or something--I never really understood the issue.

    Neither could I figure out whether or not
    - it is fixed
    - they think it is fixed
    - they intend to fix it
    - they think it can be fixed

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