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Mandriva Businesses

Mandrake 6.1 Is Out (For Real This Time) 69

Posted by Hemos from the go-out-and-download dept.
Several readers have written in with the news that, yes, Linux-Mandrake 6.1 (Helios) is out. The ISOs, and the whole bit are availible from their site as well as mirrors around the Web.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Mandrake 6.1 Is Out (For Real This Time) More

Mandrake 6.1 Is Out (For Real This Time)

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  • So put /usr/local on its own partition! I've upgraded Linux twice now, and that little trick makes it almost completely painless. Just restore the backup and your home directory. I admit that I haven't yet had an upgrade major enough to warrant recompiling the applications, and that might make it more of a pain. But Debian is almost as good as BSD when it comes to ease of installation and package management; with a little effort, you could make packages out of any source tarballs you had that needed it, and make them part of your backup.

  • Upgrading from Red Hat 6.0 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was wondering if it's possable to upgrade from Red Hat 6.0 to Mandrake 6.1?

    I know Mandrake is suppose to be based on Red Hat, but I also see there are some significant differances in some of the packages, which may confuze it, and cause me to loose some data.

    Mostly I am worried about my KDE setup, my MySQL database, and the stuff in /home (which should be the least of my worries).

    Anyone able to comment on how this works first hand.....

  • Why isn't this release called Mandrake 1.2? Its not like they have been through six major revisions yet.

    Redhat's version is bloated enough, but at least there were major, incompatible changes between revisions (e.g. libc)
  • Once again, I enourage all Mandrake (or KDE based distribution) enthusiast to give the new distribution a try.

    I've been using Linux-Mandrake 6.0 as my main distro for several weeks now, and I like it a lot. BUT... I'm not about to upgrade to a release based on a pre-patched kernel, especially considering the memory leaks that have been in the last couple of stable kernels.

    IMHO, Linux-Mandrake should have waited until Linus released 2.2.13.

    TedC

  • Re:Mandrake is quick and RH is clever (Score:3)

    by ninjaz ( 1202 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @06:41AM (#1676676)
    Are we talking about a distribution targeted at networking professionals, corporations, consumers?

    Is a network administer interested in trying out GNU/Linux for some mission critical service going to opt for a distribution with a prerelease of the kernel and other relatively untested packages, or is he/she going to opt for the distribution that is the most widely used and supported, and fairly well-tested?

    The "networking professionals" around here use Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD (And occasionally Solaris if the boss requests it) Red Hat is not even in the running due to their hasty releases & apparent lack of any real testing, quality control or attention to security issues. The Linux distribution I'd give the undisputed "most tested" title to is Debian.

    Corporations may be effectively targeted by Red Hat, though. I noticed a post yesterday where someone said he was choosing Red Hat to push at work despite those problems for the very reason that the PHB's have seen it mentioned in a good light in the standard PHB-oriented publications. Of course, given that Mandrake won the Linux product of the year award at LWCE, which had a 'suit-friendly' aroma, and that Caldera also won an award, I wouldn't regard Red Hat dominance in this segment as a given.

    I think consumers could easily sway between Mandrake, Red Hat or Corel (once released), as they tend to be more about pushing the envelope on "new user gui friendliness", which recently has necessarily meant releasing quickly. For instance, the new kernels and X support evermore devices.

    I think Red Hat is really blowing it the hardware certification area, though. That the only machine they've certifed was one that contained a winmodem demonstrates a profound lack of ethics, imho.

    Of course, this is from the geek "big picture" and not from the business "big picture".. I'm guessing the businessmen at Red Hat thought it would be great to further legitimize themselves by having a hardware certification program and to grant IBM a favor to promote good relations with a huge industry player. But, as their IPO risks statement said, they risk losing the support of the community. I think this is a risk that could have easily been avoided by picking a different model to certify. (Was the Thinkpad really doing that poorly against competing laptops that IBM felt they had to push this one for Red Hat certification? Do they really think this will affect their future sales positively?)

    I think it's critical that any of the doors Red Hat is given credit to for opening should really be opened. Speaking from experience, it really sucks walking into a screen.

  • Is it possible to downgrade the kernel (based on the mandrake kernel rpm I guess). I finally have a working sblive install and I would hate to lose it, but want to upgrade to the latest mandrake. cos mandrake is real nice.
  • Is Gnome included?

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • Thanks whoever you are. Who was that masked man? ;-)

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • - More complete and generally improved internationalization (Japanese TT fonts, more man-pages, more ispell dictionaries...).

    Doumo arigatou gozaimasu!

    --

  • Hmm. I actually run three different linux distributions: I use Mandrake (6.0 at the moment, but 6.1 is being burned onto a CD-RW as I write this) on my Intel box, RedHat 6.0 on my SPARCstation, and Debian 2.1 on my Mac. Between the three, I think Debian is the easiest to install and upgrade packages on. I wish Mandrake and RedHat had some sort of installer with all the capabilities of dselect. Granted, it's not pretty, but it works.

    --

  • I was wondering if anyone knows if you're able to create bootable CDs using their ISO images. Otherwise I'll just buy it from CheapBytes.

    "Microsoft is the epitome of innovation and product quality."

  • I run Mandrake 6.0 and I like it very much. I used to think of Mandrake as nothing more then RedHat with KDE slapped on top of it -- and I started to hate Redhat with a passion after it killed my partition table. That was until the article on /. that said Mandrake had been awarded Product of the Year. I immediately downloaded a copy and installed it (got to love the cable modem :).
    From what I can tell so far, it's an award well deserved. Although it still felt like RedHat initially (esp. the installation part), it turned out to be RedHat that actually works. And works very well I must say. Pentium optimizations turned out to speed up the system a lot. All the apps seem to have a significantly smaller memory footprint (I'm assuming that's the effect of the optimizations?), and that causes the system to swap much less and load apps faster. Oh, and the colorized gcc output is kind of neat.

    There were, of course, a few things that I didn't like about it. First of all, KDE was not in the standard location. Putting KDE under /usr is counter-productive and confusing since all the KDE apps expect it to be under /opt/kde. Download an rpm of any KDE app -- it'll install itself under /opt/kde.

    Secondly, and that's not something specific to KDE, it doesn't have the nice key mappings for vim that SuSE has. SuSE puts a lot of key mappings in the vimrc file so that the arrows, home/end, pgup/pgdn, etc. always work properly. No big deal -- I just copied the vimrc file.

    Finally, for some reason, Netscape seems to crash a lot more often. Perhaps it has something to do with glibc2.1?


    I can only hope that Mandrake 6.1 is just as good. However, I'm worried that Mandrake is starting to do what RedHat is doing -- ship beta and pre-release packages. I don't like that it ships with a pre-release kernel as well as betas of other apps, as Skeezix has pointed out. To Mandrake team: please please please don't repeat RedHat's mistakes.

    Oh, and once again, great job guys!
  • Well, releasing 'pre' versions is a habit they picked up from Red Hat :). As long as they follow Red Hat's practice of announcing the 'final' release as a free download, it shouldn't present a problem.

    I'm just glad they didn't jump on glibc 2.1.2 right away.
    ---------------------
    Most Annoying /. Comment Ever:
    "If I use Red$at Gnulix to make a Beowulf,
  • Not to be pedantic, Aaron, but the default RPM build target for Red Hat is the 486. The 'i386' that appears in the names of the packages refers to the architecture, which is a different parameter in RPM and doesn't necessarily reflect the actual compiler flags being used for the binary.

    I just wanted to clarify this, since many people see the i386 in Red Hat's RPMs and think RH binaries are the opposite of optimized (pessimized? :) .
    ---------------------
    Most Annoying /. Comment Ever:
    "If I use Red$at Gnulix to make a Beowulf,
  • I was just browsing their ftp site and I didn't see gcc or egcs there. I saw pgcc instead. Can anybody here comment as to what is the basis for this choice? From what little I know pgcc is optimized for pentium and uses some of MMX. How is it for floating point compared to gcc/egcs?
  • And after doing that once, how inclined are you to to fork out your dollars to go through that experience again ?

    I've used Mandrake 6 for the past 3 months and feel the same way. I've upgraded E, Tcl/tk, gnome, KDE, Netscape, linuxconf, and added a ton of other stuff. This isn't like Windows where the OS is kept under lock and key and certain configuration can be assumed for upgrading. But Linux can't. You can't assume that the installation configuration will still be the same when it comes time to upgrade.

    I'm not sure about upgrading. How does it work? Will it mess my system up? Has anyone else upgraded Mandrake? How about some feedback?

    -Brent
    --
  • I'am happy that Mandrake guys challenge Redhat. It's force RH to improve their own product and it benefits for the users.

    Competition is vital to having a good product, right?

    Let's never forget that competition brings innovation. A common idea these days is that Linux should be the end-all of Operating Systems and we should just have one "distribution". But what would we have then? Just another "microsoft" product. There'd be none of that push to innovate anymore. The only innovation being done would be only that needed to sucker in "users".

    But what do we have now? Red Hat and Mandrake. Gnome and KDE. And others. Let's not meld the KDE and Gnome projects together. They should always exist as different projects. They provide innovation that we wouldn't have otherwise. The LSB is good, but let's not make it something that forces distributions to all be identical. That would stop innovation.

    Hey, Microsoft even need to be here. Microsoft provides strong innovation in the Linux market. Not their idea of "innovation" of course, but real innovation.

    -Brent
    --
  • Mandrake originally started out as an improvement (IMHO) upon Red Hat's releases. The version numbers mirrored which exact version of Red Hat's Linux the version was made from.

    For example, Linux Mandrake 5.2 was a copy of Red Hat Linux 5.2 with various modifications (KDE etc.). This version number scheme made it very easy to take advantage of existing Red Hat resources. If you saw something on the web (tip, trick, fix, etc) for Red Hat 5.2 you could be 99% sure it would work on Mandrake 5.2.

    Once the new 2.2 kernel came out Mandrake started to diverge from Red Hat's distro. Mandrake 5.3 for instance was Red Hat 5.2 with the new 2.2 kernel and the regular Mandrake additions (KDE etc).

    Since that time Mandrake has diverged its previous history of starting with a base Red Hat installation. Mandrake now starts with their own base (which is still Red Hat compatible) but no longer matches Red Hat exactly. The version numbers now do not refer to Red Hat versions as they used to, but they have not renumbered from 1.0 as this would be very confusing for all the Mandrake users of previous versions.

    Hope that clears things up.

    Cheers!
  • This was a known issue on the Mandrake beta list. It was relatively close to release time. They're was a message from Gael that a fix was in the works and would be released as soon as possible. It's a problem with the PCMCIA driver I believe.
  • Mandrake is not as RedHat based as it used to be. Mandrake has tried very hard to make sure it remains 100% redhat compatible though. All programs that are designed and compiled to run with RedHat should work without any problems on Mandrake. Mandrake has split off from RedHat in a few respects, most notably the look and feel (which it has been for a long time), now the install routine has been GUI-ified, and the kernel and underlying driver sets have been hand tuned and optimized.

    I have personally found the Mandrake distribution to be RedHat but better. That's just my opinion of course. I think whereas RedHat spends more time in the marketting of their Linux, Mandrake spends the time in making their Linux better and easier to use for the common user.

    Cheers!

  • You have a point, but... (Score:3)

    by TheBashar ( 13543 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @05:03AM (#1676692)
    You have a valid point. I too would feel more comfortable with a non-pre kernel. The problem is that there is no way to know how long it will be until 2.2.13 comes out. Were are on pre-9 already.

    And going back to the last stable kernel 2.2.12 really isn't a good idea either. 2.2.12 (and 2.2.11) was riddled with wide spread problems. I respect Mandrake for trying to stay on the cutting edge as well as ensuring that their distributions are stable.

    Please remember, 2.2.13-pre3 has been out for a while and we have been hammering it pretty hard to make sure it is stable. And, of course, as soon as 2.2.13 finally is released it won't be long before Mandrake release a small update package.

    It's not that I disagree with your observations, I just don't think the issue is so big as to scare someone off from a much improved distro release.

    Cheers!

  • Big Improvement (Score:4)

    by TheBashar ( 13543 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @01:58AM (#1676693)
    I've been following the development of Mandrake's latest release from 6.0 to 6.1 very closely. I strongly encourage anyone running an older version of Mandrake to upgrade.

    There are major changes in this release which are very much worth taking advantage of. Most people will enjoy the new graphical installer and graphical disk partitioner. These things make it nicer for the average user to install. But more importantly than that, 6.1 is the first release benefitting from Mandrake's "cooker" process.

    Mandrake 6.0, while being very good, was chock full of small annoying and disruptive problems. After the experience with 6.0, Mandrake opened it's development process up to the public. Thos of us who have chosen to participate have been able to download and intall development versions of 6.1 and make suggestions for improvements.

    This means that 6.1 has the inputs and suggestions of far more people than any previous release. Hopefully we have all found the "gotcha" issues before the official release this time. I am confident that the 6.1 release is far more stable and gotcha-free than the 6.0 release.

    Once again, I enourage all Mandrake (or KDE based distribution) enthusiast to give the new distribution a try.

    Cheers!
  • The "networking professionals" around here use Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD (And occasionally Solaris if the boss requests it) Red Hat is not even in the running due to their hasty releases & apparent lack of any real testing, quality control or attention to security issues. The Linux distribution I'd give the undisputed "most tested" title to is Debian. I agree completely. Debian is very well tested distribution...I'd agree it's the most tested and stable. When I was referring to "networking professionals," I should have clarified my statement. What I meant was networking professionals who haven't really had much experience, if any, with GNU/Linux. They are more likely to try Redhat, because of the media attention, support, etc.

    --Jamin Philip Gray
    jamin@DoLinux.org

  • I think Mandrake and Redhat are beginning to move in slightly different directions. This does not have to be a Bad Thing. It is not suicide for Redhat to move in a different direction than Mandrake. Redhat, afterall, is the distributor with the IPO, stock soaring, major corporations backing it, and is the most widely used distribution. It all depends on what markets they are going for and whom they are trying to package their product for. Are we talking about a distribution targeted at networking professionals, corporations, consumers? I assure you, this is something Redhat is seriously thinking about. I think Mandrake may be have been a bit hasty releasing 6.1. I fear there are many lurking bugs and issues. Mandrake 6.1 may be an excellent distribution for us geeks who want the bleeding edge and tons of software (some of which Redhat doesn't include), but is a network administer interested in trying out GNU/Linux for some mission critical service going to opt for a distribution with a prerelease of the kernel and other relatively untested packages, or is he/she going to opt for the distribution that is the most widely used and supported, and fairly well-tested?

    ...But don't take my word for it..try it out. I plan on ordering a CD from CheapBytes [cheapbytes.com] as soon as it's available.

    --Jamin Philip Gray
    jamin@DoLinux.org

  • Does anyone else think that many of the packages in Mandrake 6.1 are just a bit premature? For example (see the announcement [linux-mandrake.com]):

    - Linux-Kernel: 2.2.13 (pre4)
    - Enlightenment 0.16-dev5
    - GnomeICU 0.66 (according to the GnomeICU Homepage [gdev.net], 0.66 hasn't been released yet..it's still in developement!

    And there are other examples of software that has barely been tested...

    And while I respect the fact that they are no longer basing their distribution on RedHat, they do claim compatibility with RedHat. I fear that by releasing their distribution prior to RedHat's release they risk some incompatibility.

    Redhat now has a chance to "one-up" Mandrake's distribution if they choose to.

    Just a few thoughts...

    --Jamin Philip Gray
    jamin@DoLinux.org

  • Mandrake Announcement (Score:3)

    by Chris Pimlott ( 16212 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @02:00AM (#1676697)
    ... is here [linux-mandrake.com], with info on the major updates and changes.
  • If you have ever tried Mandrake you know that they always try to have the most cutting edge software at the time of the release of their distro. I have already download the kernel RPM and have been using it without any problems. Mandrake does a good job at making sure the development software they do include is not too buggy. KDE 1.1.2 has been released and is ready for consumption. If you want software that is all final and nothing cutting edge, than you should use redhat, even though it still is buggy.
  • Yeah. I did it in Windows with EasyCD. You can just double-click on the .iso, and it knows what to do. The CD will only boot, though, if you enable CD-booting in the BIOS.
  • I'm running 6.1 (Cassini) beta, that I upgraded from 6.0 so while I can't quite comment on the final 6.1 version I can say that my upgrade on two different machines went flawlessly.

    Upgrading is rather a painless process, boot off the cd or diskette like a normal install and then tell it you want to upgrade instead of install a new version of Mandrake. The install routine will check all the packages you currently have installed can chose those as out of the newer version as the default (along with any new dependency's or libraries required), from that point you can either continue as is or add / remove packages from the upgrade process. Tell it to run and 10-20min later your rebooting into your new system.


    post install left 98% of my systems intact, a few changes were a couple new icons on my kde desktops. It replaced my .bashrc in /root but left my /home/"user" directorys alone. Some extra libraries that I had installed were gone (jdk etc), which was okay since I had the wrong version anyways and it never worked, now I finally downloaed and installed the correct version. Left everything in /usr/local alone.

    Since I use XIG's Accelerated X I did have uninstall / re-install XFree86 and X a couple times to get everything working the way I wanted it again. Overall after the initial upgrade probably about 1hr of tweaking for each machine to fix the minor changes in my system(s).

  • Oh but my /usr/local/ is on its own partition. But that doesn't help if you regularly hack your own initscripts, upgrade gcc , libc ld ,by hand etc etc. And all your smb and apache confs and hacks, and your custom tweaked CVS GNOME installation. I never said it wasn't possible and my two weeks was a slight exaggeration, its just the more your box deviates from the vanilla distro and the more you put in by hand, the more pointless a CD upgrade becomes.

    And I think as broadband net access becomes gradually more and more plentiful and the average linux user more and more knowledgeable, then this sentiment might grow a little.

  • So many distributions , so little differentation. (Score:4)

    by scrutty ( 24640 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @02:07AM (#1676702) Homepage
    Seems to be a growing number of high profile distributions these days , an increasing number of them based on RedHat. But I wonder how truly sustainable some of these are.

    Its only to be expected that we will be seeing floods of first time or new users eager to try out Linux with the media profile of our favourite OS being what it is nowadays. But what will happen as the userbase matures ?

    I'm sure I'm not the only Linux user who has started to move away from using the shrink wrapped stuff. You install a Red Hat, or a Suse or a Mandrake or whatever, you spend a few months setting loads of stuff up , tweaking it , installing all of your favourite gizmos and libraries from source, graudually making your box as comfortable as a pair of well worn slippers. Then six months down the line attracted by the shiny new box on the shelf at PC world you buy a updated copy and do the upgrade thing. Then you spend the next 2 weeks in mild shock getting everything working the way it used to again.

    And after doing that once, how inclined are you to to fork out your dollars to go through that experience again ?

  • Alan releases 2.2.x kernels, not Linus.
  • These last few weeks have been nothing short of amazing with all of the new releases that have come out. Mandrake, Corel, etc.. releases here, Alan Cox kernels there... It seems like I'm reading about a new update or debut nearly every day!

    It's a good thing I'm not one of those ultra-geeks that has to have the absolute latest of everything or I'd never get around to anything more than the updates.

    I keep thinking this rapid rollout will subside but it just keeps going!!! Keep it up!!

    D. Keith Higgs
    CWRU. Kelvin Smith Library

  • fyi: Mandrake 6.0 does come with ppp...
  • Sorry for being off topic, but I thought I'd ask this anyway...

    When using Netscape 4.61 on Mandrake 6.0, my netscape icons are appearing black and grey even though I'm running at 24 bpp color. I tried uninstalling and reinstaling but no luck. Has anyone else had this problem?
  • For the record, I'm using a Matrox G400 Single head 16MB with version 3.3.4 of X
  • I understand your frustration but i run Mandrake 6.0 and it is certainly not obsolete. I've had no problems with it. I find it a great distribution when I want to quickly slap a distro onto a disk.
    I install everything and it all works when I reboot. It's also very quick.
    There's really no need to keep upgrading all the time unless there is some new feature that you need.
    I've been running FreeBSD 2.2.8 for a little while and have only recently considered upgrading to a new release.
    The next time you want to try out a distro you might want pick up one of the $1.99 cheapbyte CDs.
  • The main problem i have is mandrake is bleeding edge..too bleeding. RedHat is bad enough with the bleeding edge stuff but at least they dont release 2.2.13pre4 kernels or cutting edge gnome stuff. I was also disappointed with some incompatibilities between mandrake and redhat in 6.0..the setup programs seem to be slightly different..the sound+network configs seem to have changed (does PPP come with mandrake 6?)..and mandrake has begun to fork a lot off redhat without any real backup..im not too sure you can upgrade a redhat to mandrake and vice versa or use the same rpm packages anymore..Anyway, i think that mandrake is basically a redhat knockoff which has lost sight of its original goal - to be a better redhat than redhat.
  • in linux cdrecord does it fine. i made the lorax cd (redhat 6.1) and it worked great.
  • IIRC the way you solve that problem is to run in 32-bit color, rather than 24. For some reason, Netscape doesn't understand 24-bit color as reported by X on some systems... so it instead defaults to the 2-bit black and white icons.

    Doug
  • The pgcs project takes releases of egcs and optimizes it to use pentium, pentium II, and other newer processor instructions.

    Kind of like Mandrake does with Redhat if you think about it :)

    I like it for most applications, but it is a little more risky to use as it can optimize away crucial code that was written using poor syntax. (read: linux kernel).

    I've been using a kernel compiled on it for months now, however, and never had a problem, but let the buyer beware :)

    Doug

  • Man! (Score:1)

    by Pike ( 52876 )
    Bother. I am a Windows developer who has just seen the light, and I just forked over $12 for a mail-order CD set of Mandrake 6.0. I hope upgrading's not too big of a deal - but probably couldn't be harder than making room for it in the first place. I was pretty convinced of Mandrake's superiority when I first started looking around, though.
  • I understand where you're coming from, and I still have a machine that's gone from early Slackware to Kernel 2.0.36 and Gnome purely by hand (no packages etc.)
    However, yesterday morning I upgraded from RH5.2 to RH6.0, the second such upgrade I've done on this PII, and it went much more smoothly than the equivalent changes by hand
    Sure, an experienced user like me has 20--30 minutes of tweaks to apply after the install finishes, but RH makes it easy to see what they've changed (.rpmsave files) and what they didn't risk changing (.rpmnew files)
    The user-side configuration, thanks to the beauty of Unix, is untouched and remains ready to go.


    Almost all the changes RH made would have improved the system for a newbie, and wouldn't have needed tweaking if I didn't fiddle.
    e.g. They added procmail rules to sendmail.cf, thus voiding my old .forward-based approach.
    The new settings seemed tighter, and the install process itself was flawless (500+ packages updated in 1 hour over FTP, much quicker than by hand)


    Even for Linux power users, RH/Debian/Mandrake/ whatever are *much* easier to keep up-to-date than any other OS I've seen.

  • I don't see why not. I upgraded from RH 6.0 to Mandrake 6.0 without a hitch. Everything worked the way it should have. I expect that the same is true for RH 6.0 to Mandrake 6.1.

    Overall I've been extremely happy with Mandrake and can't wait to get my hands on the new distribution.
  • Well, being a Slackware, then SuSE person, I've never been at all impressed with RedHat and related distros.... but I downloaded and installed Mandrake 6.1's ISO about 2 weeks ago (downloaded the whole distribution a week ago) and I like it. Maybe it IS like Redhat, but it's quite fast and doesn't remind me too much of Redhat (Good Thing). And for the record, I prefer Gnome/E or WM, not K.

    My big question is... if Mandrake 6.1 is only just now finally out, what the heck is that I've had installed for a while that SAYS it's Mandrake 6.1???????

    Did I miss something here? I don't remember where I got my files, but I think I was smokin' the DSL wires from Georgia Tech's site downloading the full 6.1 release at LEAST a week ago.
  • What vidcard are you using? I just installed SuSE 6.2, using my Banshee. At 24 bit color, the little netscape navigation icons, as well as the little icons netscape shows when a picture didn't come in, were just black and white. Not even grayscale. I hopped the bit depth down to 16 and I'm happy there. I can't see the diff anyway, usually. I just attributed it to the fact that although SuSE 6.1 comes with the banshee driver, 6.2 did not (!). Maybe it's a banshee thing?
  • Downloaded iso-image, burned cd with cdrecord, installed as workstation to new HDD using boot from CDROM.

    Yes I got nicely configured newest programs better than I can configure for sure, but it is rough edged. Some icon images used as button below the pull down menu seems to be scrumbled. May be due to my X to be 16 bit color, which I do not know.

    I will boot this again a month later and run MandrakeUpdate (BTW, this is not installed in the original installation process even though icon sits on the desk top.). Then it should be better.

    To me, Mandrake distribution offers a nice hobby PC workstation with nice desktop to play with .

    Good job Mandrake!!!
  • I got started with slack 3.0 about a year ago.. learned to use linux through manpages, irc, and 'learning experiences' (read - breaking things)

    Since then, ive used a 1.something of openlinux, slack 3.5, 3.6, 4.0, enoch .6, redhat 5.2, and mandrake 5.3 through 6.0 I originally decided to go with mandrake, since i was planning to get kde for RH anyways. ive found that mandrake typically is much less buggy than redhat, and theyve done better jobs with setting up the desktop and several other small conveniences. I personally dont think that mandrake is simply copying off of redhat, because most of the stuff in the development version of mandrake is compiled from sources, usually on the same day the updates are released. Theyre keeping up a remarkable pace of development on their distro, and i applaud that. Also, they are working on a few projects of their own, such as panoramix - a graphical installation tool, and diskdrake - a free clone of partition magic (something like that anyways.. its still in the eat-harddrives stage)

    At present, im running mandrake on two of my desktop boxes (router is running slack). The development version of mandrake, aka cooker, has new and upgraded packages practically every day, which lets you stay relatively bleeding-edge with a minimum hassle. i like mandrake-gnu-linux.

  • you got 6.1b - the prerelease
  • I had the same problem. I was told that it is a Netscape/24 bit color bug. It went away when I switched to 16 bit color. I don't know if there is a better solution or not.
  • I am using a Banshee as well, and as I said, I have the problem too.
  • They already had kde 1.1.2 packed as a lovely RPM at Rpmfind.net [rpmfind.net] quite a few days before I could read the announcement of the Tarball release on /.

    For Red-Hat : if they're suicidal enough to depart from Mandrake, they'll regret it sooner or later. The guys at Mandrake really do a hell of a job. Red Hat may decide to benefit from it (Open Source mind : Good Thing) or they just may close up and lock themselves into some ivory tower (MS mind ; Bad Thing).

    Tell me : what would be the gain of consciously cutting compatibility with all the nifty things the Mandrakers are doing right now ?

    Thomas Miconi
    Karma Police - Please be calm, be quiet, be at ease, please don't try to escape...
  • I am using Cheapbytes Mandrake 6.0 and have preordered the Mandrake 6.1 power pak from Linuxmall.

    Any idea when Mandrake will ship the shrinkwrapped boxes??

  • ftp://128.253.254.56/mandrake/mandra ke61-1.iso [128.253.254.56]

    SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers

  • I agree with this. I've upgraded from Red Hat to Mandrake a couple of weeks ago, and my system seems much quicker (undoubtably due to the fact that Mandrake compiles their binaries for Pentium class machines, where Red Hat compiles them for 386).

    As far as Red Hat being more of a marketing company, this may be true, but it serves a valuable purpose among the distributions. I believe that Red Hat will continue to focus more and more on appealing to larger companies moreso than any of the other distros, leaving the others to focus on providing more bang for the buck to individual users. Not that this is a bad thing. Each of the distros has a place depending on what is important to you. I just feel that larger companies will want to use what they view as being the most visible and widely supported of the distributions.

    Aaron

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