I've been yearning to play with a new desktop distro so I went out and ordered the latest and greatest of Mandrake Linux 10.1 for the AMD64 (screenshots). Here is my review.
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a few notes
google for captive-ntfs. this will basically run the windows ntfs driver through wine, gives you read/write mounting of ntfs partitions.
libdvdcss is illegal in some countries, which is why it tends to not be included in any distro.
consider yourself lucky to get ati acceleration going, it tends to be around a 30 step process under linux ;-)
google for urpmi repositories. i have no clue how to do it or where they are, but rpm by itself is completely unusable. rpm is one of the reasons i dont use mandrake.
give cedega (formerly known as winex) a look. if you are just using windows for games, this may be a way to save ALOT of space. cedega is to games what crossover office is to ms office.
and last but not least, before you pay for a mandrake subscription try out a few other distros first. plenty of people love mandy, and thats perfectly fine, but plenty dont either, and just go to it because of its reputation for being easy.
If you think RH 7 had an unsophisticated installation you should have seen it pre RH6. Admittedly the first RH distro I installed was 4.2 (i think). Better yet, try installing a BSD distro - you probably wouldn't make it past the partitioning. I'm not trying to give you a hard time, just trying to make you realize many things in life are relative - like the ease of *any* OS installation. USERS are STILL LOSERS
I only wish i had those hardware specs. :-)
Installing libdvdcss under Mandrake could not be easier. Go to the following link and add contrib and plf as repositories. Then, you can go into Mandrake's Control center and install it easily.
http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/
urpmi makes life very very easy. Finally, you do not have to subscribe to anything to be able to get security updates. On the other hand, if you want to support MDK and want to have any future versions that come out during your subscription period. Then, subscribing is indeed a good idea.
Take care and enjoy the ride.
V.g. "Download the Community Edition first before diving in or use their Live CD"
Why Community Edition? Official Edition is available in a lot of ftps for everybody.
Even you dont have to toast CDs because you can make a full NET install.
Just find a good ftp repository and enjoy it!
how the heck did you get 3d working? ATI has not released 64 bit drivers yet.
What do you suppose a "duel boot" system is? Two OSs shooting it out for control of your PC?
Well, with those specs and the games he tried, he wouldn't even notice that the machine is running Mesa and not fglrx (which doesn't work on 64bit yet).
The comment about libdvdcss is bull - of course random packages off the web will not work because they are compiled for the 32bit version. Installing it into the "64bit" directory wouldn't help neither - you cannot mix & match ABIs as you wish. Either both app and library are 32bit or both 64bit, otherwise it will crash.
This was also funny: "I went into the network section and disabled ACPI ..." Eh ? Since when are the boot parameters in the network section of Mandrake Control Center ? Perhaps you meant the boot section?
Finally, please, learn to spell. You obviously used a spellchecker to fix the typos, however things like "duel" vs. "dual", "edition" vs "addition", "Inside the box was two books." ...
I'm sorry about some errors concerning the review. ACPI was in the boot-loader and I disabled it. 3D isn't working, but some games did work under the default ATI driver. Tux racer did work, which was strange but doesn't look as it should due to drivers that are not available yet. As for libdvdcss I did get it working, but I found it going to the Xine site, there is Suse x86 64 versions. I installed the RPM that were needed there and the DVD playback did work after that. Since Suse has a 64-bit driver thats the reason why it worked. Finally Im sorry about the grammar and misspells, if it would make you feel any better you can come over and beat me with a wooden spoon until my cries for help are silenced. On the lighter side of things thanks for the link and tips, this was my first review and appreciate the support.
ATI hasn't released drivers, but there are open source drivers for ATI that support 3d operation. So 3d works fine without proprietary drivers on ATIs, unlike nVidias, which have no open source 3d support, but far better proprietary 3d support than ATIs.
grammar: the open source 3D support only works on fairly out-of-date cards. I think the system was just fast enough that it was able to run Tux smoothly with software GL, which will be used so long as Mesa is installed. If you want to check it out, Scott, try Quake 3 or something.
As others noted, PLF is the way to go for DVD playing on Mandrake.
PLF has a x86_64 branch for ML 10.1:
see http://plf.zarb.org/
For example:
http://mandrake.lcpe.uni-sofia.bg/plf/10.1/x86_64/lib64dvdcss2-1.2....
PLf maintains third party packages that cannot be distributed in ML for legal reasons. You just need to add it as a media, like main, contrib, club and so on... See my guide http://www.zebulon.org.uk/ICML0.HTML , I wrote a part about DVD by the way.
The partitioning is the only really hard part of it, because it is so somewhat different from other OSs on x86. But it has automatic partitioning, and if you manage to unremember other OSs' terminology for partitioning, BSD's way isn't any more complicated.
Other than that, yeah, sysinstall isn't graphical, but that doesn't make things harder. It has an intuitive and simple user interface, it just happens that that interface is curses-based. It also doesn't autoconfigure X, that is a hassle. If mandrake automisconfigures your video card, as it often used to do, that is a bigger hassle though.
The partitioning is the only really hard part of it, because it is so somewhat different from other OSs on x86. But it has automatic partitioning, and if you manage to unremember other OSs' terminology for partitioning, BSD's way isn't any more complicated.
Other than that, yeah, sysinstall isn't graphical, but that doesn't make things harder. It has an intuitive and simple user interface, it just happens that that interface is curses-based. It also doesn't autoconfigure X, that is a hassle. If mandrake automisconfigures your video card, as it often used to do, that is a bigger hassle though.
FreeBSD isn't difficult at all.You only have to make a solid foundation with a up2date ports-tree.
There are two scenarios with 3/4 sub-groups:
-------------------------------------
Update of packages with "portupgrade"
-------------------------------------
(1) With cvsup -L 2 -g /etc/cvsup.ports you keep your ports-tree in sync.
(2) Now you have to update the dependency database with
"portsdb -uU"
(3) The command "portversion -l" shows all ports that can be upgraded
(4) Last but not least with "portupgrade -arR" you upgrade *all* ports and with "portupgrade -rR" you upgrade single ports.
---------------------------------
New instalation of programs
---------------------------------
(1) see (1) above
(2) see (2) above
(3) Have a look at the Makefile at "/usr/ports/serie/program" to notice the options you can enter in "/usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf"
(4) Last but not least "portupgrade -NRr" "serie/program" installs the wanted app
Most of the times everything should run as expected.However it's perhaps usefull to take notice you can repair the database with "pkgdb -F"
NOTE: Your cvsup.ports could (should) look like this:
#############################################
*default host=cvsup5.de.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/usr
*default prefix=/usr
*default release=cvs tag=.
*default delete use-rel-suffix
*default compress
ports-all
##############################################
If you read all the instructions. It does ask some fairly confusing questions that could be better explained for beginners. But really, freebsd has a lot going for it in ease of use and documentation. The handbook is amazing. Amazing amazing amazing. I really wish most linux distros would supply a similar handbook.
I can tell you, if I ran one, and had someone else to assign it to, mine would!
according to this.
http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=652