OSNews

Athlon XP 2100+
EPOX 8KHA+
WD 200GB SE 8MB CACHE 7200 RPM IDE

The installer categorical package selection is really tedious to use, especially since they squeezed it into the center of the screen unlike RedHat who lets you hide the 'side panel' so you can devote the full screen to package selection.

The Mandrake 9.2 installer recognized my ATi Radeon 9800 Pro, and installed the fglrx module for it, but upon booting it failed apparently unable to support the 9800. The screen flashed three times and then just sat there at a standard login prompt. Unlike RedHat it did not prompt me to run the XFree86 Configuration program or offer to let me view the XFree86 log to see any relevant messages from XFree. This is supposed to be the 'newbie' distribution? Pffttt.

This lead me to go grab the latest RPM from ATi, which while installing said it would have to rebuild the kernel source for the module but it couldn't find them on my system. (I remember trying to find the kernel source during installation in the package selection but I guess I missed it).

So I figured, "I'll just the much touted urpmi to install the kernel source, surely that will work." WRONG. urpmi kernel, kernel-source, kernel-src, and everthing else I could try turned up nothing. I also discovered to my dismay that urpmi only seems to work for packages that are included with Mandrake 9.2, there wasn't any obvious way to have it fetch things from online, although I'm sure if I read a bunch of urpmi documentation or sites I would eventually find that out.

Finally I went out to an FTP mirror and manually downloaded and installed the kernel-source RPM I managed to find after an hour of searching.

So, I did that and finally I was able to get into X.

During installation I had selected IceWM, Blackbox, WindowMaker and a few other desktops to be installed, just to amuse myself by trying them out.

The first thing I noted upon it bringing up the graphical login screen was the 'face browser' basically a list of non-root users on my system with a picture next to the username. I selected my username and then was prompted again this time to enter my password. Why bother with the face browser and make me go through two dialogs? I would rather begin at a username and password prompt than click through 3 things. (At least with RedHat I could type my username, tab, password, and hit enter and login).

I selected KDE for my session and logged in. What did I find? The same old KDE. Nothing astounding, the default Galaxy theme didn't really jump out at me, but things were fairly polished and I liked the Configuration-> Configure my Computer, Configuration -> Configure my desktop options I found right away.

The first thing I noticed was KDE took a long time to load (a minute or so to fully get rid of the startup dialog). I thought maybe it was just a fluke so I logged back in and out a few times. The same. *shrug*. I don't use KDE anyway...

The next thing I noticed? Cluttered menus, the same thing almost every Linux distribution (including RedHat although less somewhat IMO in RH9 and above (fedora)...). My menus filled with two or three programs that do basically the same thing with their lovely programmer names that mean nothing to me and I wouldn't have known what they did except for the menu categorization or because I've used Linux distributions so long (since 1994). Can't someone please make a distribution the picks the 'cream of the crop' in functionality for each desktop and then name them intelligent things like 'Email Client', 'Web Browser', etc? If they want to use that application's specific icon and it's aeshetically pleasing then go right ahead!

The next thing that stood out is after my initial disappointments, I noticed that every game (including TuxRacer) and others just plain worked, no problems at all. (TuxRacer has no sound at all for some inexplicable reason under RedHat 8/9?)

Afterwards I decided I would try IceWM as a login session, selected it, logged in and it threw me right back to the login prompt. Oooookkkk....

Next.

I decided I would try Gnome out and see how polished it was in comparison to Ximian's Gnome or RedHat's version of Gnome. What an abysmal disappointment, all of the graphical polish and tweaks that I had grown fond of where almost nowhere to be found. The Galaxy theme looked alright here (although not to me in KDE for some reason), but the default fugly gnome foot icon was still in place and the menus were a mess. In edition they didn't bother to have a 'Configure my desktop' link like they did for KDE (which they could have). So I had to dig around for Gnome's Control Center.

I toyed around awhile longer, but finally was disgusted and left.

As far as the much vaunted speediness by having everything be i586/i686 compiled? I didn't see it. Maybe I'm missing something...

Just my 2 pence...