OSNews

Before I begin, Everybody likes screenshots ;-)
They are on Mandrake's website http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/9.2/features/


Yes, there is no revolution in this release.

It is a bad thing ? KDE is just 7 years old. In France, it is the "Age de Raison", when your beautiful baby becomes also reasonable. Well, I think it is the same for Mandrake, and Linux.

So no revolution, but now a constant evolution.
For example, most of Mandrake's users have upgraded without burning the ISOs and using the installer.
urpmi makes the redhat rpm format usable, and for the first time, I just upgraded with
urpmi --auto-select, Mandrake's equivalent of the so loved debian feature apt-get updage ; apt-get dist-upgrade


With these commands, you realise the equivalent of an upgrade between Windows ME and Windows XP.

The first time, you are a little reluctant, but !
Yeah ! It works !

In the same spirit, much distros review complain a lot of
"Good, it includes that" versus "Where is MY software ?"
This is a bit pointless : a little visit to http://plf.zarb.og/~nanardon/
and you can install it in a few seconds your software

For example, if you want a graphical front-end for top :
$ urpmi hot-babe



Oh and a last thing. It's interesting to see what you Mandrake can do for you, but you can also ask yourself what you can do for Mandrake. (Thanks, John K. ;-)

I belong to the people who believes that "free as in speech" is more important as "free as in beer". The mandrake's guys trully believes in free sofware ( ALL software in Mandrake are free (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html ). There is no need for the debian vrms package)

So, I'm proud to contribute to the life of FOSS software which are important for me. In this spirit, I gave bucks to the Perl Foundation, and I'm a prout member of the
Mandrake Club ( http://www.mandrakeclub.com/ )
(Anyway, in the FOSS domain, not free as in beer is cheap)


Now, I can try to answer a few questions

@SMEAT
This just goes to show you that you can't please everyone. Eugenia says that linux distros put too many menu entries in by default. This person installs their sytem and says there are not enough menu entries by default.
That's why Mandrake has two menus :
* one "What To Do ?" menu with a few entries named like
"Read my mails", "Browse the internet", ...
* one well-organized by category where you can find all programs with their name (It's just me or it's very better than the crap of the disorder of the windows start menu) and one menu "What To Do ?" for people like Eugenia with a few selected prograls

Just run menudrake and choose what you prefer


@Crawling Mushroom Syndicate
Well, what to say ?
Right Click>>Rename

Unlike Lindows, Mandrake is not a distro for newbies.
To say it better, it is not ONLY for newbies. It is a good
distro if you begin with Linux, but I also used for the servers of my little company. For such a company, the time spared installing Mandrake is very interesting.

It answer one of your points @Shawn, I think ?

@Metic
I agree with your idea about a comparaison of level of security between distros.


@chad
No, rpmdrake is no longer segmented (ie: install/remove)
The guy from Mandrake loved it so, but they recieved many negative feedback. The users decide...


@Mike about the Dual boot
if you want to install as a dual boot system, the installer wipes out the MBR without asking, forcing you to have to restore it.
Is it a problem ? When Mandrake installs Lilo on the MBR, it adds an entry for each OS you have on your computer. In my experience with Debian and Windows[1], it worked well.

But perhaps your dual boot is with another more exotic OS (OpenBeOS, ... ) ? If it's the case, you can fill a very interesting entry on bugzilla.


[1] Now removed