OSNews

I been running 9.2 RC2 since it was released and I got to say it is quite stable. I have been a Mandrake user since 6.0 and I have to say IMHO version 8 through 9.1 had some strange issues ranging from nfs lock to autofs trying to mount remote volumes that are non-existance. Sometimes application crashes for no apparent reason or something missing/broken.

However, 9.2 seems to be more stable than the rest at least with my RC2. Having tested beta through rc2, I have to say a lot of work has been put into stability. Nevertheless, I have to say there are still quite a few rough edges on RC2 but I am sure this would have been fixed in release version. There has been a few new things in MCC particularly with printer installation and management.

There's a few things I don't like though, since 9.1 the installation asked user to add new user before setting up networking. This can be a problem if you are only installing a individual workstation and get your userlist from LDAP or NIS. One thing I dislike with 9.2 installation is, there's lack of control or chice by the user to steer things or go back to change something midstream.

I don't experience problem with kde as James mentioned because I keep my old home directory mounted from the network. All my old KDE settings remain. One problem that I never really understood is why Mandrake don't install jdk or most of the browser plugin by default.

The locale setting and UTF-8 settings is still a problem. I still can't get chinese language display properly with most of the application except mozilla. Acrobat Reader still can't be installed but I heard there are similar issue with redhat.

9.2-RC2 also runs slightly faster on older machine such as K6-2. At least quite noticeable on one of the K6-2-500 I tested.

Overall, I really think this one is kind of cool in terms of stability. I have even installed the RC-2 on my boss' desktop and he likes it.