
Mandrake Linux
10.0-preview edition pretty much defines the shape of things to come in Linux land in 2004. With Kernel 2.6, KDE 3.2 beta and XFree86 4.4 beta, it doesn't leave much to be desired. This article refers to cooker snapshot as of December 31, 2003. Please note that this release is not a beta release. This is not even an alpha release. Its just something put together to show what we can expect from Mandrake 10.0. This release comes on only two CDs so some of the packages are missing. And as there are bound to be lot of bugs in this kind of release, I'll be concentrating more on the usability aspect. So let's see if it is worth drooling over.
As a cooker, it's not bad. Few packages wouldn't install from the 2nd cd; it somehow delayed the installation. Despite ignoring those packages (I did default installation), installation completed. There's still a bug that's following Mandrake since version 8.0; if you move mouse during partitioning (or other tasks), mouse freezes, and you have to complete installation with keyboard (or restart installation). Kde 3.2 shows much improvement and simplification. The system with kernel 2.6 shows some responsiveness.