I keep reading review after review after review of the current crop of linux distributions. And everytime I'm annoyed at the end. I'm not annoyed by the style, or the comments, but more at the way they always end far too soon? One of the latest reviews of Lycoris is a prime example. What is this a review of? It's a review of the installation, and a quick insight into some of the packages found. To compare, it's like reviewing the opening cinematic sequence of game. You need to review the way the game plays as well! And people need to start reviewing how the distributions function over a period of time greater than a day or two. So here's my Mandrake 8.x experience.
Getting up and running
First, my machine; a GeForce2, Celeron 700, SoundBlaster 64, a nice 19" monitor, hardware modem, nothing fancy, everything linux-compatible. Then there's me. I'm nobody special (yet!) in the world of computing, just somebody who finally had enough of Windows and enough interest in Linux to make the switch on his own.
I downloaded Mandrake 8.1 in eager anticipation. I had gotten rid of my horrible Microsoft infestation once and for all, and Mandrake was being hailed (by all these reviews) as one of the leading distributions in terms of ease of use.
So, I threw in my 8.1 CD, and the installation went well, quickly and smoothly. There were some bugs, a few of the back buttons just didn't work right, but nothing that stopped me. It certainly wasn't an installation that was for computer illiterates, with a number of slightly technical questions. But other than that it was fine.
On a side note, I installed Lilo first time around, then reinstalled Mandrake and selecting GRUB. (Because I wanted to!) This was fine, but when I tried to install a 3rd time, it wouldn't let me install GRUB, throwing up a spurious error about a problem with my master boot sector. But Lilo was fine. Weird, but unimportant.
Anyway, enough of the installation. You can read about that in, well, every review I've ever read about a linux distribution. And you can read how 'yes you can import .docs' in all those two, I'm not going to touch on this since I had no .docs to import urgently anyway.
Loading up Lilo, the options are, well, plain wrong. It recognised my NTFS drive as a bootable windows partition even thought all I did was back up files onto it ie no Windows there. (I tried to boot it out of morbid curiousity and the error message was just boring.) Lilo had options like "Mandrake non-FB" which, well, mean nothing to me. KISS; names should be explicit. Obviously acronyms like FB are explicit if you know what they mean. But I, along with 99.95% of the worlds population, do not.
So I just go with the flow and it booted up fine, I logged in via KDM as the normal user account I'd set up. And the first time user dialogues sprung up. I set up my modem, my freeserve account, happy as pie was I. I fancied Gnome as my desktop. I didn't set up any email, since I'm currently just on hotmail at the moment for my out-of-work time email. (Besides, does your Joe Average understand POP3? Probably not.) And my nice Mandrake desktop was displayed. Okay, that's pretty good, I was getting excited about my brand spanking new linux distribution.
It took a while to boot, but that didn't bother me. Windows was hardly lightening quick, but as long as it's less than a minute I couldn't really care too much. Besides, I don't think Joe Average cares too much. He, like I, just hits the power button then saunters off to make a cup of tea or do something a little less mentionable.
The Internet
First things first, the modem. After a bit of messing around in the menus, I found out where I wanted to go. [ Networking -> Remote Access ] is hardly the most intuitive place to stick your modem dialers, even though it does makes sense once you find it. But explain that to Joe Average, my mum would never have found that. Anyway, I was in Gnome and I wanted to see the status of my connection, so I tried the Gnome applet dialler. But there was no account there like I'd just set up seconds ago? So I set up my freeserve account again. And I ran it, and the applet was broken; text was not being cleared but covered instead, so the applet quickly became a mess. (Why include broken software like that?)
Scrap that, I tried KPPP. I had to set up my freeserve connection again. This worked, but there was no display, and I wanted one that badly that I quit out of Gnome and logged into KDE. But I'd forgotten to disconnect, KPPP was hidden, it wouldn't let me load a second instance of it, and I didn't know how I could get hold of the current KPPP GUI. Fortunately, I'm not totally ignorant so I popped up a console and killed the offending process. (But Joe Average would probably have had to reboot.)
So, KPPP was now running with a display. Brilliant. First things first, let's try browsing. Galeon had gotten rave reviews so I loaded it up, 1.0.3. It was good, I was happy. Instant messaging; my research indicated I should try Gaim first. It was relatively intuitive, and I was quickly chatting away and, zip, it died after a few lines of text in a conversation. And repeatedly. So, scrap that. I tried Licq for my ICQ needs. It was ugly, and it didn't allow me to download my ICQ contact list as ICQ has for, say, the past year. So I tried everybuddy 0.2.7 which I had to download, but had MSN for me too. It worked, but was very basic. But not as ugly as Licq. But it crashed too. So I moved on to Gabber, which was stable although not very friendly. But it had to do.
By this time it's worth mentioning that Galeon had crashed on me 3 or 4 times in the hour I'd been trying these various IM clients. So I quit Galeon and went into Mozilla. I forget which version but, although slower, was somewhat more stable.
XChat worked well for irc, and was suprisingly user friendly.
- "Getting up and running, The Internet"
- "Going Downhill, 8.2, 0.1 better than 8.1, Easy Installation"
