OSNews:

previous versions of mandrake!

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 06:41:00 GMT

I had no deep problems with mandrake linux previously. I had 2 machines with intel cards and Mandrake was first one to detect my sound card correctly! only after that red hat and other like suse(it never detcted it correctly though).

My experiences with mankrake has been very good so far. It is my most fav distro with Redhat/Fedora coming next and suse coming third(for me suse has always been problematic even now on my toshiba laptop i have hard time ) .

Mandrake looks and feels good from the start. Hope this new version bails mandrake out of it's crisis

Mandrake and current state of my Linux machine

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 06:45:00 GMT

Currently my Linux machine is reinstalling Suse 9.0. That about sums up my experience with Mandrake 10. I didn't notice any speed improvements, and the system crashed several times in an hour worth of use. It felt unresponsive and sluggish. On the other hand, Suse runs perfectly on the system. Oh well... I guess my next Linux download will be Suse 9.1 when it comes out!

Mandrake and current state of my Linux machine

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:05:00 GMT

Suse is the one to watch for. the rest of them please keep trying. my 2 cents.

bittorrent

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:23:00 GMT

I think that is a problem with bittorrent.

Unstable

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:25:00 GMT

I tried installing Mandrake 10 yesterday and it was a long, frustrating evening. It crashes when I try to set the regional settings to norwegian at the end of the installation (I get a grey dialog box with no buttons on it and then I'm stuck), it crashes when it tries to start KDE (some unreadable error pops-up)...for me this version seems rushed. Too bad because I enjoyed Mdk 9.1 a lot (but 9.2 was already going down the hill, I didn't even try installing it since I have a LG CD-Rom and I didn't want taking chances)

For me it's also back to Suse 9, and hope they release their new version soon!

Rodrigo

Fonts Configuration Tool (MCC)...

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:27:00 GMT

I found a nasty bug from somewhere RC1 and MDK10CE, where if you press the Import button and in the next dialog you press "Install Fonts" without adding anything, you will get back to the Fonts Tool pane, but most of its controls will be disabled! I reported this bug trought the Help->Report Bug tool.

This action could ocurr so easily that it amazes me that their QA Team did not catch it (they have a QA team, right?)

Fixing the bugs

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:28:00 GMT

It will be interesting to see whether the new development & release process actually translates into fixing bugs on the ground. I reckon we have an even 50/50 chance of the bugs actually being fixed.

RE: bittorrent

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:28:00 GMT

>I think that is a problem with bittorrent.

Of course it is. But the point of any major distribution is to also clean up any such obvious bugs before they include them in their distro and jeopardize their quality factor.

Re:bittorrent

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:32:00 GMT

Shouldn't the author of bittorrent fox this problem?

Re:bittorrent

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:34:00 GMT

and fix it too

Re:bittorrent

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:35:00 GMT

Not necessarily. Whoever has business or personal interest could fix the problem, it is open source. And MandrakeSoft does have the business interest in this case. The fact that Mdk/SuSE/RH/Debian are "distributors" doesn't mean that they are not also "OS people". And that means that whatever bugs they find, they should either be fixed or not include them in their CDs.
Pure "distribution" (as in "this should be fixed upstream") is Slackware or Ark. Most of the other "big" distros are also into bug fixing in order to offer good products.

As always

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:42:00 GMT

The only things I like about Mandrake is that it is i586, and the theme Galaxy, and now Galaxy2.

re:bittorrent

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:49:00 GMT

Isn't this what the "Mandrake Linux Official" is for? Not that I don't think it should have been worked at before, but most people just click on a a bittorrent link to open it up. The real problem is that it seems it wasn't designed to be used like a download manager.

I.E.

Run Bittorrent GUI ---> Get a list of all the partially
downloaded files, and resume them.

Instead, you have to click on each and every link you want to get, and click each and every link again if you have to do it again for some reason.

This is a poor design decision for bitterrent in my humble opinion.

I don't really think it will be fixed by Mandrake unless we all yell at them to "innovate"

re:bittorrent

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 07:55:00 GMT

>This is a poor design decision for bitterrent in my humble opinion.

You don't get it, do you?
It is NOT about WHO's fault it is! It doesn't matter who did what, what matters is that the PRODUCT has to be flawless, no matter who has to sit late at night to fix the issue (if that is the Bittrorent author or a mandrakesoft employee, it is completely and utterly reduntant information for the customer)!

Please stop replying on this issue, we have already talked about this in the past, on other RH and MDK reviews, and in fact some people inside Mdksoft already agree with my view. What matters is the customer, not WHO is going to fix the bug. The bug exists and it has to be fixed. That's all we need to know, nothing more.

My biggest obstacle

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:02:00 GMT

RE: Unstable

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:11:00 GMT

Rodrigo, did you check the integrity of your media?

Suse?

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:12:00 GMT

it crases atleast 3/8 times when it starts X with my NVIDIA card. It does not allow me to set up more than one profile for my wireless card?(Centrino) and so I have to manually edit files in /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0 for ESSID. Suse 9.1 should be better than this. But definately my exp with Mandrake says its more stable for me than SUSE

Upgrade works a treat

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:32:00 GMT

With some concerrn I upgraded my heavily customised mandrake 9.1 machine that runs mail, web, smb and ldap servers plus a heap of dektop tools. To my relief the upgrade went with out a hitch it even managed to keep the layout of my desktop up yet upgrade all the icons and decorations around it. Very cool. BTW I have installed it on 3 machines and 1 of those required me to boot off the second disk while the others where OK?

A reminder to submit bug reports

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:33:00 GMT

If you are having trouble post a bug report so that the Offical version can be rock stable and problem free.

http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/

8/10?

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:46:00 GMT

8/10 for ease of use? That's one more point to reach Jaguar's 9/10. Personally, I would love to see Mandrake to choose a desktop. Perhaps KDE because if Red Hat included KDE in the first place, Mandrake may never have been concieved... Then start integrating Mandrake tools by hook and crook into KDE. That would boost ease of use a wee bit...

Good experience with Mandrake 10

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:48:00 GMT

I have seen that a lot of people have had problems to boot
from the CD. I worked fine for me.
Before I created the CD's I verified with md5sum.
K3b was used when I created the CD's.

I installed Mandrake 10 on my desktop at home (PIII 700 MHz).
Very stable and much faster than Mandrake 9.2.

more bugs

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:59:00 GMT

I just enabled Sound on "Frozen Bubble" and now I get it crashed each and every time.

RE: more bugs

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:02:00 GMT

I guess you get what you pay for.

RE: more bugs

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:10:00 GMT

Two more:

1. The game "Mures" crashes my X.

2. I asked from inside Gnome for a "shutdown" and it got me to the login screen again instead of shutting down. In the login screen, there is NO root user showing up in the mdk-DM user list and also there is no "shutdown" option to be found. How do I turn off my machine?

RE: more bugs

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:17:00 GMT

Is it not on the menu at the bottom of the login screen?

I love Mandrake 10

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:18:00 GMT

I have an Athlon 1.5ghz on a Asus A7V 333 with onboard audio and the only disto's that detects my sound card right out of the box is Mandrake and PCLinuxOS.

With that said, I have had almost no problems with my installation of MDK 10. It's way faster than 9.2, more stable, and looks a whole hellova lot better.

I just wish Texstar was still packaging for Mandrake's distro. He built quality rpm's, but has sinced turned his interest to his own distro, PCLinuxOS.

RE: more bugs

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:19:00 GMT

>Is it not on the menu at the bottom of the login screen?

No. MandrakeSoft uses its own DM, called MdkDM I think. It is not GDM or KDM.

Re: Eugenia

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:28:00 GMT

Oh well u could always goto a console and type "sync; poweroff" )

But seriously agreed this sounds rather bad, especially considering this is a major release. Hope they fix this soon.

Installation

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:44:00 GMT

There's something wrong with this review

> Installation went through fine
> 9.5/10

OK, let's see:

> except that it asked me for a non-existent 4th CD [...]
> During installation and later in the drak time/date tools [...]
> The "Install" drak tool is buggy [...] At the end --by doing installation for only few packages at the time-- I was able to get what I wanted, but that was not a great experience.

Hey, as for me, it's nightmare and exactly the reason I abandoned Mandrake somewhere around verision 8.2. As I can see, nothing has changed. But 9.5/10???

RE: Installation

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 09:47:00 GMT

The installation procedure is not bad. The only real bug there is the time/date thing.
The 4th CD is a design decision from MdkSoft, because the paying members have access to 5 CDs instead of 3. The third thing you quote is the "instal new software" utility, NOT the installation of the OS.
So, yeah, 9.5/10 alright.

my experience

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:42:00 GMT

I've tested mdk10 since beta1 and problems revolved around USB devices and sound.

Sound works now and USB mostly. USB problems stem from how "young" 2.6 kernel still is. 2.6.4 is just out, with a lot of USB fixes. That should remove the last problem for me : my All in one doesn't scan.

Re: Eugenia

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 12:06:00 GMT

I asked from inside Gnome for a "shutdown" and it got me to the login screen again instead of shutting down. In the login screen, there is NO root user showing up in the mdk-DM user list and also there is no "shutdown" option to be found. How do I turn off my machine?

Root user is apperantly setup as a hidden user. You should have a config option for MDK-DM (which is based upon KDM, I think), where you can choose to NOT have root hidden.

They way you worded it above makes it sound like a bug.

...

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:26:00 GMT

My reason for not keeping 10.0 an my laptop (acer tm662) was that every time X started the screen looked like pay-tv without a decoder - until you switched to terminal and back, then everything worked (except knotes, which crashed, but only when called from within kontact...). In RC1 everything had worked fine. Except USB. Erm, except the mouse, which did fine again.
Luckily I had kept my 9.2 partition. Right now I'm giving Debian another chance, this week I got X and kde 3.2.1 running for the first time

NTFS read/write support

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:28:00 GMT

I've read in the press realease that NTFS support has been completely rewriten.

Has anybody tested it? Is it really safe to use NTFS writing now on Mandrake 10.0?

Eugenia

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:41:00 GMT

You claimed slack to be the best distro in town but rated it lower than mdk.
I understand what you meant with "under the hood", but shouldn't slack be rated higher than mdk since it has less bugs ?

ADSL

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:56:00 GMT

RE: mythought

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:56:00 GMT

Bugs aren't everything..Slackware is not user friendly to a new user.

core dumps?

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:57:00 GMT

I really like mandrake, but I always get a bunch of core dumps usually 3 or 4 every few days(which is one of the reasons I switched to slack and am now core dump-free). Is this release more likely to cut down on those or not? If so I may have to switch back.

network cards

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 14:07:00 GMT

I tried it at home last night, and I can't for the life of me get my network card working properly (and therefore have no internet access). I tried it with two different cards and still no joy (and yes, I did check the MD5)

The community edition will get bug fixes and updates.

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:18:00 GMT

The community edition as Mandrake had said in the past will recieve updates and bugs fixes as they come up. This version is a stable version of what is in Cooker and it will recieve any updates and bugs fixes that come out of Cooker. The "Final Version" will come out in about two months and will incorperate most what is in the community edition at the time.

do u guys post all the bugs u complain about?

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:31:00 GMT

Hey,
I hope that you guys do submit bug reports because it doesn't halp mandrake if you guys just complain on msg boards.
--quitedown

I'm still using RC1 but...

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:31:00 GMT

I may attempt the upgrade to CE. I really haven't had many issues with RC1 though. Totem and XMMS don't want to play without crashing and I can't seem to boot into failsafe mode. Other than that, I'm really impressed so far. Hopefully the upgrade process won't wreck my install. I'll be sure to post any negative experiences.

Mandrake Tools

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:32:00 GMT

10CE has worked pretty good for my on my desktop. I did notice the knotes bug when starting from Kontact. 10CE is seriously broken on my Sony Vaio Laptop. USB does not work. I have to use the 2.4 kernel if I want to use my mouse or printer. The Mandrake tools definitely need to be reworked. They are not user friendly. I agree that many of the tools should be combined. My biggest pet peeve is that they split the rpmdrake tools into separate applications. It is a pain to have to start different apps if I want to install, remove, or manage media. They should all be together in one app!

CD Burning experience (or lack of it)

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:41:00 GMT

It would not boot CD 1. However it booted CD 2 which told me to place CD 1 in and than it worked from CD 1 I won't get in too many details, it's not worth it, I'll get into details once I have the OFFICIAL edition.

That's because you burned the CD 1 in a wring way !
(Since it works with CD 2 ! )

Not a Mandrake 10 problem !!!

Re: ADSL

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 16:19:00 GMT

If I were you, I would have gotten a good PPPoE ADSL modem. Personally, it seems faster. A big plus point is those coming with network hubs - brain-dead easy Internet sharing configuration, even on Linux. But regardless, yeah, they should include drivers for at least the more common USB modems - after all, there are drivers out there (though not really sure of their availability for 2.6.x)

Re: rodrigo

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 16:30:00 GMT

It crashes when I try to set the regional settings to norwegian at the end of the installation (I get a grey dialog box with no buttons on it and then I'm stuck)

This one has been fixed in the installer CVS ... will work in the "Official" release. AFAIK, it was only reported after "Community" was released ...

Re: Anmoi

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 16:33:00 GMT

it crases atleast 3/8 times when it starts X with my NVIDIA card.

Which drivers are you using? There are known issues with the currently available versions from NVIDIA. Search in Mandrake bugzilla (and if you got the drivers from NVIDIA ... complain about them ...).

It does not allow me to set up more than one profile for my wireless card?(Centrino)

It should allow you to set profiles in Mandrake Control Center, which apply to more than just networking ... is this what you tried, or not?

/rant on

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 16:34:00 GMT

I fet so tired of people's attitudes regarding "this little nit-picky thing doesn't work" or "This tool is ugly" (COMPLETELY subjective. Personally, I think the entire Gnome UI is a dog, but I don't let that color my viewpoint. Now, on to Mandrake... 9.1 installed flawlessly on both my machines (P3 933 w/Intel 760 video, P4 2K w/ATI). 9.2 broke my Linksys 802.11 PCI adapter and my Sound blaster Audio, so back to 9.1. 10.0 COMMUNITY (meaning NOT the finished product, kiddies) upgraded everything without a hitch, save the non-bootable CD1 problem. BFD. As opposed to Debian, which never could configure X on either of my systems, SuSE, who doesn't even offer a complete downloadable version, RHL, whihc has never found a sound card I've had installed, and on and on. BTW, if you want to whine about installing Mandrake... has ANYONE here tried installing Win XP recently? At least the various Linux distros attempt to stay updated. M$ is still distributing the original CDs they did when XP was first introduced. I haven't seen a Linux distro yet that was as much of a pain in the ass to install as doing all the rebooting, upgrading, and praying XP currently requires to get a somewhat stable product... and that's one without a BIT of usable software.

So sit down, shut up, and self-medicate. And be happy we have these resources available in the first place. It could be a LOT worse.

/rant off

Mandrake 10 is rock solid

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 16:35:00 GMT

I have deployed Mandrake from last Saturday and I have not one issue . Everything run just great.

Great Job Mandrake Team.

knotes crash fixed

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 16:37:00 GMT

10CE has worked pretty good for my on my desktop. I did notice the knotes bug when starting from Kontact.

Packages fixing this just got uploaded. You probably want to test them ...

RE: Network cards

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 16:40:00 GMT

"I tried it at home last night, and I can't for the life of me get my network card working properly (and therefore have no internet access). I tried it with two different cards and still no joy (and yes, I did check the MD5)"

Make sure you turn off the "Network Hotplugging" for the NIC that you are trying to get working. I have tried it on 6 different makes/models of cards, and with Network Hotplugging turned on they do not work. Turn that off for the card and the network should come up and work. This is a known issue and has been reported to Mandrake numerous times.

proprietary drivers

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 16:42:00 GMT

Frankly, I've got to the point where I'll only install distros which include drivers for my ADSL modem (a common USB type). Linux distros who go on about not supporting or issuing non-free software aren't getting the important point that an incomplete product is an incomplete product regardless of their precious principles.

People just want their stuff to work.

And, you may notice that now the proprietary drivers for some popular USB ADSL modems don't work with the 2.6 kernel, but the open-source driver (now included in Mandrake 10.0) *does*.

People who just want their stuff to work should support the work of people developing open-source drivers for their hardware ...

Of course, most distros will give your the proprietary drivers if you buy the commercial version ...

And, some people believe principles are important. If you don't, why do you even bother running Linux?

the 4th CD

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 17:01:00 GMT

the 4th CD is part of the Mandrake Club download version. It is nothing more than the files you'd find in the contrib folder on the mirrors stuck on a CD.

(my apologies if someone else covered this)

PPC version?

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 17:31:00 GMT

Any news on a PPC version? The latest version of Mandrake for PPC is 9.1. I hope they release 10 on PPC too.

@A. Nonymous

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 17:32:00 GMT

Umm... Actually Microsoft has been selling updates SP1 versions of Windows XP for some time. Used them... They do exist!

BTW: The only two systems that I have ran that are perfectly stable (for me) are Windows XP and SUSE 9.0. Of course everyone has their own configuration and experiences. (I am currently typing this on my freshly installed SUSE 9.0 box... Yes I tried Mandrake 10.0 and yes that's the reason my installation of SUSE is freshly installed.)

Mandrake 10.0 community installer has lots of deadly bugs

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 17:34:00 GMT

It crashes and reboots during network configuration. Lots of bugs have already been reported. I am surprised that Eugenia did not encounter that.

Frozen Bubble

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 17:38:00 GMT

Actually Eugenia did mention a few bugs in posts... For instance that Frozen bubble had problems when she turned on the sound. I'm sorry, but Frozen Bubble is my favorite Linux game. If it freezes... Well... That definately settles it. Down with Mandrake 10.0

RE:more bugs

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 17:40:00 GMT

Eugenia, this is a known bug in frozen bubble across all distros. You can read about it here:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=42137

The suggested fix is to run frozen-bubble like so:

artsdsp frozen-bubble

RE:Frozen Bubble

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 17:48:00 GMT

"If it freezes... Well... That definately settles it. Down with Mandrake 10.0"

God forbid we spend 2 seconds searching google to see if it is a known issue that can be corrected with a 2 second fix.

regarding bugs in mdk

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 17:51:00 GMT

The best way to compare is to see in same time two brothers growing...
I just had a new HD and it was the perfect time to try this new OS
After a buggy test of mdk 10 (does anyone could use xmms without a core dump ?? among others)
I just tried the development Core of Fedora2 :
ftp://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/fedora-core/development/i386
And even I do not like the new philosophy from RH I must say no comparaison can be done: faster, better worked around etc..(except the Gnome 2.6 still in early stage) it looks already in a better shape than the 10.0 from Mdk.
Comparaison can be done...? Wait and see
I return for now to Debian

RE: Frozen Bubble

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 18:03:00 GMT

"God forbid we spend 2 seconds searching google to see if it is a known issue that can be corrected with a 2 second fix."

Umm... It was sarcasm....

Now back to Mandrake 10. Have you read the comments from other posts. People are having problem after problem with it. That's completely unacceptable. Those 2 second fixes add up.

bugs

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 18:41:00 GMT

In the past I've always given Mandrake a try, but I would eventually remove
it because there were just too many bugs. A bug such as not being able to set
a GTK them is tolerable for an experienced guru, but the average Joe would
become quickly irritated. Bugs in the system configuration utility are not
as acceptable, especially if the tool locks up on you or core dumps.

Now, I know that things cannot always be perfect, but I would like to make one
major point: the major bugs ought to be fixed in subsequent package upgrades. This is
the question that all major Linux distributions should address and none of them do, at
least not to my satisfaction. A major bug should be defined to be a flaw in software or in
the system setup, which causes usability problems or system instability, that are directly controlled by the distribution. So, if
the Mandrake Control Center is locking up on package installation, it ought to be
repaired.

I hope somebody will begin to realize this.

Buggy sh*t

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:09:00 GMT

Mandrake 6.x were the best Linux desktop distro out a couple of years ago. When they introduced version 7-8-9 and so on it's just a bunch of buggy sh*t! Avoid Mandrake and install SuSE, you wont regret it!

RE RE:: Network cards

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:24:00 GMT

Drill Sgt is correct turn off network hotplugging and you should be fine.

@buggy

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:28:00 GMT

I tend to agree, I wish there was only like 3 distros and
Mandrake just doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from
others.

Re: Buggy sh*t

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:37:00 GMT

Buggy how and for whom ? I have had it running via cooker for a while and I only encounter maybe 3-4 bugs which were quickly fixed. To say that Mandrake is buggy but too not mention some of the bugs in SuSE ( yes SuSE has some bugs in it ! ) or any other Linux distro or OS ( Windows, OS-X ) and to say it sucks becuase a few people are having problems is stupid. It does not suck for me or others who have had it working fine.

Replies

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:48:00 GMT

> Root user is apperantly setup as a hidden user. You should have a config option for MDK-DM (which is based upon KDM, I think), where you can choose to NOT have root hidden. They way you worded it above makes it sound like a bug

It IS a bug. It is a usability nightmare the way it is setup now. The default is to not expose the root user and that is fine with me. However, when you DON'T get the "shutdown" button on the login screen, there is a real life problem! There should have being a "shutdown" button then and if necessary to ask for the root password if someone wanted to click it.

> Frankly, I've got to the point where I'll only install distros which include drivers for my ADSL modem (a common USB type). Linux distros who go on about not supporting or issuing non-free software aren't getting the important point that an incomplete product is an incomplete product regardless of their precious principles. People just want their stuff to work.

Very well said.

> God forbid we spend 2 seconds searching google to see if it is a known issue that can be corrected with a 2 second fix.

You are _completely_ losing the point. If this is already is "known issue", then MandrakeSoft takes a BIGGER BLAIM for including a buggy application in their product. They should either fix it (Frozen Bubble has no problem on my Slackware btw), or not include it. That's how it goes. The fact that is a "known issue" makes things even worse. If I didn't want big distributors to fix bugs, I would create and use my own distro, but I use these big distributor's distros because I WANT to use software that works.

> Drill Sgt is correct turn off network hotplugging and you should be fine.

You should not be having to do this (and from what I read, this was reported many times to MdkSoft). Why Slackware doesn't have such problems with its hotplug??

> I have had it running via cooker for a while and I only encounter maybe 3-4 bugs which were quickly fixed.

You must be a very lucky man.

problems!

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 20:25:00 GMT

first, my centrino support! after getting ndis wrapper, it does not work! dont knw why!

second , tried driver from linuxant but it does not work coz of dependency on wireless-tools(and it has dependency probs too!)

third, key board on laptop seemed sluggish! had hard time with keys on it. also it took long time to log me in on even command prompt log in! dont knw why!

boots only after 9 seconds even after pressing enter!!!

goodies: kde 3.2 i guess really quick and fast.

on the whole i would say that I am a bit disappointed with Mandrake 10 after tryingit. I was so curious to install it but it just went away after installing it. ! I am installing Suse 9 back now on my laptop again!! a lot to be done i guess

@buggy

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 20:28:00 GMT

"Mandrake just doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from others."

Says you. How about if we keep Mandrake and get rid of Fedora seeing as how Matthew Szulik told us to use Windows anyway.

Power Pack

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 20:29:00 GMT

But seriously, did anybody notice a difference between the Power Pack and regular editions?

Re: incomplete product

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 20:48:00 GMT

> Frankly, I've got to the point where I'll only install distros which include drivers for my ADSL modem (a common USB type). Linux distros who go on about not supporting or issuing non-free software aren't getting the important point that an incomplete product is an incomplete product regardless of their precious principles. People just want their stuff to work.

Usually, distros that go on about not supporting or issuing non-free software aren't "products". Linux is not a product. Debian is not a product... etc. So there's no "incomplete product" in such cases.

Victor.

ISOs Too Big?

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 20:53:00 GMT

I bittorrented the ISOs but they are 711mb, and Nero won't burn them on a 700mb blank cd. What gives?

RE: ISOs Too Big?

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 20:58:00 GMT

Use Cheetah burner for Windows. Worked fine here.

@ ranger

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 20:59:00 GMT

And, some people believe principles are important. If you don't, why do you even bother running Linux?

While I support the Free(Libre) Open Source Software philosophy, I find it hard to say "Tough Luck!" to someone who wants his nVidia graphics card to use its 3D hardware. I will recommend using the (GASP!) propriatary nVidia drivers.

I don't know about anyone else here, but I use Linux becuase it works well for me! It does what I need done very well and reliably. If, by your comment, you feel that if you don't refuse to have anything to do with propriatary or closed-source software then you should NOT run Linux, then I think you are way off-base.

Upgrade glitch

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:04:00 GMT

I was running Mdk10 Beta 2 for a while, and upgraded to community edition right after it was released to public ftp. So far the experience is not bad. However, the upgrade process failed to get rid of XFree86-4.4.0-rc2 rpms and replace them with 4.3.0 version that's included in CE. I had an awful system lock up when in KDE maybe because of that (I really hate the fact that errors in XFree are able to lock up the whole system, on the contrary, winxp generally can recover by invoking the task manager via "Ctrl-Alt-Del" then killing the offending process). Ctrl-Alt-Bksp didn't work, Alt-SysRq-S/U/B didn't help. Had to press the reset button to get out of it. But overall, MDK10 seems promissing. Its installation tool is among the best, its responsiveness is catching up, its menu/theme unification of KDE/Gnome is awesome, and its uprmi tools is handy(slightly buggy though). I hope once they get out of the financial difficulty, they can have more resources to put on DrakXXX tools, more QA, better UI consistency. Maybe not to be so bleeding edge, 'cause that should be part of the reason why MDK is not rock solid... Anyway, congrats to MDK team. Being a long-time MDK user, I still remember what a good disto MDK6.1 was (it's the first distro under which I can easily use the modem to dialup back in '97 or '98).

New Codename

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:14:00 GMT

Mandrake Linux 10 Community Edition: When Bugs Attack

RE: New Codename

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:27:00 GMT

So, it's time to go to http://qa.mandrakesoft.com and report that bugs. That's the only way they can be fixed in Official Version. I have encountered my "piece" of bugs too, but they will be sent to the MDK qa team. If you (and all of us) do the same, 10 Official will be really stable and bug free.
My two cents.

By Boomtown

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:29:00 GMT

If we got rid of fedora, mandrake, slackware and 200+ distro's and were all expected to run debian, redhat, gentoo or suse, sure id be all for it. I'd gladly move to one of those systems.

but Mandrake seems to only copy everything red hat. First they fork the distro, they get cooker from rawhide, get 'community' from fedora. Why are they around? cause they're french? cause they use the color orange? cause thier sys-config tools are written in perl instead of python?

As far as szulik saying run windows many of us happen to agree with him. If markets windows users and think they can use it without going into command line, understanding root or reading man pages more power do them but what happens when all these windows users switch and say "linux sucks" cause it wasn't ready? Only people who WANT to learn linux either for technical reasons or sheer hatred for microsoft apply themselvs enough to learn linux. gamers and grandma's would think it was 'broken' is that the BUZZ you want going around about your Distro, that is broken and windows is better? me either. We got one shot at this desktop thing once we get the rep for being something it sticks so lets make sure when they 'try it' they stay.

bitterman:

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:46:00 GMT

congratulations, that's the most ridiculous post in this thread, and there's some hefty competition.

one, cooker has always existed and has always been the way Mandrake has been developed. if you can think of a better way of developing an operating system than by having a continuously updated bleeding-edge build of the entire thing, I'm sure Microsoft, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake would ALL love to hear about it, because that's how they ALL do it. It's just the sensible way to develop, no-one's "copying" anyone else.

two, seems you're another person who's completely misunderstood the whole Community / Official thing. It's completely different from the Red Hat / Fedora split. Red Hat Linux and Fedora are now COMPLETELY SEPARATE PRODUCTS. Fedora Core is a community-supported home-oriented Linux distribution. Red Hat Linux is a Red Hat-supported, corporate oriented Linux distribution. They have separate development processes.

Mandrake Linux 10.0 Community is what Mandrake Linux 10.0 final would have been on the old MDK development cycle. Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official will be Community - the old "final" - plus the first month or so of official updates for it. Remember MDK 9.2? There were a lot of bugs which were patched early, and many people - including many right here - suggested that a 9.2.1 should be released which would be 9.2 plus those updates. Eventually that happened (you can get the updated 9.2 ISOs if you're a club member), and MDKsoft decided to incorporate that as a permanent refinement to its development cycle. 10.0 Official is essentially 10.0.1. It's that simple, and completely different from Fedora / Red Hat.

ISOs Too Big? No Way!

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:48:00 GMT

Cheetah CD Burner for windows burned the ISOs when Nero wouldn't! Woo hoo!

Re: By Boomtown

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:53:00 GMT

"but Mandrake seems to only copy everything red hat.First they fork the distro, they get cooker from rawhide, get 'community' from fedora. Why are they around? "

If that's all there was to Mandrake, then all Mandrake users would be Red Hat users. But all a matter of personal preferences. Everybody has different priorities, and somehow Mandrake remains one of the most popular distros. Because Linux is all about choice. We always say it in here, and choice is often based on whims.

"We got one shot at this desktop thing once we get the rep for being something it sticks so lets make sure when they 'try it' they stay."

Actually, at least half the people I know (who own computers), don't even know or barely know how to use Windows, how to install software, how to change their wallpaper, how to burn a CD, how to cut and paste, etc. That's not even mentioning worms and spyware. If one wants to get a computer, one had to learn how to use it. That's all there is to it. It will NEVER be easy enough for some people. If people don't like my favorite distro, they should be able to pick a different one. The more the merrier, I say. Suppose there's only three distros and I happen to think they're all lousy. Then I'm screwed Linux-wise. Then it would be me saying Linux sucks which would be untrue and unfair.

And besides all that, you make it sound like Windows doesn't have bugs, doesn't have security issues, that apps don't crash on it, etc. You're worried about rep? How good is Microsoft's rep these days? People use it because they think have no choice and because it's cheaper than Mac.

adam

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 22:09:00 GMT

So community would have been MDK 10 and Fedora would have been Red Hat 10.... huh? Fedora code will be in RHEL 4 just like 'community' code goes into 'official' right? I don't see the huge difference you speak of. It seems more like a war of words than real deep differences. It seems mandrake just learned from the 'no support' of fedora that ticked everyone off and kept the current model. They are both the front runner for thier stable projects.

no, you're still completely missing the point.

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 22:14:00 GMT

nope, you're still not there. 10.0 Official is a minor update to 10.0 Community. They are the same product. RHEL will be a separate product from Fedora Core which happens to incorporate some of its code.

Boomtown

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 22:25:00 GMT

I spend time with windows users and most come back because of things i've already stated. They do not understand its the hardware vender that is broken, they say its linux thats broken because drivers are not provided. Most of them have old e-machines which almost nothing works for linux in alot of cases and if you listen to them talk to eachother these are the reasons they say linux sucks due to ignorance. people should call crackers, crackers. but they don't they call them hackers its not the correct term to use but cause of its widespread usage that is now the defination. same with procieved problems with linux. Everyone says 'it does not work' so thats what gets adopted as the truth. What red hat (the original topic) ment was they want to get that support by entering the server market where companies are expected to provide support for hardware then that will trickle down into the desktop market. We need hardware venders to see dollar signs before spending dollars to develop drivers. and 'free desktops' do not yet generate the same amount of money servers do. people out there will buy 10,000 workstations and the hardware vender gets to sell 10,000 video cards. How many linux desktops do we sell? 20 half of which get refunded for 'being broken'

I'm probably wrong and need a shot of zealotoxide but i have some other stuff to do.

no, you're still completely missing the point.

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 22:25:00 GMT

http://www.redhat.com/software/rhelorfedora/

Re: ISOs Too Big? No Way!

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 23:16:00 GMT

Nero burns the ISOs without problems.

Mandrake: the biggest disappointment of mandrake (9.2) was the "emergency repair cdrom". It seems to be impossible to repair a destroyed boot sector with it. I don't know No 10.

Impressed

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 23:20:00 GMT

Well, I just installed it, haven't tried it much yet, but I have to say that installation is the best/simplest one I have seen in Linux so far. It beats Suse and Fedora hands down. Let's just hope they get those bugs worked out before the final release... Btw, I'm a slackware user.

Re: Boomtown

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 23:52:00 GMT

I understand your point. Guess it's just going to be up to each individual to decide for themself.

Oddly enough I'm almost one of those people you describe. I'm a cheapskate so I own an Emachine. I have work twice as hard as anybody in here to get Linux to run on my pc because of it, and I'm a newbie. No 3D acceleration, no modem, and because of some silly wire from the cd Player, I have to rip cds, I can't just play them or I get no sound. That's only the things I know about. I asked Emachines if they were going to be supplying Linux drivers like they for Windows, and they basically told me to go pound sand. Or might as well have. VIA is dragging their feet on drivers as is S3. NONE of those people you deal with goes through as much hell as I do, and now I'm getting ready to install Mandrake 10.0. I don't know, I guess Linux is worth all the hassle to me.

And since I said all that...Hey Eugenia

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 00:15:00 GMT

What other bugs did you find? Anything really terrible, nasty, horrible we should be warned about?

RE: And since I said all that...Hey Eugenia

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 00:21:00 GMT

The text was updated. Bugs don't always have to be nasty, just be on your way is enough to drive people to other solutions.

It's Alive

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 00:31:00 GMT

This linux thing isn't so bad after all. Thanks Eugenia for the help, now I too can join the ranks of teh leet haxor. -- This message brought to you by Konqueror!

Running great over here

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 00:37:00 GMT

I didnt have any blank CDs so I had to do an FTP install. Went alright. Everything seems to be working OK, Right now im downloading the kernel-sources so I can install my nvidia drivers.

IMO this release is much faster than previous versions.

Great job MDK team!

Aesthetic

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 00:38:00 GMT

I knew from the Days I was using Mandrake 7.0 that this is Different. The French hav a a good aesthetic Taste as obvious fron their wine fashion and now Mandrake. The Community edition is so polished, And it works for me without problem out of Box in my toshiba tecra 8100. I have an ADMTEK wireless card which is workig like charm. I had horrible experience with Redhat 9 and Fedora Core 2. Ndiswrapper was never so sweet for me until I tried it on Mandrake. Antialaising of the fonts makes them close to Windows Xp in terms of Font Rendering. And best of all kernel 2.6 I never thought I caould do any other job while untarring a 150MB file. But with this Kernel TADA it was literally flying.

Wierd

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:06:00 GMT

OK I just installed my nvidia drivers(5336) and changed my XF86Config-4 file. When I try glxgears in the terminal I get:

Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Error: couldn't get an RGB, Double-buffered visual

Anyone else have this problem?

eMachines

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:12:00 GMT

OK, gang...
I just dug out an eMachines Celeron 366 system from the dustbin as an experiment. 128MB RAM, onboard Rage graphics, onboard sound. Installed Mandrake 10. Now it's the third machine I've installed it on, and the only problem I had was having to change out the CDs in the proper order. This one even recognized that CD1 was the boot CD. Works just fine for me. Is it that my morphic resonance field is above average? Good Karma? Are a lot of people on here smoking the GOOD crack? I'm sorry, I just don't see where the problems are. This is the most trouble-free distro I've encountered. Package manager works fine, frozen bubble works with sound... am I hallucinating, or what?

RE: eMachines

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:13:00 GMT

> I'm sorry, I just don't see where the problems are.

Have you tried actually to USE the machine and its applications and its tools instead of just "installing it"?

RE: Wierd

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:19:00 GMT

LOL nevermind, im an idiot

I didnt save my changes. VI is so confusing

@Eugenia

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:22:00 GMT

been using it all afternoon so far with no problems other than the obvious... it's a celeron 366 with 128 MB so it's dog slow. but everything I've run on it just works.

RE: eMachines

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:24:00 GMT

>been using it all afternoon so far with no problems other than the obvious

What do you mean "no problems other than the obvious"?
Have you tried to reproduce the bugs I mention in the article (which I found just by using and trying the OS and its apps?)

ahh well

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:27:00 GMT

they did say it was the community version lol. The official release will be more stable if people actually report bugs rather than saying screw it and formatting the HD

This is why I was driven to Debian

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:29:00 GMT

I started out on Mandrake but the system crashes and frequent (once or more a week) crashes of desktop software forced me to install debian. I really miss the easiness and look of mandrake but it's got too many crashes! When using debian I can appreciate just how stable a linux system really can be. The only times I ever got a system crash was when my RAM went bust.

Mandrake has everything in place now, they should freeze their distro and just fix bugs for the next year. Sure some of the packages might seem a bit dated in a years time but if people want bleeding edge they should install from cooker.

just my 0.02

@Eugenia

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:30:00 GMT

the obvious that it's dog slow. which I said in my previous post. Other than that, no, I haven't run into ANY of the bugs you have. Kontact is working fine. I don't use Gnome, so I can't comment on the themes problem. It changed the timezone with no problem at the installation. I loaded new soft with the "Install" tool with no problems. And on and on.

I will admit that The Drak tools aren't the best looking, but that's a matter of taste more than anything else.

YMMV.

PS: No, I don't work for Mandrakesoft, and have no proprietary interest. I'm just another luser.

PS:

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:32:00 GMT

dog slow on a Celeron 366, that is.

Ever consider that you may have flaky RAM or some other hardware problem?

for anyone with a the USB problem

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:33:00 GMT

After installing MDK 10 Community my usb scanner and digital camera wouldnt work. I found the fix for anyone that is interested I logged in as root from the command line and checked off the ACPI check box in the Mandrake Control Center under the LILO preferences. Rebooted and voila it worked.

I still have a problem with the find files program under KDE and some sound issues. I am getting scratchy sound from it. Two dvd issues one cant read the dvd disc consistently. Plus a problem with movie playback even after the libcvss is installed.

Hopefully Mandrake will fix these bugs for Mandrake 10 Official. Compared to Mandrake 9.2 official which worked flawlessly for me. This version of Mandrake 10 has been a bit of a challenge. Hopefully they will fix this and all the other bugs if not I will have to go to a Debian system or Slackware or just take the plunge and do a Gentoo install.

RE: PS:

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:35:00 GMT

>Ever consider that you may have flaky RAM or some other hardware problem?

A RAM hardware problem does not create bugs like "I won't change your theme" or "adding the WhatToDo-> menu even if you never asked for it after a menu update".

Please! We are not newbies around here!

Re:Weird

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:38:00 GMT

Typed glxgears and no problems here worked fine.

@Eugenia

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:39:00 GMT

Perhaps not, but you certainly seem to have a serious problem with someone disagreeing with your estimation. And yes, bad hardware CAN cause problems such as "KDE's Kontact will reproducibly crash when clicking on its "notes" button."

RE: PS:

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:44:00 GMT

I can assure you, I have no bad hardware. Linare and Xandros did not exhibit any such problems on that machine. And regarding Mandrake, I have had many such bugs on previous versions of mdk on other hardware as well. Just read my previous reviews for 9.0 and 9.1: lots of bugs. MandrakeSoft has evolved their offer in many levels, but the amount of bugs they got is much more than any other distro. Maybe Fedora is only close to them in # of bugs I find per hour.

No, Slackware doesn't have such bugs in general (some stuff are buggy, but you need to really search hard to find them).

@Josh

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:51:00 GMT

Sorry I'm not Mandrakesoft's SQA department. I just wanted a stable, fast distribution with the 2.6.3 kernel and not have to compile like Gentoo. Like I said before, I'm waiting on SUSE 9.1.

Sticking with Gentoo

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:52:00 GMT

I have a system that I am constantly testing on to see if any of the new distros are worth a damn. And my main system with Gentoo on it. Well, I tried Mandrake and was sorely disappointed with it. I thought the test release of Fedora Core 2 was better than this, even without mp3 support at install. It felt more responsive and had less bugs than Mandrake and it isn't a release version yet! Well, I believe I will be sticking with Gentoo!

Answers to some questions.

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 02:03:00 GMT

"except that it asked me for a non-existent 4th CD [...]"

IRIX 6.5.x (arguably one of the most user-friendly proprietary Unices) does this too with maintainer vs feature release. It is really a non-issue as long as you know what you're doing because the manual states this. I don't know wether the MDK manual states this. But there's no damage at all regarding IRIX and i wouldn't ask to have even more various images beyond the 3, or 4-default.

"My reason for not keeping 10.0 an my laptop (acer tm662) was that every
time X started the screen looked like pay-tv without a decoder - until
you switched to terminal and back, then everything worked (except
knotes, which crashed, but only when called from within kontact...). In
RC1 everything had worked fine. Except USB. Erm, except the mouse, which
did fine again.
Luckily I had kept my 9.2 partition. Right now I'm giving Debian another
chance, this week I got X and kde 3.2.1 running for the first time "

Have you filed a bugreport to the maintainer of the package or to upstream maintainer?

"first, my centrino support! after getting ndis wrapper, it does not work! dont knw why!"

Most likely you need the actual driver from MS Windows. Don't worry too much, Intel has finally released some source as driver for this WiFi card. Info/status at http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net

"I've read in the press realease that NTFS support has been completely rewriten.

Has anybody tested it? Is it really safe to use NTFS writing now on Mandrake 10.0?"

The answer is: Yes and no. I'll explain later.

Since this MDK release has Linux kernel 2.6.x and since Linux kernel 2.6.x (as well as newer 2.4.x versions) has the "new", rewritten NTFS implementation it does support the "new" features.

But wait. While the write support AS-IS _does_ work, is _more_ clean, is _nicer_ wtitten and _is_ safe (in contrast to the old driver), it is not fully functional! You can read exactly which parts of write support is supported at: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#3.2 also see paragraph 7 for more info about this new driver and for solutions to write to ext2/3fs see paragraph 3.2

Want write support for NTFS on Linux? You can use Captive then. It uses the ntfs.sys from your Windows machine. It works, but it is a "quick, dirty hack" and the driver ain't open source. Also, be aware you need a Windows License. Works for NT/2K/XP. See: http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

"Frankly, I've got to the point where I'll only install distros which
include drivers for my ADSL modem (a common USB type). Linux distros who
go on about not supporting or issuing non-free software aren't getting
the important point that an incomplete product is an incomplete product
regardless of their precious principles.

People just want their stuff to work."

(That's why i took the more expensive Ethernet one :-)

Yeah i know someone who had a problem with their USB Modem too. He fixed it with Mandrake 9.x but with quite some work. Which modem do you have? I don't know which howto he used but you might find the USB Modem link here http://www.adsl4linux.nl/links.php helpful.

"While I support the Free(Libre) Open Source Software philosophy, I find
it hard to say "Tough Luck!" to someone who wants his nVidia graphics
card to use its 3D hardware. I will recommend using the (GASP!)
propriatary nVidia drivers.

I don't know about anyone else here, but I use Linux becuase it works
well for me! It does what I need done very well and reliably. If, by
your comment, you feel that if you don't refuse to have anything to do
with propriatary or closed-source software then you should NOT run
Linux, then I think you are way off-base."

If you support the FLOSS philosophy i honestly suggest you do not
recommend people to buy NVidia cards when they'd like to use Linux or
suggest that they'd complain to NVidia for an open-source driver.

In fact, the damn driver is closed-source, except for a small wrapper
which has been ported by a 3rd party (minion.de) to 2.6; on which
NVidia's support is based.

Let's oppose their merits, behaviour, or whatever it should be called. Let's advice people to buy _officially_, openly supported hardware by friendly companies instead :-)

Rockin' and Rollin'

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 02:04:00 GMT

Here's what I did. Y'all tell me if I am going to hell or not. I downloaded Firefox but didn't know where to install it to. Where is c:program files in linux? Anyway I looked around and discovered that mozilla was in /usr/lib so I tried to drop firefox in there. No dice, you have to be root. Fine. I learned how to see a console in my konqueror window, used the su command that I learned from doing a google, and it still wouldn't let me do it. Since I don't know how to copy files or folders in linux, I had to log in as root and do it with the gui. Fine. I told KDE to unhide root, logged in, moved the folder, and went back to my normal login. Viola!

Can somebody tell me what book I need to learn about stuff like this? Things like "where should I install stuff?" and some basic console commands?

Thanks!!!!

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 02:22:00 GMT

Just wanted to chime in and thank Drill Sgt. for the network hotplugging tip...he saved me some time fiddling with settings. Hopefully that will be disabled by default in the final release.

re:john

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 02:33:00 GMT

Hi

tldp.org
linux in a nutshell. please email me if you want more docs

regards
Rahul

tldp.com

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 03:54:00 GMT

Wow. The Linux Documentation Project. I am getting into this! Thanks Rahul.

Why did they bother

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 04:20:00 GMT

With using redhat as a base to begin with, and not continue using it.

Now they have to many problems.

Does it still overwrite the MBR even though you tell it not too.

Yes I know ask this on every MDK release, but on every release the answer has been the same, and that it is not fixed.

Is it fixed this time?

MDK Overwriting MBR

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 04:29:00 GMT

I've had that happen to me before with MDK 9 I think it was. This time I unplugged my Windows HD before installing

The two biggest bugs I've noticed

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 04:36:00 GMT

The two biggest bugs I've notices is that XMMS won't play my MP3s. It didn't work when I did an upgrade installation, and so I did a full install (existing partitions so I didn't lost /home) and it worked fine last night and this morning. But now it won't play, just crashes when I try to play a song. I have uninstalled it an re-installed it and it doesn't help.

The other bug is that Totem will play video but not sound. I just get static for sound. Mplayer works very well though, much better than 9.2 (I don't get errors when opening clips), so I just uninstalled Totem and I'll pretend it doesn't exist.

That XMMS bug needs to be fixed though. My friends will be disappointed if they come over and can't use XMMS, because it's so easy and friendly and so much like winamp...the rest of the sound programs don't come close to its coolness.

Sound

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 05:46:00 GMT

In regards to "The two biggest bugs I've notices is that XMMS won't play my MP3s."

You do know that alsa in part of the 2.6 kernel. Which means it's not OSS. Which means you need to tell xmms to use ALSA instead of using your old config for OSS. Not hard, same for totem and mplayer and the rest of em. Good luck.

RE: Sound

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 05:58:00 GMT

IF what you suggest is indeed the solution to the problem Halifaxion saw, then it is also MandrakeSoft's fault for not configuring these applications correctly by default.

RE: Sound

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 08:27:00 GMT

Indeed. And that's what the Community Edition is for. Identifying bugs and reporting them.

This is a new development model for Mandrake. Make no mistakes about it: Mandrake 10 CE will be full of bugs and other problems. It is meant to be a stepping stone to the stable Mdk 10 release, less of a moving target than Mandrake Cooker (which is constantly evolving and therefore often not quite usable) but more up-to-date than the previous Mandrake release.

The community edition is not really meant for "normal" end users - that is not its purpose. It is there to provide a development freeze so that the QA department can build a rock-solid official release. All the bugs you've indicated are quite valid, however it's kind of pointless to say that it's "Mandrake's fault", as those bugs are expected. As always, the best thing to do is to report the bugs to the Mandrake bug database, in order to make Mandrake 10 Official Release the stable, most bug-free Mandrake distro ever.

RE: Sound

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 08:39:00 GMT

I am sorry then, but I find the whole thing completely pointless then. If this is a technically a beta, it should be identified as such: a beta.
Calling it a "community edition" and then having thousands of people getting _dissapointed_ in it because they expect something that it is _not_ a beta (and ending up with gazillion of bugs that are better attributed to an alpha), has the worst result for the commercial success of the Official version.
Personally, seen ALL these bugs on CE (in my book, this is an alpha, not even a beta), I would never buy the Official version. It is just way too buggy and I as much I use it, I continue to lose trust to mandrakesoft again.

purpose

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 09:11:00 GMT

The purpose of 10.0 Community is to find and report bugs.
10.0 Official will be out in May.
I don't understand why people don't read announcements before installing - and then complain about things they could have known before.

Eugenia

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 09:21:00 GMT

Spot on!

People at MandrakeSoft should learn from Lindows how to market their pruduct.
After browsing through some comments, i have got the impression that MDK 10 is nothing else than a nail to be driven into their coffin.
It's a shame though, but they are not in the same position as MS was with their Win9.x series where people had no other choice but to accept their bug loaded rubbish. MDK's main competitor are other Linux distributor and not MS or Apple. It's about time they face this reality and try to compete against the SUSE, Lindows, or what have you or else die.

Unfortunatly they have not learned from their past mistakes and keep on repeating them release after release.

XMMS

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 09:47:00 GMT

I went into Options/Preferences and switched the output plugin from OSS to ALSA and it WORKS NOW!! Thanks Thoreau!

I really shouldn't have had to struggle with that for a day though; this strikes me as one of those obvious "how did they miss this?" bugs like the Amazing Disappearing K-Menu from 9.2.

Will there be another CE release

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 09:48:00 GMT

after fixing all bugs reported?

RE: Will there be another CE release

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 09:48:00 GMT

No, just the "official release" which is commercial.

sorry all you sad sacks Im happy with it

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 09:57:00 GMT

sorry all you sad sacks Im happy with it, its great I have had no stability problems USB with my Card reader works really well the themes are great its very pretty, havent had a crash or a fall over, the preemtive kernel is excellent with a noticeable increas of responsiveness, stop complaining and learn to write code

One other question

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 10:06:00 GMT

I have one other question that's always nagged me, maybe someone here can shed some light on it. In Mandrake 10, 9.2, 9.1, Lindows, Lycoris, and Red Hat 8 (all the linux distros I've ever tried), whenever you go into an administrative control panel or go to install something, it asks for the root password, and there's a little checkbox that says "keep password" or "remember password" depending on the distro, and it never, ever, ever does anything at all, in any of the distros I have ever tried. Why does this checkbox still exist in KDE if it serves no function and doesn't do what it says it does and never has? Does anyone know?

RE: One other question

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 10:08:00 GMT

Because the people who coded that can't develop something that works across different installations. I have seen it too, it doesn't really work, don't bother checking it. Usability nightmare (like many other on OSS/Linux)...

CE != Official and everybody knew that

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 10:31:00 GMT

That's funny. When they made their announcement about the two-step Community and Official release, most people were happy with that and said it was a good strategy, a good step towards quality. Now people are upset ?

Mandrake is the most popular distro, and thus has potentially more problems because it is installed on many, various, hardware. We knew the CE would have bugs, and by the way, most of these bugs have been already corrected in the updates, available to everyone. BTW, there have been betas and RC before the release of the CE, it is up to people who are interested to try them. And this 10 CE works very well for the majority of people.
So if you don't want to participate to Free software development, just wait ! All versions Community and Official will be finally released to the public. Then you will be able to download a polished product.
Other people who think it is important to squash bugs in a product that is freely available, that respects the free software spirit by making a 100% free software version available to everybody, that develops tools under GPL, that do not restrict redistribution with a proprietary installer, like many other vendors, just report them on http://qa.mandrakesoft.com, or on the mailing-list cooker.

About Bugs

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 11:11:00 GMT

Well, I really don't understand how you are able to find so many bugs. You had the same complain about 9.2, which I am running since 1 year now and I haven't discoverded not one serious bug. I think that the problem is on your side, and not on Mandrakes.
Try to read more carefully the manuals

Mandrake 10.0 broke my hard disk.............

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 11:52:00 GMT

This is the first linux distro ever breaking hardware from my computer. I have always had a dual boot with XP and linux. The very first thing that Mandrake 10.0 did was giving black screen and frozening up computer after selecting windows from boot menu. Since there was no solution to this problem i decided to install RedHat 9.0 back. But the windows xp was gone. Next step was trying to format hard disk and make a clean windows install. Installation program started fine but then, every time after first boot, i got this error message: Error loading operating system.

I have tried everything including making only one partition using linux fdisk, using fixboot and fixmbr commands from Recovery Console, making two partitions and trying to install either on /hda1 or /hda2. Nothing works. All i get is that same nasty error message.

Since any linux distro does still install i can make only one conclusion: Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition has somehow broken the very first sector of hard disk so that the windows installation can no longer write the accurate boot information there.

After all the hype that i have red about Mandrake 10.0 i was going to test it first with Community Edition and then probably pay the Mandrake Club Membership and get the official release later this year. Right now the situation is so bad that i am thinking about making a legal suit against Mandrakesoft for ruining my brand new hard disk. I think one needs only to get couple more similar cases and that will be enough proof against them.

This is too bad since i have always liked linux and i have tried at least 1-3 new distros every year. I am really shocked about the ignorance they show to linux community. How can they release such dangerous bugs for linux users is beyond my understanding.

RE: Mandrake 10.0 broke my hard disk.............

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 13:22:00 GMT

bug 7959

well iam posting this from a windows xp.. thats too bad,, but..

Community Edition

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 13:46:00 GMT

This means their community edition is like Fedora, and Official is like RHEL, except that RHEL is probably much more stable an tested.

I think they are actualy putting an unnecessary strain on their resources to develop like that. I see no logic in it. Mandrake should really go back to the drawing board and come up with a strategy that works.

RE: One other question

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 13:54:00 GMT

The password is usually only saved until the next login. This is not a bug, it's there for security reasons.
If this (kdesu) tool forgets the password there may be wrong file permissions (kdesud, setuid, setgid) which leads kdesu to forget the password cause because of possible security risk. This behaviour is by design and it's a problem of the distribution.
It works great with Suse 9.0, without doubts the best platform for KDE. It works acceptable with Gentoo but not as good as with Suse. That's because of inadequate gentoo configuration scripts. This is simply a distribution problem.
Programmer has no chance to fix this until linux gets organized. Luckily 99 out of 100 gentoo users aren't aware of the problems and are happy.

But maybe you think of another tool than kdesu.

Re : Community Edition

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 13:59:00 GMT

> This means their community edition is like Fedora

No. Alpha and beta testing in Fedora is longer as Official. Fedora Core 2 is schedule for may 10.
http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/

RE: Will there be another CE release

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 13:59:00 GMT

Quote Eugenia:
"No, just the "official release" which is commercial."

And 'commercial' means?

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/pr-releaseprocess.php3

Quote:

"3) Two or three months later, in April/May, "Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official" will be created from the Mandrake 10.0 Stable branch. It will then be packaged for several products such as the Mandrake Linux PowerPack. Mandrake 10.0 Official ISO images will also be available for all contributors and Club Members; then, after a short delay, Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official Download Edition will be made available on public FTP mirrors."

Community is commercial

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 14:13:00 GMT

Quote Eugenia:
"No, just the "official release" which is commercial."

Community is commercial :
http://www.mandrakestore.com/mdkinc/index.php?PAGE=tab_0/menu_0.php...

Price : 59.9 USD

am I lucky??

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 14:27:00 GMT

Well, i don' t see much of what you are talking about, but it seems that all about hardware issues :/
The fact is that i've installed Mandrake 10 on my three pces and everything worked out as sweet as candy So i don't know what to say except that for me it is the best userfriendly distro ever.Of course there are some minor bugs, but i don't believe that there is such a thing as a bug free os

grr

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 14:28:00 GMT

right, we have to many noobs talking here, who have no f***ing clue about anything ... they even cant read!

its better to shut the f*** up instead of talking bulls***!

RE: Community is commercial

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 14:34:00 GMT

its better you improve your english skills and learn to read instead of misinforming everybody!

CE is available for free to the public. the link you are refering to is for people who have a slow internet connection and cant download it ...

thx for your 2 cents!

Mandrake 10

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 16:49:00 GMT

This is the latest in a line of bad distro releases from Mandrake. I have tried all of them in the last three years. None have been very user friendly in opinion. I had tried the 10.0 "cooker" release and found it to be awful, but I tried this release based on the review. Same results. I'm not a cheerleader for any one distro, but the only distros I have ever got to work like they should are the Debian based ones like Mepis, Lindows, etc. It seems to me that Mandrake could take a lesson from Lindows. It installed and ran like it was supposed to right from the start. Yell "newbie" all you want, but if Linux is ever going to become a desktop option for most users, it will have to be a lot easier to install than Mandrake. I know most people want to see Linux replace M$ on the desktop (me included), but this is not the one to do it.

Re:bittorrent

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 17:37:00 GMT

I've packaged bittorrent for Mandrake Linux. Bittorrent IS already fixed more or less. The official version doesn't even open the file open dialog on startup but gives you the help screen (the window without scroll bars) if started without a file name. So it's already better than the official unpatched bittorrent.

If you don't like the bt GUI, why don't you send a mail to the bt devel list or the author?

Re: Mandrake 10

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 17:39:00 GMT

I have to agree with you. To switch over to Linux we need a very user friendly Linux to capture them. Some of my friends that are switching over would still find this Mandrake still not preconfigured enough. To suggest to them a switch I would have to say between Xandros or Lindows. I love my Mandrake since 6.5. However they need to make it really preconfigured for these type of users. Having DVD working right of the box and all the java and other common plugins. Also Xandros and Lindows ask 4 questions or so in total during install. If we are ever going to capture those desktop users we got to make more distros like these two even better than these two to keep them.

On a personal note if Mandrake 10 official does not become as stable for me as 9.2 was. I will have to go over to a mepis, knoppix or libranet to get the stability of debian. Hopefully of this will be mostly fixed by 10 official. If not with a pain in my heart bye bye mandrake.

RE: Community is commercial

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 17:54:00 GMT

> its better you improve your english skills

You are right, i'm not confortable in english. Do you prefer portugues ?

> CE is available for free to the public. the link you are refering to is for people who have a slow internet connection and cant download it ...

http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/10/community :
Immediately as a DVD set which includes commercial applications such as Acrobat® Reader®, Real PlayerTM, NVIDIA® Drivers and more.

You want free software but can't get it with Internet :
http://linuxinstall.org/fedora.php

price : $10

Mandrake 10

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 18:03:00 GMT

Why is it that Mandrake 9.2 detects my modem and sound card but 10 can't? I have never understood that about linux distos. Really, why is it that they can't just have things that work still work. Anyways I'm sure I'm not the only one that notices this. Just which the big companies would too. Microsoft does the same thing.

re: John DeHope

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 19:07:00 GMT

//Can somebody tell me what book I need to learn about stuff like this? Things like "where should I install stuff?" and some basic console commands?//

Look here:

http://www.lindows.com

;-)

RE: Mandrake 10

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 19:29:00 GMT

RE: Sound

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 19:35:00 GMT

I am sorry then, but I find the whole thing completely pointless then. If this is a technically a beta, it should be identified as such: a beta.

That's your opinion, and you're entitled to it, but clearly Mandrake is trying to do something different.

Calling it a "community edition" and then having thousands of people getting _dissapointed_ in it because they expect something that it is _not_ a beta (and ending up with gazillion of bugs that are better attributed to an alpha), has the worst result for the commercial success of the Official version.

I disagree. For starters, none of the bugs I've experienced are bad enough to make me want to switch distros (then again, maybe I've been lucky). Second, anyone who follows Mandrake news already knows that this is a bleeding-edge, not-so-stable distribution, and that the stable distro will be the official release.

The problem is that OSS evolves so quickly that it's hard to only have an "official" distro and another that incorporates all the latest and greatest. It's not a matter of Alpha or Beta - in fact, these terms may be suited for individual pieces of software, but they don't apply as well to distributions. Mandrake's solution is to branch out from cooker a distro that will receive bug-fixing attention, but no new package versions. It tries to "fix" the moving target in place long enough to turn it into a rock-solid distro, without stopping the continuing development of cooker.

I think it's a brillant strategy, and since CE is not meant for commercial sale (i.e. no boxed sets) it's also the smart thing to do from an "enterprise" point of view.

Personally, seen ALL these bugs on CE (in my book, this is an alpha, not even a beta),

As I have said, these terms are well-suited for software development, not building distros. There's nothing "alpha" about my Mandrake 10 distribution - it works very well. But I'm sure that it can be made more stable for other systems. In a way, Mandrake has chosen to get out of the alpha/beta/RC paradigm, and has rather opted for an "experimental/unstable/stable" model. I think this is a very courageous choice.

I would never buy the Official version.

That may be, but as I've read in your other reviews, you are a very harsh critic. You don't exactly represent the typical Mandrake community user, who this distro is targeting. I suggest you wait until Mandrake 10 official (unless you want to contribute bug reports).

It is just way too buggy and I as much I use it, I continue to lose trust to mandrakesoft again.

Well, it seems that the market disagrees with you on this one, as Mandrakesoft is now out of the black and trading on its stock has resumed.

They have made smart business decisions so far, and this in my opinion is another one of them. I think you're being unfair in judging the CE on the same scale as the upcoming Official release, but then again that's just my opinion! :-)

@mythought (IP: ---.mas.optusnet.com.au)

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 19:39:00 GMT

After browsing through some comments, i have got the impression that MDK 10 is nothing else than a nail to be driven into their coffin.

Just a suggestion, but perhaps you should actually try Mandrake 10 instead of drawing conclusions on the comments section of a web site?

It might surprise you, but MandrakeSoft is now doing pretty well, financially. They are out of bankruptcy, are showing a profit and trading has resumed on their stock.

This new distribution paradigm is a brillant move, if a bit unorthodox. I'm certain it will pay off for them.

Not for me :(

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 22:50:00 GMT

I tried Mdk 10 CE today... No network! I jumped through all the hoops, tried everything... zero, nothing. I searched some foruns and newsgroups and it appears I am not the only one. Network connectio (of all things) seems to be very broken on this version: until it gets fixed, it seems I will have to search somewhere else for a 2.6 distro (I have an AMD64, so 2.4 just doesn't cut it...)

RE: Sound

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 23:18:00 GMT

If you read the original post, the problem (if it was indeed the problem) was that the user was using his old /home directory which means it was using all his OLD configs, not fresh new configs. So its not really MDK's fault if he his old configs dont match the new defaults.

Re : Not for me :(

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 23:29:00 GMT

> I have an AMD64, so 2.4 just doesn't cut it...

Try Fedora Core 1 from AMD64 (with Linux 2.4 :-) )
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2004-March/msg0...

For Linux 2.6 you should wait a little :
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2004-February/m...
"- Fedora Core 2 test 1 is currently only available for i386-compatible architectures. x86_64 will appear in a later test release."

RE: Sound

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 23:35:00 GMT

> the user was using his old /home directory which means it was using all his OLD configs, not fresh new configs. So its not really MDK's fault if he his old configs dont match the new defaults.

Wrong again!
When I upgrade Windows or even Mac OS 9 to OSX or to a new OSX version, all my personal settings are preserved for important things like networking or sound.
If MandrakeLinux or Linux distros in general can't do the same for versions released just 6 months ago, then it IS their fault.

RE: Sound

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 23:56:00 GMT

That's exactly the point, Eugenia: his old settings were preserved - but the new installation requires different settings to work.

This is a difficult problem to solve, as you can't overwrite old settings without pissing off users (and rightly so), yet some of the old settings won't work with the new system.

The point which the poster you were replying to tried to make is that this problem doesn't happen on a fresh installation, i.e. sound is correctly configured if you install from scratch.

RE: Sound

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 00:03:00 GMT

Ok, well then this is more generic linux problem in general. I know almost all programs I use on linux, for better or worse, use the configuration files they find if there any there. Even IF its an older config with out of date info.

Ever tried using RedHat 9 Gnome and use that same home directory under Sun's gnome? Doesn't work so well, and yes this happens at my school with NFS.

Also, when you upgrade windows how many system settins are actually saved and not just blown out of the water? (Don't know about mac as I dont use it.) Last I checked a windows install wont go through and check EVERY single app's settins and update it if needed. I guess I just see a flaw in the analogy of this is all.

Your point is taken to a point, but there is no reason to start yelling, and say wrong again, as I haven't posted on this subject yet. geez

xmms bug

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 01:01:00 GMT

XMMS problem is more likely to be a known incompatibility between current XMMS and very recent versions of glibc, I remember it being discussed on the Cooker mailing list recently. Not a lot Mandrake can do about it. An easy fix is just to use beep media player instead - beepmp is basically a GTK+2 rewrite of XMMS, and is packaged for MDK 10.0 I think in contrib. Works great for me. looks nicer than XMMS, too. no .shn or .flac support though, which is irritating.

For the guy who doesn't have a CD audio cable in his eMachines PC - you can too play audio CDs. In XMMS or beepmp, go to the input plugin preferences, edit the preferences for the CD audio plugin, and change it from analog output to digital extraction (or something like that, don't remember the terms exactly). Then you should be able to open tracks from /mnt/cdrom and they will play back just fine. You can also use digital extraction to play them via mplayer - do:

mplayer cdda://

general comments on this article and thread - I see a lot of vague bitching and whining and virtually no actual significant bugs...

RE: I'm still using RC1 but...

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 01:19:00 GMT

I finally got the 4 CD iso files and upgraded from RC1 to CE and so far I haven't had any issues I normally have after an upgrade. Totem and XMMS are now working fine. I haven't tried failsafe mode yet though. All other programs seem to be working well. Only crash I experienced was KOffice while trying to perform a spell check. Only happened once though. I have to boot from CD2 as some people have indicated they had to do as well. It's as if the boot function of the iso file wasn't included or picked up on by my machine when trying to boot from CD1.

Currently, I've beeing using Kontact, KGPG with GnuGP, Kopete, Juk, KOffice, Konqueror, and URPMI the most. None have given me any showstopper issues.

Compared to OS X, it is far from polished, yet it's worlds better than windows 98. I rate it about the same functionality as windows 2000 or Mac OS 9. If it had a more consistant feel throughout with a tad better stability, I'd rate it closer to Windows XP and gaining on Mac OS X.
I suppose that's why this is the community edition. We are the test bed for the final version. Let's hope that philosophy pays off.

A nun, he moos (IP: ---.107-70-69.mc.videotron.ca)

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 01:51:00 GMT

Isn't it good practice to do some research before investing your money in any product you intend to purchase?
I was going to try MDK 9.2, but after reading that it could blow up your CD-Burner, I kept my hands away from it. OK, it had problems with a particualar brand, but for me it was reason enough to forget all about it ..... In this time and age it is simply not acceptable.

MDK might have financially recovered, but to regain the consumer's confidence and to survive in the future it is absolutly vital that MDK10 has all the problems of previous versions ioned out and offer a better solution than their main competitors. This doesn't seem to be the case, though.

Mandrake 10.0 CE on my systems

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 02:56:00 GMT

I've installed MDK 10.0 on 2 different machines. And I have been using them alongside other systems with MDK 9.1 and 9.2. Here are my impressions:

- Instaler: same as MDK 9.2 (as far as I can see). That is, it's good, looks nice and does its job. One minor issue: if you do network install in 'expert' mode, be ready to (iteraly) spell out your network-card module's name, as MDK doesn't even try to auto-detect. Too 31337? Maybe I'm getting old... Aside from his, it went beautifully in both scenarios: fresh install and upgrade from MDK 9.1. (yes, nine point one)

- Use: It certainly has some bugs (kontact, quanta...) but in general works pretty well. retty good for a 'Community Edition'. Can't wait for the 'Final Edition'.

MDK 10.0 wors nicely, specialy after upgrading to the latest patches (check the ftp://..../mandrake-devel/stable/Mandrake/RPMS sources). Now Quanta works way better.

Then, I've had trouble with an ISA sound card and with hotplug+USB. The ISA sound card (SoudBlaster) gets detected, but no sound comes out from it. I've noticed that the booting process complains while loading the audio modules. Manual use of modprobe is no good. If I want to reboot/shutdown the system in a proper way, I need to disable hotplug daemon, as it 'hangs' the shutdown process. I guess I have two cases for http://qa.mandrakesoft.org .

Aside from this, I like MDK-10.0 a lot: the new MCC is a very good improvement. Then, the new menues are a huge improvement in aestheticaly, usabilit and logicality terms.

Of course, some DrakTools are lacking in user-friendliness and plain common sense (rpmdrake / rpmdrake-remove: WTF are they sepparated?). Eugenia is quite right here.

Then, speed. The test machines are no speed demons (P-2-450 and P-3-700), and both perform beautifuly: fast, responsive and nicely. This makes me get carried away and I try to do too much with the P-2 (192 MB ram) and I discover that 2.6 + KDE-3.2 are very good but do no miracles (try using OpenOffice, Moszilla, KDE 3.2, Quanta, several konsoles... at the sametimewith so little ram). hen, the P3, with 256MB, works like a champion.

As a side note, let's disclose that my first distro was Slackware in'96. And I've used Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Caldera, TurboLinux, Kondara, Linux BBC, *BSD, *nix... BTW, I moved from SUSE to Mandrake ~ MDK 7.0 and never looked back.

Oh! both Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 have given me zero trouble. Of course, I update my systems, so I have avoided the 'LG nightmare' (which was LG's fault), 'disappearing menues' (fixed in *november* 2003) and other nuisances that get corrected when they are found and *reported*.

Disclaimer: yes, I own *one* single MDKsoft share. < sarcasm > So I'm terribly pro-Mandrake as I want to get rich quick < /sarcasm >

Salut,
Sinner

RE: CD Burning experience (or lack of it)

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 03:56:00 GMT

I had the same prob. with disk 1. thought it was corrupt but K3b verified it was ok. Booting off disk 2 is the supposed quick fix for now, but it doesn't actually prompt you for disk 1. BTW this is the best Mandrake yet...I am sure the full release in May will be far better.. this is more like a late beta release..

community = debian unstable

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 04:32:00 GMT

basicly you have official = stable, community = unstable and cooker = testing.

if you run cooker you can and will experience deprencey breaks, day to day updates that are to add features but not to fix bugs and so on.

any amount of internal betas and RC's will not pick up every bug out there. that is unless mandrakesoft sets up a testing lab with so many computers that they cover every theoretical combo of every item of hardware out there, we do not expect this from microsoft so why should we expect it from mandrakesoft?

this is why community got started. its a bleeding edge relase that is stable when it comes to features but one that will not be 90% solid when it comes to bugs. in 2 months there will be another release of 10.0 called official, this will be one where they have tryed to solidify the community relase. this is what goes into the boxed relases and in my view is the one that should be reviewed.

i have followed mandrake as of 7.x and every time we get a .0 release you can be damn sure its more buggy then the one before it. i think it was 9.1 that broke my cdrom (in intslled fine but after reboot it would not read). the problem was solved with some chating on irc and a helpfull hint about a program called hdparm.

linux distro communitys are way more open then any propriatary os helpdesk you will ever find. here you can run into coders and translaters, and all are willing to listen and help out.

hardware conflicts comes in all shapes and sizes. thats why apple gets the nice rep (strict control on hardware). and when your trying to use a os that more often then not have hardware drivers that are reverse enginnered rather then made based on reliable info from the hardware makers you can and will see crashes in the strangest of places. hell i have seen windows 2000 hang on a hardware detection when installing (i removed a cheap pci modem and the install went fine, inserted the modem afterwards and it got detected and installed fine). for some reason we are expecting more from a garage project then from a os that have multimillions development fundings. given the origins of linux as a os im surprised there are not more things that go wrong on a daily basis.

oh and eugenia, get of your high horse. some of the things your pointing out are itches at best and others are stuff that only a style obsessed mac user would care about.

RE: A nun, he moos

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 04:53:00 GMT

Errmm...you realize the CD issue wasn't MDK's fault right? The CD-ROM Manufacturer didn't comply with standards and decided to add there own special calls to the hardware, so when MDK tried to use it in a STANDARD way it broke it (or in your words, blew it up)...but somehow, I suppose you could call MDK on that...maybe...or not.

Anyways, LG (the cd-rom mnf.) has since updated their firmware so they are using standard calls so its not even an issue any more....but you're right. I can see why this would be a good reason to never ever ever try MDK.

All I ask of people is to TRY it out instead of taking other peoples word for it. If you give it a legit shot, and it actually does blow up your cd drive, well then you can whine and complain (and provide pictures). Until then, if you don't have anything constructive to say, don't say anything.

Time to reassess this whole pointless thread

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 06:51:00 GMT

There are too many people on this thread with an axe to grind. You can pinpoint them in the following manner:

Mandrake sucks, use Lindows.
Mandrake sucks, use Fedora.

There are a few bugs and it is not perfect, but it is very good. Some things I like:

*Great menu layout.

*Koffice is awesome now.

*Breathed new life into my hardware. Things are super fast and you can multitask in a way that I have never been able to do before on this computer with any other OS.

*Juk is beautiful. By far, one of the most intuitive and stable media players in FLOSS land. Its mp3 tagger is impressive.

*Write click on any folder to zip it or burn it to CD. Did I mention how truly awesome k3b is?

*Kopete is great and it integrates very well in a KDE desktop and Kontact is shaping up very nicely.

The one thing that I would agree with Eugenia on is that Mandrake's tools need greater integration.The network tool is particularly confusing and poorly laid out. All the others are pretty good, though. Mandrake also needs to provide better documentation as the one that ships with Mandrake 10 Community release mostly refers to the MCC 9.2 tools. Hopefully, this too will be fixed before final.

BTW, Eugenia, I think it would have been fairer of you to do a review of the official distribution as that is what you will do with Suse. If you plan to do so and this is more of a peek preview then, by all means.

Finally, Microsoft has all kinds of remote exploits and viruses daily and people put up with it.

Apple, a multibillion company, releases an OS that kills USB connected dries and people deal with it. Yet Mandrake releases its community edition under very clear terms of what it was and people complain about it. The MDK community release was announced here and it was explicitly slated for people that like to live on the bleeding edge. If you are not one of them, wait for the official release and stop whining.

nick,

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 09:10:00 GMT

I might give it a shot when the boxed version will be released in May; unless a miracle happens and i can afford an Apple G5 with OSX Panther ....

RE: Community is commercial

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 10:38:00 GMT

>You are right, i'm not confortable in english. Do you prefer portugues?

why not italian, german or french?

you did misinform, point. this only shows your lack of knowledge ... perhaps you should use MS!

General thoughts

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 11:01:00 GMT

Thanks for the great thread - all sides have shown up - Not a programmer ( I am not worthy ,, I am not worthy ... ), I wanted to drop in on behalf of the regular people - you know one of those who reads threads BEFORE unleashing things I barely understand on a 3 year old notebook that amazingly brings the world to my fingertips while I slouch in my bed { and runs well on open source - Mandrake 9.2 }

Eugenia - like your descriptions of what you liked in your first review and felt your frustration is the last one

10.0 is a few days away ( cheapbytes is close and has been reliable .. ) - one of those who uses Win for work and Linux for learning and everything else... I push Mandrake 9.2 to those around me who even look like they want to pop the bubble of security by exposition that MS seems to promote these days and even take time to help them install it.

My biggest problem today is that MS put an XP file ( MFT ) way across a partition so that I don't have enough room on a 30 gig drive to partition the drive the way I want to for a 9.2 dual boot installation ( and don't get me started on NTFS vs. FAT32 )

Bottom line - for us who want to contribute to the open source movement and no clue about programming, being able contribute a few bucks here and there and to be able to report a bug ( "Given many eyes ... " ) is inspiring. And Mandrake has been a way to do all that.

Update to my network problems...

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 11:47:00 GMT

Solved... switched to a fixed IP, disable APIC and network hotplugging. Had some small problems with soundcard, also solved (VIA 8327, disable something on the INPUT of Kmix to get OUTPUT sound... weird). Now gaining courage to use ndiswrapper to get my WLAN connection working... *shudders* (BTW, thanks Eugenia)

@Eugenia

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 13:24:00 GMT

> MandrakeSoft should REALLY sit down and think hard about their QA department

how about your own QA? you wrote your article before really analyzing the distro in all details, didnt you? very interesting ...

Hard Disk

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 13:56:00 GMT

Here is update to the hard disk problem that i had with MDK 10.0 and although i can't get it to dual boot with xp, i was at least able to get windows back to my computer:

I have always had dual boot with xp and linux so technically it is nothing new for me. But for some reason, and i still don't know why, Mandrake 10.0 first made xp no longer to boot and then later i was no longer able to get xp installation to finish when i had already formatted the whole hard disk for a single OS installation.

My own impression was that Mandrake has somehow messed up with the File allocation table in the beginning of hard disk. I tried everything i could including linux fdisk, windows 98 fdisk, windows xp professional recovery console and so on.

I was able to install any linux distribution back to hard disk but there was no longer the option to install windows alone without getting a bus load of error messages.

The last resort was to write about this problem to linux installation news server in my country. I had given up all hope of getting windows back to hard disk but then i received this nice little hint:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1000 count=1000

This simple linux command writes the beginning sector of hard disk full of zeros. And it works: I couldn't believe my eyes when the xp installation no longer crashed in the error messages after first boot!

So i'm now writing this message from windows xp. I do have still those Mandrake disks and my first impression about the new distro was overall very good. But since it failed to boot xp i will not install Mandrake back to this hard disk.

The most important lesson that i learned from this incident is to have always a simple linux boot disk available so that if hard disk gets messed up and nothing else works, dd-command works. I was so desperate that the next thing would have been Low level format. Thanks to the linux news group i found a working solution!

I recommend that anybody having similar hard disk problems should try the dd-command. It will break nothing it only writes the MBR full of zeros. In my case it was also the only way to get windows back to my computer.

If anybody knows a working solution to making dual boot with xp and MDK 10.0 i am still willing to try it but it has to be rock solid and not messing up the Master boot record again. Somebody wrote in other forum that Mandrake has issues with BIOS but i'm not sure if it is also related to this dual booting problem.

Oh and one more last thing, i have a quality IBM hard disk, it is so far definately the best that i have ever had and i have tested about 15-20 different linux distributions in it. Normally the dual boot with xp and linux has no problems at all.

Also, from all of the distros that i have had, i like Fedora and Slackware. Debian is also very good. The problem with Mandrake is too fast release cycle and too many bugs.

No Mandrake until bugs are fixed

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 14:22:00 GMT

I gave up on mandrake after 8.0, previously being an big supporter of thier distribution (altho I was never a card carrying member)

I'm not suprised that this release also falls short on the bug front - it's been that way since 8x versions and for some reason, every single Mandrake I've tried since then has plagued me with problems on various platforms.

I've since become a more educated Linux user and have switched to Slackware for the time being, slackware 9.1 gives me everything I need at speed without the bloat and the bugs.

Seriously, Mandrake need to buck up thier act on the bug front NOW or get left behind. I understand that they have new policies in place where they will issue a final 10 version once bugs have been ironed out, but I don't have time for that.

First things first - get a new designer and ditch Mandrake Galaxy - it's childish and ugly.

reason for rpm drake being 3 tools

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 14:34:00 GMT

is that people complained about the loadtime when it was one tool. now its a bit faster as it dont have to deal with both install and uninstall in one code. allso, with being two seperate windows its more clear what your doing. haveing one tab for intall and one for uninstall that look the same functionaly can lead to people wondering why the window they belive are the install window is showing only the stuff they have installed. its a combo of user ignorance/stupidity and murphy: if it can be missunderstood it will be missunderstood. and whats clear for one user is total confusion for someone else...

I was very impressed with it in the beginning...

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 16:16:00 GMT

...But after using it for a while I've noticed that the release is Beta quality. Don't get me wrong, but when apps like GIMP2 Pre3 and Pre4 can bring a whole system down by doing a Scale Image or when xxgdb locks the whole system, one might wonder how catastrophic it would be in a server environment. I don't want to bad mouth Mandrake, because I wish for them to succeed as I've noticed that a great amount of work has gonne into this release, but hell, it should atleast be stable. I can live with a bugy system, but not with one that crashes unexpected and leaves me no other choice but "hit the Reset button on the tower".
Good luck Mandrake, cause if you mess this one up, you're gonne.

Reviews

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 17:47:00 GMT

We went through this same scenario when Fedora was reviewed. It seems only Slackware gets good reviews here, but if it's so great why isn't everybody using it?

RE: Reviews

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 19:00:00 GMT

Not exactly. Fedora had some issues but they where corected soon trough patches. Based on Mandrakes past problems, if they keep it up like this there will be no difference. I think that they've jumped to soon on the NPTL/kernel 2.6 bandwagon. I was impressed at first with Mandrake 10 and was planning to support them, but the problems that I had with it made me go back to FC1. Slackware isn't that great, but it has the least bugs because it's focused on stability. I would say that performance with Mandrake 10 is outstanding but stability is crap, and when something like xxgdb or gimp2 brings the whole system to its knees, it's unusable. Just my 2 cents.

Gimp 1.2 stable is the default.

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 19:48:00 GMT

Gimp 1.2 is the default. Gimp2 Pre is on the CD, but it is the responsability of the user to install a non finished software. So please don't spread the FUD like Gimp2 being the default image manipulation software, it isn't.

RE: Community is commercial

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 20:01:00 GMT

> why not italian, german or french?

french is also fine.

> perhaps you should use MS!

No since 1998 (Slack with Linux 1.2). I'm an Unix/Linux developer (mostly C++ and SQL).

Any over problem with me ? Do you want to know my size ? How old i am ? etc...

RE: Gimp 1.2 stable is the default.

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 21:28:00 GMT

But GIMP2 works fine on any other distribution, and what kills me is not the fact that it doesn't work as supossed, but that it brings the whole system down. This isn't supposed to happen on any linux system.
Jesus!

RE: Gimp 1.2 stable is the default.

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 05:59:00 GMT

On my system Gimp2 works perfectly by the way, so it may be specific with your machine and the compilation options of Gimp2 in Mandrake. Maybe you should make a bug report ?

RE: Community is commercial

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 12:02:00 GMT

>Any over problem with me?

yes, I dont understand why you try to misinform people by mean ...

no sound over digital out of sb live

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 21:37:00 GMT

kde 3.2 is fast; mdk has a nice galaxy theme; but the digital out of my soundblaster live 5.1 doesn't work and i didn't find a way to solve that problem; the digital out works fine under mdk 9.1, xandros, ...

GUI for ...server admin

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 22:32:00 GMT

Is Mandrake 10CE/OE, and Mandrake in general, bounded for friendly desktop usage, or it can be used also as an admin friendly server?
Working with different OS'es in network administration, the easy of use and completness of gui tools are important issues. Well I know, Linux lacks some of them.
This is my first Mandrake install ever.
The installation went quite smooth, well, cd1 did not boot (but readable), I had to make a floppy. Few problems became apparent only after(some security locks, as I choosed the higher level, an aditional locale not set properly).
The GUI tools for server administration are poor and dilluted. I do not mean a novice interface, but a way of having a comprehensive view of the whole configuration and a fast way of detailed setting. Which is not the case. BTW, is it possible to setup a DNS server in the way webmin interface is doing?

RE: Sound

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 18:04:00 GMT

When I upgrade Windows or even Mac OS 9 to OSX or to a new OSX version, all my personal settings are preserved for important things like networking or sound.
If MandrakeLinux or Linux distros in general can't do the same for versions released just 6 months ago, then it IS their fault.

I'd have to disagree. In our enterprise, we had major headaches when we upgraded to Windows 2000 SP4. Personal settings WERE preserved but with the SP upgrade they were now not valid. We had to invest major time upgrading many third party apps after SP4 broke them.

BTW, I have been using 10CE for a couple of weeks without any problems.

ML 9.2.1 ->no hassle ultra stable, 10.0c ->bleeding edge RC

donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 08:12:00 GMT

If you want stable and really de-bugged, try Mandrake 9.2.1 -the club release. It's still really fresh, but proven.
I'm posting this from 10.0 Community on my HP laptop right now, so that my pre-ordered pressed 10.0 final-version PowerPack CDs will have benefited from MY debugging.
-AkBrian