Timothy R. Butler writes: “In this second part of the OfB Distribution Shootout, Eduardo Sánchez
considers the distribution who nabbed our first annual Open Choice award last
July — Mandrake Linux. After finding Mandrake Linux 8.2 quite possibly the
best GNU/Linux distribution ever released, Sánchez probes deep into its
successor to see if it is a worthy replacement.” Read the full review.
I found Mandrake 8.2 riddled with problems and overall quite crap.
There has always been a show-stopper in MDK, which is still not fixed in 9.0: allow a User to connect to the Internet!
Sure, the “create a connection wizard” is great.
Sure, wether ISDN or DSL, setting up a connection is easy.
BUT when you do not want auto-dial, a User has no chance of triggering the connection, as the Mandrake Tool needs root priviledges (and setting the app suid root is not possible).
So, how can a user start a configured connection (say, ISDN) without having to give them the root password? Something like SuSE´s “KInternet” does…
This guy is not to far from my experiments.
I manage 6 PC with Linux at my office. It is a big compagny but of course they only support windows and we need Linux because of specific tools only avialable for Linux.
For now, all system run 8.2. I tried 9.0 and It is worst than 8.2 on administration tools (freeze and more bugs). The strength of mdk is in the KDE interface packaging and that people that use windows are comfortable with KDE.
The worst part (8.2 and 9.0) is that mdk provided tools that override text file configurations. For example, if you change manually the configuration of cupsd.conf then at the next reboot the changes are lost. And of course, the mdk tools provided no way to access the parameters I needed to modify.
And I need graphical tool because people are not able to edit text files (don’t laugh that’s the sad truth). I hope one day my compagny will officially makes Linux support so that I won’t have any more to waste my time with mdk distro.
I like the fact that package management is tied to urpmi. This is very nice especially in terms of dealing with dependency issues.
I like the font installer. Even with fontillus coming out for Gnome the user needs an easy way to install fonts system-wide. I do not want to install the MS fonts twice. My wife uses the linux box as much as I do, somedays more.
I like the Debian menu structure thing as opposed to having a distro menu or that ugly Extras menu you see in Redhat.
Some of the issues and the real lack of new neato gee whiz moving the linux desktop forward features will keep people away from a distro with at least a couple of very good points.
I like the font installer. Even with fontillus coming out for Gnome the user needs an easy way to install fonts system-wide. I do not want to install the MS fonts twice.
This was my main problem. I dislike the font installer on mdk 9.0 really bad.
I wanted to install win NT5 fonts and I did … but they were all anti-aliased !
I never found out what changes to be made on /etc/XFree/font.dir? /usr/lib/?? to turn off font anti-aliasing and I don’t want to waste my time with it (also courrier – my favorite – is anti-aliased on KDE too, very, very bad).
Font anti-aliasing is really bad, totally crap, and should be easier to turn it off !! (Unless I missed something).
I went back to RedHat 7 and win NT5 (didn’t want to)
This guy didnt seem to have as many problems and he nevver used linux before.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2207
Let me see if I can remember this. Open your KControl, go to Look_N_Feel (or something similar), browse to Fonts (again, maybe something else similar), either on the first tab, or other tabs there is a checkbox to switch AA fonts off and on.
It correctly setup 3D acceleration on my Voodoo5, but X crashed whenever a program tried to change the resolution.
Beyond that, it thought my TV card was my primary sound card but didn’t actually load the drivers for the TV card.
Thanks, I tried something like that. I choosed to turn AA fonts off when re-installing win fonts. I even uninstalled win fonts, reboot (I know it’s unnecessary), pray a little, re-installing with AA checkbox off, but no luck.
Look and feel of admin tools is good but few things work. It would be better for them to release only working software/tools.
I started with Mandrake 8.2, and then eventually tried to upgrade to 9.0. Holy crap was that a bad experience! It crashed upgrading and crashed trying to fresh install. I went to Libranet and look forward to debian based distros for years to come, or at least until the RPM situation works better.
Actually, it has nothing to do with having it off when installing fonts. You simply turn it off, logout, login and KDE will no longer anti-alias things. In other words, its a user setting and has nothing to do with the way fonts are installed.
I’ll try that too Timothy, thanks.
turn it off, logout, login and KDE
If you come back, could you specify if you did it on KDE control center or on Mnadrake control center (I suspect you mean KDE’s).
Hi Chicobaud,
Indeed, that is in the KDE Control Center. Take a look in the “Look & Feel > Fonts” section. If you are using Mandrake 9.0, you should see an “Anti-Alias Fonts” option that you can disable. If you then apply it, it will note that only newly launched apps will be affected by the change. After logging out and back in, all of KDE will be non-anti-aliased. 🙂
-Tim
I downloaded Madrake 9.0 a couple of weeks ago. I had read a lot of good things about Mandrake, so I wanted to try it. During the same weak I downloaded the new redhat beta(phoebe-8.0.92)- and installed both. ( As for background I have used linux regularly since 94 and exclusivley for the past 1 1/2 years-Gentoo is my primary system and SuSE 8.1 for my job).
The Madrake install was fairly simple, yet after the install I had, and still have many problems. Setting up and configuring the network is a nightmare- I believe however this is redhat-specific- I had exactly the same problem with the Redhat beta and Mandrake-with one exception- solving this problem in Redhat was easy and inutitive(with no prior Redhat experience I solved the problem in under 1 hour)- with Mandrake I will probably simply have to reinstall-having spent many hours trying to solve it to no avail- I can get the network to work, but each time I boot the machine I have to do the same procedure.
I have a pegasus- based usb ethernet adapter and a 3c95x mainboard ethernet adapter For some reason during the installation process the two adapters are being cross-linked, ie. they both are being assigned to eth0. In Redhat I simply deleted both eth0 and eth1 and manually created eth0 ,eth1 and ppp0(for use with rp-pppoe). In order to get this to work I had to swap the the order in which the drivers are loaded-making the usb adapter eth0 and the 3c95x eth1. Since then no problems with my newtork using Redhat.
Madrake, in its attempt to make things eaasier ends up making this process much more difficult-sure I can manually delete the false routes each time I boot -but why must I ?. I will admit I have tried up to this point to use the DrakConf tools- which I find to be an absolute joke in contrast to SuSE(which has its own quirks, and necessitates tht all sysadmin work is done with these tools alone-ie. manually manipulating config files is to no avail-they will be overwritten)-I could hack the config files by hand, but the advantage of such distros is that one need not do so-if one needs to Gentoo is the way to go.
Perhaps if I reinstall, this time skipping the network setup steps I can get things to work smoothly. The fabled Drakfont tool succeeded in locking up my machine each time I tried to use it-no joke- I had to reboot the machine-never have I witnessed such(except in windows)-I have fat32 and ntfs partitions(Win98 and WinXp) on a older harddrive- I click on get windows fonts, and off goes my computer into lala-land.
Setting up decent multimedia stuff was a nightmare(albeit it is much the same for SuSE and probably worse for Redhat- I have to admit I am spoiled -gentoo does this stuff right from the get go.) I needed mulitple hours to be able to view my videos and DVD’s- installing, deleting, reinistalling, breaking dependencies( oh I had forgotten what rpm-hell is) – no “newbie” has a chance of getting this stuff working at the get-go.
I did got ahead and download kde 3.1-rc5 and installed it- yeah the system finally looked good and I could finally install my fonts. Gnome was acceptbale, but nothing to write home about, and I say this as an avid gnome fan. Redhat phoebe-with the exception of its inability to use the nivida drivers absolutely rocks(and yes I mean inability-the new beta will not work the nvidia drivers-I instqalled/reinstalled-recompiled the kernel(so that kernel,xfree, and nvidia-drivers were compiled with the same compiler version-no luck whatsoever)-the best gnome I have ever seen-and perhaps the best deskktop as a whole I have ever seen(except for OS X).
Redhat Phoebe amazed me, my first experience with Redhat-and I am really looking forward to a usable Redhat 8.1- albeit I believe they went too far in nullifying the differences between kde and gnome-I acually like to the BlueCurve theme, I use it on gentoo too, but the folks at Redhat went over the top on this one, at least on gentoo with BlueCurve one can still see and feel the differences between gtk2 and qt based programs.
Mandrake, after all the hype, disppointed me- I have not given up yet, for I do not give up easily, I will continue on my quest towards a functional install-but I really noticed a profound disparity betwee SuSE and Mandrake- Mandrake seems unfinished, unstable, and quite unrefined in contrast- SuSE comes with every program in the OSS world and then some, its configuration tools are the best period-even though I much prefer hacking config files by hand- SuSE sucks in the mulitmedia and fonts department, but it is rock-solid.
But none of these distros compare to Gentoo-Gentoo is not easy to install, it is not simple to set-up, one must want to learn a lot and enjoy learning-but nothing I have ever seen before or since matches the grace and beauty of portage-and with Gentoo you are in control, which simply cannot be said of any of these other distros.
“Redhat Phoebe amazed me, my first experience with Redhat-and I am really looking forward to a usable Redhat 8.1- albeit I believe they went too far in nullifying the differences between kde and gnome-I acually like to the BlueCurve theme, I use it on gentoo too, but the folks at Redhat went over the top on this one, at least on gentoo with BlueCurve one can still see and feel the differences between gtk2 and qt based programs.”
Isn’t that the point…to take away the difference in appearance and give that ‘unified’ look that we see with windows apps?
Yes, and no. I believe that the level of unification between kde and gnome apps should take place at:
a) the “themes” level
-The first thing one sees when one fires up an app is the general shape and contours-these should be similiar-not necessarily identical
b) at the level of menu arrangement and dialogs
-New users need to have a consistent interface-knowing the order of “ok” and “cancel” and where to look for these “buttons”- in general there needs to be a unification of the GUI in general-this can be done with distinguisable widget sets which allow for a certain level of distinction without confusion
c) of how one does things, and where one should look to find options, preference etc, is the key-“how” all the way down to the way one uses hand-gestures in controlling the mouse to operate the application. One-click or two-clicks as a standrad is a step in the right direction.
If one choose KDE as their desktop, as opposed to GNOME, one should be able to tell immediately that they have made a choice-yet the awareness of the differences and distinctions should not overly complicate the usage…..
I could not tell the difference between the two desktops at first glance. Moreover what distinguishes KDE and GNOME is that KDE presents a unified solution- it comes with a large number of apps-not unlike a standard windows install, whereas GNOME has far fewer apps, high quality but low in number- in the Redhat menus one does not have immediate acces to the wealth of programs which are standard parts of KDE-moreover a standard install came with not a single CLI text editor…..
There is more than one way to acheve similiar goals. I agree with the general goal of what Redhat is trying to do. But I disagree with the :
1) the outright elimination of distinctions and
2) the level at which they chose to unify
-I feel that the integration has to occur on more fundmental levels as concerns the GUI.
KDE tends to offer many, many configuration options scattered amongst multiple entries in the applications themselves, and then of course again at the Desktop configurqation level- they sometimes conflict with one another and are often quite confusing. GNOME, in its current state, has very view configurable options at the GUI level. System configuration tools should not belong to either GNOME or KDE.
KDE has implemented much of this due to the fact that many distros came with little or miserable configuration tools- we need system configuration tools at the GUI level independent of the desktop -some distros already provide this-others don’t -Redhats tools are good but sparse and decentralized making sysadmin counter-intuitive. I know the main selling point for many as to whether they prefer this or that distro is based upon the configuration tools which the distro provides.
But it should be possible to come up with System configuration tools on two-tier basis-one that applies to virtually all linux distributions and covers fundamental aspects of system administration-where the distros differ in how they deal with certain system specifics could serve as the point where certain features are turned off by default- or when clicked launch the distro specific tools.
I’ve tried installing MD9 with the intention of replacing Debian on my server. Well, the installaion went smoothly. However when I start to configure the setting it start to freeze on me.
Well it look like it still not as stable as Debian or Redhat but still it maybe usable to newbies. For me tis is the second time I get frustrated with MD. Previously I cancelled my installation on my office desktop since it fail to detect the hardware properly (8.0)
My advise ti MD is that keep on improving so that it will be more attractive.
have u ever noticed whenever there is a review of
Mandrake that red hate people usually jump all over
it. its amazing. red hate is quite afraid of Mandrake,
im sure they will do what they can in the future to
destroy it.
i have been using Mandrake for several years and i dont
have any of the problems that people here speak of.
its unstable they say…………….wrong.
it looks bad they say…………….wrong
its trash compared to red hate…….wrong.
i hope all the red haters continue to post here
though.