“As a long time Red Hat user I have of course been awaiting 8.0, but since Mandrake 9.0 was released a little sooner, I decided to give it a try, while I was waiting on Red Hat 8. I had high hopes, but my hopes were quickly dashed.” Read the article at LinuxOrbit. LinuxHelp have a review of Dolphin too.
Mandrake Linux 9.0 First Impressions
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Anyone else tried it? These articles seems to contradict each other on their overall opinion of it.
Wait for the osnews review then… 😉
I am still waiting for Mandrake to send me the CDs.
I’m getting tired of “reviews” consisting mainly of the Installation process (read: the LinuxHelp review). Can’t these folks be more imaginative and actually give us a clue as to what the “user experience” is like? Sheesh!
Gosh, Eugenia, this makes you look pretty sharp. 😉
-fp
I don’t know, what, but sounds like something seriously b0rked in the install for this guy. I’ve never heard anything like it.
I’ve been running mdk9 since beta2 and it worked fine. No bugs no nothing, just gcc3 goodness and kde3. Well was I surprised when I installed the final release and they added a bunch of bugs to the network configuration. I had to specify some sort of a bull gateway, cos I didn’t have the option of using dhcp for that..etc(i got 2 nics, 1 static and 1 internet).
Anyway, the fun continued, I found a b0rked symlink in /lib/cpp which prevented a bunch of stuff from compiling, etc.
Now the mdk betas were the most perfect betas i’ve ever seen..Rock solid.
I have no clue why the mdk people decided to screw that and throw in a bunch of bugs.
No problems here…I didn’t have a USB keyboard, but I do have a Microsoft Optical USB mouse, and that works fine…I am very pleased with M9.0. Too bad the author had troubles. No problem with LiLO or my user accounts…AFTER the install is where I was most pleasently suprised…everything worked!! When I had tried to install M8.2 on the exact same computer it would not install, and the one time I was able to install it the damn thing wouldn’t work…so I then switched to SUSE8.0…but now M9.0 works fast and slick, love the refined Mandrake Control Center!!!
> am still waiting for Mandrake to send me the CDs.
why not download them ? I’ve downloaded the ISO for SNF, that could have potential …
I’ve been using Mandrake since 7.1 and tried out all the betas , in addition to reporting bugs on cooker list. Had I not seen or tested (null) and now RH 8.0, Mdk 9 would have been the best Linux distro I’ve ever tried. The main reason I liked Mandrake before was b/c of their gui config tools (aka drak…). The new package management tools rock!
RH 8.0 has completely turned the tables by not only providing good config-tools (aka redhat-config-…) but these tools are well integrated into my favorite DE ( you know which one ). In addition, I don’t need to tweak the interface at all to make it look good – it does by default (to me).
With Mandrake, after installation, I have to fetch fonts, change themes, and make other adjustments to suit my needs. But with RedHat 8.0 I just install, login and I’m ready to go. The fonts look sweet, and Bluecurve is just right. The only thing I miss so far is not being able to use the package-manager with a network based package archive like in Mandrake. That is one area in which Mandrake is far ahead.
Although most people complain about the menus in Redhat, it’s the best I’ve seen so far (IMHO), Mandrake’s menu just doesn’t cut it for me ( feel free to disagree).
Another thing about all these reviews is that they are just linux bashing. Most of the problems they have mentioned are not new problems, nor are most of them distro specific. None of these reviews including Eugenia’s (sorry but its my opinion) have not bee useful for me. I was expecting to see more detailed comparison about between previous versions and the current version and not comparison about Linux and Windows or Mac. Everybody already knows that Linux is not yet a competetor so its mute to reiterate it all over. What is useful IMHO is how has it improved from the last release and how does it compare to other Linux distributions.
Now the flames can start
Because I prefer to have a relationship and a real communication with all the companies that do OSes, because that will help both OSNews and these companies to make sure we don’t publish bullshit over here. (Yeah, I know, I am good at marketing too…
)
> I was expecting to see more detailed comparison about between previous versions and the current version and not comparison about Linux and Windows or Mac.
My deepest apologies for being OSNews and not RedHatNews.
> Anyone else tried it?
Well, I tried yesterday. I couldn’t get it to install. It keeps popping up an error after about the 3rd step. Something about being unable to decompress the initrd or something. I tried on both my laptop and desktop, and got the same error. I wrote another CD, on a different kind of blank cd, just to be sure, and the error still won’t go away. And no, my laptop config is very different from the desktop, so I have no clue where this would happen.
to publish a piece of this (lack of) quality is pathetic.
less than pedestrian knowledge doesn’t make for interesting reading. neither does bitching & whining about non-issues.
thanks so much linuxorbit staff for rush limbaugh diarrhea
Mandrake detected my netword interface correcltly, but it has no internet connection, on any browser and even the terminal. I hope SuSE and Redaht 8 will be much better.
“but my hopes were quickly dashed”
I am not surprised.
linux_baby,
check that your ISOs are donwloaded correctly.
run md5 on them, the ISO maybe are currupted over the
network, not the burning
Installed it Friday night.. well… Saturday dawn
Went fine, no problems whatsoever, detect all my hardware, am on the net, etc etc.. weird thing though, xmms gives me _no_ sound… i can hear the lovely (eh) system bell… but no sound when playing mp3s…
Oh well… it’s just an experiment anyway, i quickly went back to BeOS
Take care everyone,
DaaT
http://www.beosjournal.org
and it seems to be working great for me, no major problems so far, and it seems a lot quicker then previous releases to me too
that might be due to kde3 or the new gcc or both? but whatevr it is i like it! and it works for me.
GCC 3.2 produces faster code. Red Hat 8 is faster too.
Well, now i have sound… had to change a stupid (imho) option in XMMS… *sigh*…
Still going back to BeOS of course
Mozilla takes me less than 3 secs to load there, in here… over 10…
Nice desktop/icons though
DaaT
http://www.beosjournal.org
“Still going back to BeOS of course
Mozilla takes me less than 3 secs to load there, in here… over 10… ”
Well, at least you w’ont be whinning about Mandrake.
I installed it on my Notebook with a USB Mouse and Keyboard. No problems whatsoever.
The article at LinuxOrbit sounds fishy to me: the reviewer’s USB keyboard would not work at all, yet they were able to “hobble through the install using only the mouse”. [raised eyebrow]
Well, different people respond differently to the same things.
My take on it is that you get the best objective picture of the state of things pondering different sort of peoples experiences.
In other words, I find this atleast somewhat helpful.
“My take on it is that you get the best objective picture of the state of things pondering different sort of peoples experiences.”
I agree with this. Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass what somebody using Linux for 8-9 years thinks about the new distro(s). Hell, these people were telling us that Linux was a ‘Windows killer’ and ready for the desktop back when color text installs in Slackware were considered to be on the cutting edge.
These types of distros (MDK 9, RH 8, etc) were made for people like me (the Windows user), so I want to see what people like me think of the distro. From my way of thinking, if you install the OS and sound (or something else) doesn’t work out of the starting gate, screw it .. it’s history. From where I come from, if something doesn’t work, you throw in a CD with a driver on it and then it’s fixed.
Some people would say that we’re lazy, but perhaps we’re just spoiled by having shit work the way we expect it to .. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. So, don’t attempt to target the Windows userbase and then complain that we tell you how pathetic (or not) your efforts are. We know what we like and what we are used to, and MOST of us are not willing to come around to your way of thinking, at least not for the ‘revolution’ anyway.
It is all so funny really….I just sit here running Mac OS X 10.2. I have a Unix system with a command line and everything “Unix” a Linux user would ever want, and everything works….it just WORKS. I have a beautiful GUI, I am listening to MP3s in iTunes, can watch my movie trailers with Quicktime 6, and surf the web and check email with no issues using IE 5.2 for and the Mail application that comes with OS X: all integrated beautifully together. Have I ever had a crash? NOT ONCE….and all on a G3 300MHZ machine (which is the bare minimum according to Apple) that I bought off Ebay for 269 bucks. Money well spent if you ask me. So I will just sit here and watch everyone rant about what does and doesn’t work in all these Linux distros we chose to download when they come out each week and wonder: is being free really worth it? I have used all flavors of Windows, OS/2, BeOS and tried every distro of Linux since RedHat 4.2…there comes a time when realize that you want to use your PC to do something!
I don’t know what this guy downloaded, but it certainly couldn’t have been Mandrake 9.0. I’ve been following 9.0 since beta-1, In face i’ve installed both beta-1 and rc-2 during the course of it’s development into it’s current release. I HAD NONE OF THE PROBLEMS HE DESCRIBES. He’s obviously a complete idiot. Everything worked out of box, i had 0 hardware problems on multiple machines, I had 0 problems doing things like editing documents even MS documents, browsing the web getting my e-mail configuring a personal firewall. Hell with a little help from the PLF (Penguin Liberation Front) I can even watch encrypted DVD’s with Xine and they look 1000 times better than they do when i play them in WinDVD. With RedHat’s big “desktop unification project” being a THEME I’d suggest Mandrake 100% all the way. Redhat, Lay off the crack pipe.
Final 9.0 (I’ve been testing the RC1 & 2 so far) went absolutely fine for me…
I’ve installed it on 4 PC’s – Dell notebook, Athlon Tbird, Athlon oldish, P233/MMX – and found NO PROBLEMS at all: GRUB installing smoothly (why LILO, with the huge HD’s we all have?), partitioning & resizing great, (my) HW recognising at 100%.
btw a very polite installer, it didn’t disturb – nor complain about – Win XP and FreeBSD living on the same HD where I installed it.
“Strange Things Dept.”: a few themes/styles for KDE3 are missing, comparing to RC2 (.net and glow to name my preferred ones), and perhaps a few packages; “perhaps” meaning there are so many packages – some definitely listed in the wrong category – I could easily be wrong on this.
Some RC1-2 little bugs still going (network config, for one) but generally speaking it’s the smoothest distro installer I’ve ever found.
This release comes full-loaded with whatever productivity tool I normally use, ranging from word processing to multimedia audio, to UML/development tools, and then some.
And please consider it’s the download edition… what else can lay in the 4-5 CD’s I don’t have ???
I’m using it every day for everything, and I have to say I’m less and less firing up XP since then 🙂
All in all, I definitely recommend it. Kudos to the Mandrake folks, they deserve me buying one full set.
Went great for me…I had to download the iso images again though-first set had package install errors. So yah..I would say..do Check sums! All periferials detected..even after install I hook up my Olympus DM1 mp3 usb and it detected the device created a shortcut on the desktop directing me to the contents. Ahh the future is getting brighter.
Does It come with CMUCL and GnuStep? And RedHat?
Ouch.
—–
On another note, I’m not all that happy with the newest distros either. Mandrake 7.1 was pretty nifty — although sound required going through sndconf — and most of the real stuff fit on the first CD. Now we seem to be just getting more bloat with interface tweaks coming ever so slowly. It would be nice to have a working system right after install. Heck, even the BSDs work beautifully with your hardware. Why can’t GNU/Linux distros set everything up from the start? Having to set up sound options in XMMS is pretty odd, for example. I don’t know what to recommend anymore to people wanting to switch to GNU/Linux… Mandrake 9.0 seems to have all these installation problems, RedHat 8.0 is stripped of multimedia, Slack and even Debian not pretty enough for a novice, Gentoo’s installation is way too slow, Lycoris only offers a few apps in the distro, SuSE ISOs aren’t free, etc., etc., etc. =(
Btw.. When Will you review Mandrake 9?
>When Will you review Mandrake 9?
When I get the CDs…
Remember I wrote above that I am pissed off atm? Well, I just found out that it seems that Mandrake sent the CDs MANY days ago, enough for us to make another world exlcusive ;-), and these people at fedex or ups they never brought it here! I mean, I am sure that the package is delivered, but it is delivered in the main office!
Apparently the packages were delivered in the office of the appartments in September 22th, while I was never got a sign for this (we usually get a small sticker outside of the door). These employees from *both* fedex and UPS, 90% of the time never bother to check if anyone is in the apartments, they just go directly to the office, because they are lazy to go from door to door (which is what are supposed to do!!). For them, it is easy to leave everything at the central office and lie that the people of these apartments were not in (while I am 99% of the times here, but they very rarely bother to ring the bell!). On the other hand, the central office thinks that we get the little sticker (which I didn’t!), so they don’t bother to call us. >:(
So, when I get the CDs, I will do the review.
This is not the first time that happens. Last month I got at last a book, sent to me by OReilly, delivered in… May in the main office, and no one bothered to say anything!
I don’t care much about the books, but when you have things like this, it is important to get these stuff in time!
used it. works well. no problems so far. had fun trying to crash my system by running a vnc server, accessing it using the vnc client locally to run another vnc server, to access with another local client to run another vnc server… you get the point.
pretty fast. it “feels” faster than mandrake 8.2. i’m not saying it is faster. just feels. haven’t tried my scanner yet, but all other hardware works well.
only thing i hate… i installed yahoo messenger on it. and it creates a “dead” link on the desktop of kde (dunno about gnome, didn’t check yet). why is that?
“Linux orbit is powered by Debian” says the banner, no one wonder if…. no, it couldnt be that
This test remember me the first installation of linux by my son who is a 10 years old boy 🙂
Hell with a little help from the PLF (Penguin Liberation Front) I can even watch encrypted DVD’s with Xine and they look 1000 times better than they do when i play them in WinDVD.
If you live in the US, it would be illegal 🙂 Besides, WinDVD sucks, PowerDVD and WMP gives much much greater quality.
Just downloaded the 3 MDK 9 CDs last night and installed it tonight. Here’s what I attempted to set up on my 2 hard drives.
Disc 1:
/boot of 400MB
/usr of ~7GB
/var of ~7GB
Disc 2:
swap of ~2GB
/ of ~14GB
This is running on an extremely stable dual proc. Tyan 440BX motherboard. I chose to install all desktop specific features and no server specific features using the most general controls (didn’t select/deselect individual packages). After about 1 hour, I got the following error upon reboot:
Detecting USB interface /etc/init.d/usb: line 37: /etc/modules.conf: Read-only file system
I don’t expect anyone to troubleshoot this for me. I simply wanted to share my installation experience. It’s hard to share a ‘usability’ experience when you don’t make it past the install. Think I’ll try out Redhat tomorrow night
I’m using Mandrake since then 8.1 (I know I’m still a newbie). I haven’t yet upgraded my cie’s servers from the 8.2 because I wanted to get some feedbacks.
The 9.0 is installed on my business computer and on my private computer. I’m having two differents experiences:
On my business cpu (ati rage fury, PIII 667, CM abit, 256 Mo, SB AWE 32…) No problem ! The install process was perfect and everything worked fine without having to configure anything. I enjoy the new concept “install n’ play” 🙂
On my private cpu (geforce 2MX,Duron 750, CM DFI, 196Mo, Ac’97 audio) things weren’t as easy 🙁 All my hardware was detected (event my old webcam I couldn’t remember it was plugged). The first boot was perfect but when I decided to switch to gnome my problems appeared. gnome refused to be launched and freezed my computer. After some tests (CTRL+F12) I realised gnome didn’t like my onboard soundcard. I can’t explain why because kde,e … were happy of it 🙂 I decided to shut down the onboard soundcard and… Gnome worked fine (without sound)… Anyway I don’t think the problem comes from mandrake.
My final word is that I think mdk 9.0 is the best distro I tried and as soon as I solve my problem I’ll upgrade our both servers. This distro is faster, stable and more polished than ever before.
P.S. My english mistakes are (c) by the french government 🙂
How many distros did you try?
RH 7.2, Mandrake 8.1, debian, mdk 8.2, gentoo, mdk 9.0
As I wrote I’m a “newbie” so I don’t say Mandrake is better than Debian or gentoo or … but it is the one who did I didn’t go back to windows.
Is it normal with Linux to have such partitionning? 7GB /var, 14GB /.
I’m using linux since 97 (or 99) with redhat 5.0 (I tried Debian 1.2, I guess, but at this time, my Matrox millenieum was not recognize pas the X server, debian provided)… Then 1 years later, I switch to Mandrake 6 and I only upgrade my all stuff 1 years ago with Mandrake 8.0
whenever I need to upgrade stuffs (like gnome or other) I look forward the packages I need and I install myself, when The kernel lacks something, I recompile it and it’s just work
But when I need apps which are not provided with the distro
I reach the source and usually just configure and make install it and it’s fine.
I don’t understand why people are always swithching from a distro to another one like they’ve only that to do
“Oh, it’s monday, I need to watch dvd, whatif I swicht to mandrake 9.0 beta rc2 instead of installing xine-* and libdcss ?”
“Oh, it’s friday, I need to watch divx, whatif I install Xandros instead of getting mplayer”
I can’t believe people upgrade every 6 weeks, don’t they have to work with their os ?
By the way, in my desk, I’m using redhat 6.2 and it stills rocks, I recently upgrade my glibc (to be glibc2.2 compliant) and it works. That’s all…….
It even allows you to pick an ICON to associate with the user… how XP-like.
Mandrake has been using the icon system since 8.0 (Maybe earlier, I haven’t been around that long though)
This is well before XP ever had a chance. In case the author didn’t realise, most things in linux aren’t XP Like but really, most things in XP are Linux Like or Mac Like
With that said, what I think.
The install was very easy, nothing went wrong. It installed Apache, PHP and MySQL, which all worked well, thank goodness. I use KDE and have 6 virtual desktops, and have been able to apply keyboard shortcuts to just about anything, customize the looks / colors, all through the included config tools. The only thing it can’t do that windows can is play DVDs (it can, but only unencrypted DVDs, it would be breaking international law to have an open source player for encrypted DVDs
) It is very easy to use, and easy to customize (imo thats very important). It picked up and configured all my hardware during the install (except the scanner, but it did tell me what model it was and that it didn’t support that model at the moment)
the OS itself loads much faster than 8.1 / 8.2 (though KDE 3 loads slower than KDE 2, by a significant amount)
I don’t think there’s much to say that’s bad about Mandrake 9 [dolphin]
But then again, I have only had it three days, so time will tell it’s quality as an OS
Thanks Mandrake!
I agree with you djamé.I think users should only upgrade OS’es when hardware or software isn’t working as expected. Of course, anual upgraed is ok – you just get the ability use some new technologies, you get some serios bugfixes and probably better look and speed.
On the other hand, all we are beta-testers of Linux and this is cool, we shouldn’t get angry about that – “my religion (aka distribution) is better than yours”. We have a great chance to help someone (RedHat, Gentoo, Lycoris and others) make things much better. Let’s concentrate on that and let’s dig up all the best and worst, let’s learn and let’s teach.
This is our mission. And it’s “MISSION:POSSIBLE” !!!!
And the last – OSS is a freedom even from OSS itself. If OSS looks ugly or/and unfinished for you – you have more choices, go for it. But if you stay here – let OSS vendors know what we like and what we dislike – they must be informed
.
End of story.
Best regards,
Arturas B.
P.S.: I’m sorry for my English….
IIRC, Mandrake had the picture-representating-user thingy in mandrake since its first release, because it is a kdm feature.
Sheesh .. don’t use HTML tags, if you don’t know how to close them.
Italics city…scroll to the next post.
On topic: Haven’t tried md 9, but md 9 rc 3 was a _breeze_ to install …
RH 8 is next…
Since I’m an infrequent Linux user in general (OS/2 is my day to day OS), I’m not very saavy on what Eugenia’s problems could be. I can only impart my experiences over the last 2 days with installing Mandrake 9.0.
The first install was onto a Compaq Armada M700 laptop (about 2 years old) with a Rage Mobility card, Intel Pro network card, and a WinModem (puke!).
I had absolutely NO problems with any of the hardware, with the usual exception of the WinModem (big surprise there, eh?) and that should be rectified within the next day or 2 as soon as I get around to re-installing the driver for the Lucent chipset. Time for install from start to finish? About 45 minutes.
Second install was to a home built Athlon 650 (about 3 years old now) with a Matrox G400 32MB dual-head card, 512MB RAM, Tekram SCSI card, 2 IDE HDs, Plextor 1210 SCSI CD-RW, IDE CD-ROM, LinkSys 10/100 PCI NIC, SB16 ISA sound card, standard PS/2 keyboard, standard PS/2 mouse, and Viewsonic 15-inch LCD monitor.
Again, no install issues at all. Every piece of hardware recognized and functioning just fine. Screen resolution is set to 1024 by 768 (same as the above mentioned laptop, BTW) at 16-bit color. This system is running DOS, OS/2, Win98SE, and Mandrake 9.0 now (previous version was MDK 8.2). I use OS/2’s Boot Manager to select my OS of the moment and have had not one problem with this setup for the last couple of years.
For the record, yes, I prefer Mandrake over Red Hat. Will I give RH a shot here? Probably. I’m curious to see what all the fuss is about with this Bluecurve business. However, with having no issues with any Mandrake distro since 7.2, RH will not be staying as my Linux of choice. There’s just no justificiation in a switch at this point. I’m satisfied.
How much of Dolphin (or Psyche for that matter) is built with gcc3.2? The kernel? The major libs? Gcc itself?
… most of the reviews I read on the net are just plain crap! The reason is very simple: they’re rushed out. You can’t review a distro containing 1500+ packages in a few hours, that’s impossible. So what happens is that most reviews barely scratch the potential of a distro and mainly focus on how it installs and the hardware is recognizes.
Sorry it doesn’t cut it for me but again that’s the net for you, it empowers people to write whatever they feel like. Just one word of advice, take any reviews of any products on the net with a pinch of salt
The only thing I can add is that after installing LM9.0 on 2 machines (1 is a dual P3 on Supermicro mobo) It feels much better than LM8.2 and Gentoo (and I can tell you I love Gentoo for its flexibility I just got tired of compiling…)
If you prefer RH8.0 over LM9.0 or the other way around then that’s fine by me.
If you want to install a new distro every forthnight then that’s fine by me.
If you prefer Windows or Mac OSX then that’s fine by me
If you like something tell the world.
If you do not like something then most likely someone somewhere in this world probably likes it, no need to rubish it.
At the end of the day, it’s really just software
Not that big a deal really.
/Woollhara
Someone wrote:
“And the last – OSS is a freedom even from OSS itself. If OSS looks ugly or/and unfinished for you – you have more
choices, go for it.”
Yeah, but what if all the choices suck?
MPR
I’m dual bootoing Mandrake 9.0 beta 3 and XP on my Dell Lattitude laptop.
So far I find Mdk 9 quite stable and am very happy with it. I would really like to see Eugenia Loli-Queru (the person that wrote the RH 8 review here: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1842) write a full review of the Mdk 9 as well.
If only to see a fair, proper comparison. She seemed to write a nice review of RH 8, unlike the “so called” reviews mentioned in this thread. BTW> I wrote and complained to linuxhelp.net for calling somebody’s experience at attempting to install Linux a review.
Chris.
it’s a shame the reviewer hasn’t met mandrake before, he seems to think a number of features are new and inspired by XP when it actually seems to be the other way around.
I can’t believe all the off-topic posts here. AFAICT, this site is Eugenia’s baby — and she calls the shots. Yup, taking the reins and (mostly?) running osnews comes with the privilege to curse and mod others down.
Hell, if I had a site that I worked hard on, and trolls gave me sh*t, first I’d feel complimented that my site is cool enough to attract trolls, and 2nd I’d mod their comments and not look back.
Who worked hard for this site ?
I DID. You know nothing, but yet, you speak Giorgo. Please do not post here again, any other comment I see from you here it will be DELETED. You pissing me off beyond belief.
You mean on this subject or the entire OSNews.com site ?
Their revie was RIGHT on. Mandrakes release was horribly buggy, not tested, and horrible user interface.
1 major example: the default aim client is not gaim. The one they have for the default does not automatically load your buddy list like gaim. So users will be wondering where all thier buddies went.
I posted some thoughts @ http://www.strath.org
I am thoroughly disappointed in this release and I hope, being that I donated to mandrake, that they could put that money towards making the user experience halfway decent.
I installed it last night and the install went very well, the only hitch was the time remaining was always off. After it said it would be about 30 minutes it took almost 45. Other then that install was painless.
It feels so much faster then 8.1 that its incredible. I’m using kde by default and the nicest thing I’ve noticed so far is that the default settings are very usable on my old celeron 400 (oced to 450). I haven’t gnome yet but I’m sure it’ll run fine.
The three tests remaining for me is to see if I can get java to work properly in moz, seeing if wine and an unzip are integrated properly and to see if I can get my aureal drivers to work.
One question though, its actually moz related, in the window’s version there is a button in preferances on the navagator tab to make moz the default browser but I don’t see it in the linux version. I know I can change it manually, but I’m lazy.
to Arthuras B :
2 years ago, I made a review for my work. It was entierly based on 3 months of real WORK with my powerbook 3400C, and so I was able to give impression on what run out of the box and what was necessary to achieve complete robustness (i’m sorry, my english lacks the word for rock+solid). I, of course, detailled all the installation process (it was for beginners and near all the mac users were beginners at this time in linux) but the main part was the true usability of this kind of machine (it was fine doing tex and development but not so fine for netsurfing) for a real people.
Then I made an upgrade of this paper for the french magazine linux pratique in order to detail linuxppc2K on an imac 32 mo and it was based also on real work (keyboard, sound and NIS integration suck (ie was not really, really easy to achieve) , the machine was really fast and the rest was just linux on a pc)
So I wouldn’t dare doing a paper based only on the installation process…now I’m writing a review for the mandrake 8.0 ppc on an Imac and it’s based on 6 month of work with that. So, I only needed to install three times linux :
one time for my powerbook, Second time for the imac but IT lacked too much feature so I decided to switch to mandrake 8.0 and it rocks (maybe I’ll try the mandrake 8.2 ppc for a new E-mac 17” we just receive, it would be cool to show to every people Mac OS X running in mac-on-linux) !
What can I say more ? Even if we are all geeks, I think we have to switch only if something really important doesn’t work. Wasn’t it one of the important argument to switch over windows ? to not have to upgrade every 6 months ?
I think something is wrong with that in the linux world..
If a video card is not working properly, just get the last Xfree binary and make a Xinstall.sh (maybe after that, you should make a rpm –justdb -Uvh Xfree* stuff, just to get the right dependencies), if it lacks some drivers just upgrade the kernel even by rpm -ivh kernel_new_something then add a new entry in lilo.conf (one can use Linuxconf or MandrakeUser to do that)…..
If everything is not so working, just get a new distro once it doesn’t work properly after the install, not 6 weeks after….
I don’t get it. Installing linux on pc is not so fun….
By the way, if we’re beta testing everything, why complaining ?
the thing I think is fun is to install linux on strange plateform (I tried one time to install redhat sparc linux on a javastation but I gave up
) like old power mac, atari falcon…. Once It works as I except, I don’t touch it anymore. I would be too afraid to break it 
Cheers,
Djamé
ps : please apologize for my dirty poor english too
I installed mandrake 9.0 on three different computers. Two installations went very smooth (as in “not a single problem”) while one borked, forcing me to install it three times. The first time it turned out that I had a filesystem corruption (perhaps because mandrake forgot to zero out partition when changing partition type from xfs to reiserfs) in /etc, curiously not fixable unless I manually did the fixing, which I didn’t bother. I don’t know what went wrong with second install; it just couldn’t remount / (ext3 this time) as rw during boot. BTW tests indicate no HW problem with HD. The third time went flawlessly and working very well. It is kind of hard to assess the speed on my other two boxes, (one a dual athlon, other a fast athlon XP and they have 1Gb ram) but the problem box only had an Athlon 500 and 256Mb sdram, yet, even kde was fast.
I’ve seen this on a toshiba laptop, we download 2 times the complete set of mandrake 8.1 CD and everytime during
the instalation process, the installer complains about bad rpms, even if we copy them on the vfat partition, we didn’t try the network one because we were so bored to setup an ftp server but lookin in deja.com, it seems it has something to deal with Ultra DMA chipset from VIA.
So the solution was to install the mini, very minimal rpms (without X and without dev stuf, about 80 meg ), then we setup urpmi to get its rpms locally through urpmi.add Local /mnt/windows/rpms and we did a lot of urpmi Things (it achieves dependencies just fine ! why do people always complain about the lack of apt-get whereas urpmi is just so
fine to use ?), after 1 or 2 hours , it was working. (even the winmodem with lucent drivers)
But, and there’s a big BUT, the harddrive was very slow even with hdparm -c1 -d1 -m16. When I’ve time I’ll upgrade the kernel manually for my friend’s laptop, I just don’t want to spent a lot of time redoing this again… And nobody should.
I understand why the linux guys who recently ‘switch’ was so happy to say “It just work! Woa, awesome !”
Babaye
ps : feel free to contact me if you need help, maybe I can do something
Hi,
I irregular visit this site for quite a few months. This night i read the “modded down” comments and again know why I started reading osnews. It is about clueful poeple that share their knowledge and social abilities. Too bad so many of them get sorted out. “modded down” was much more interesting to me than the discussion “left up” because it shows what I like – open discussio. But maybe I really am just in the wrong forum 😉
Best wishes
Tutor
Tried again, minimal install w/ new partitioning scheme:
Drive 1:
/ (ext3) 14GB
swap 2GB
Drive 2:
/home (ext3)
Same error. I’ll check the MD5 sums just to make sure it’s a proper burn.
1.Code an OS yourself.
2.Use existing one.
3.Trash your PC
4.Buy PS2
There is no other way. One thing was stated here many times – there are no OSes that matches everyones needs. And I think it will not happen in the future – even the M A T R I X wasn’t perfect
. The solution – choose an OS which MOST match YOUR needs.
I got aureal to work, which made me jump for joy. Trying to get them to work caused me so much frustration before that I uninstalled linux. No luck with java yet, but it was my fault. And while you can view whats inside a “zipped” file using the file manager you can’t manipulate them. But setting that association was windows easy, right click, open with, and then a check box to set that as the default app. Still can’t get moz to open all clicked links.