“Are you looking for a desktop Linux that you can use right out of the box? If so, give Mandrake Linux 9.0 a quick spin. Whether you are an experienced Linux user, a Microsoft Windows user, new to computers, or an IT-IS manager, Mandrake Linux 9.0 could be the operating system (OS) for you or your organization.” Read the review at MozillaQuest.
Mandrake Linux 9.0, Desktop Magic
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Am I the only one that has problems with Mandrake 9? Many packages do not work correctly, such as Gimp (could possibly be one of the GTK libraries), Enlightenment and Wine. It’s almost impossible to actually manually install anything due to the apparently nonstandard library placement.
Has anyone else had problems with it? If so, how did you fix it? Or what other easy-to-install distro would you recommend? I do have experience with linux, but manually configuring a bootloader is still somewhat of a mystery to me, and theres no way in crap I could actually create an XF86Config file from scratch.
I can’t say enough about Mandrake. When I first tried linux, at the time RedHat 7.2 was most compatible with my hardware (although printing wasn’t working out of the box) so I stayed with that.
Then I had my motherboard(MB) die and had to replace it with a lesser known MB with integrated vid and sound. When I reinstalled RedHat, even though the correct drivers would loaded by the kernel, sound files were garbled but audio CD’s could play. Printing still didn’t work though. Font handling in 7.2 was also really bad. I even went through the trouble of adding and configuring true type fonts. However, it looked like the X server was configured to use freetype1 rather than 2 and even the TTfonts weren’t looking that great. Also, my vid card didn’t support hardware AA. Anyway, long story short, I downloaded Mandrake 9.0 to see if it would configure printing and my sound card correctly right out of the box.
Low and behold, Installation was a no brainer, it auto-detected everything including my windows partition. First thing I notice is that the font handling in mandrake with the same TTFonts was equal or better than with win98. I fire up a sound file and sound quality is better than I can remember with win98. I decide to print a test page… works out of the box.
So without being *too* long winded here, I have to say that I avoided Mandrake because I thought that it would be “dumbed down” rather than “user friendly”. Being a programmer I don’t have a problem using the CLI or man pages or figuring out cryptic file formats and tracing through endless hoops to try to figure something out since eventually it becomes a useful learning experience. However, I do not want to have to recompile an X server to use freetype2 or replace the printing subsystem, or start recompiling sound card drivers into the kernel on day 1 or 2. If I would have paid for RedHat, I would have expected more from it. Since I didn’t pay for it, I didn’t mind deleting it entirely from my HD. There are alot of time when I’d rather get some task accomplished at the moment rather than invest ‘N’ hours into figuring out all the details of how everything is “supposed” to work and then try to “make it worked the way it was ‘supposed’ to”. Even though I’ve done these things before they just become a pain in the ass after a while.
Which brings me to my point
Mandrake gives you the best of both worlds from my perspective. They care enough about productivity and usability that they make things easy to accomplish the first time if you aren’t familiar with all the details. They also maintain pretty good red hat compatibility and you can still tweak the system when you want to invest the time learning. In most cases, a huge learning investment is not required to use their tools to accomplish something. There are alot of GUI tools that are intuitive if you aren’t familiar with CL options.
As an example the other day I wanted to use urpmi to do an auto-install of kdevelop, which is like apt-get for debian. Even though I had to add some media sources I read the man page figured out what needed to be done and it was a relief to have all the dependent packages installed automatically. urpmi prompted me for the cds that it needed. Holy intelligent update batman! If only most programmers knew the difference between _being_ intelligent and _applying_ intelligence we’d have software utopia
I was seriously loathing haveing to install 20-30 dependent packages in order to get kdevelop working. As a side note, mandrake does include a GUI tool gurpmi. I wouldn’t have needed to tweak in this case except that the cdrom that was already configured to be used with urpmi frequently hangs on data transfers. For this reason I had to add to configure urpmi to use my second cdrom which entailed updating the media indexes for the rmps. Anyway, thank heavens for urpmi 
So, in summary, I believe that mandrake pays attention to detail, offers polished tools, and consistency. It seems they are making good decisions. I can be productive and also tweak if I want to, not because I *have* to due to config problems. Everything worked out of the box and, whether or not you pay for the distro you would expect no less from any company that wants to be considered professional. They chose the most stable up-to-date packages for font handling, sound drivers (ALSA) and CUPS printing.
I’d have to say that I had a misconception about Mandrake but I’m proud to have chosen a distro that delivers this kind of quality desktop experience. Easy to use shouldn’t be considered a weakness. It takes more time, thought, energy and consideration to make a distro easy to use rather than cryptic. Besides, I’ve never gotten a warm fuzzy thinking about my decision to use windows….
Lycoris is best for new users becasue everything is preinstalled and works right out of the box. things like flash, java, and wine…..
I don’t mind Mandrake, but I wish there was an easier way to select packages at installation. There are so many packages, it’s practically impossible to install just what you want in under a day….frig, might as well use gentoo….
I’m also growing quite fond of Libranet. It’s got some knockout features….and is put together better than mandrake IMO. plus, being built on debian certainly doesn’t hurt it either…but the install is not all pretty gui like mandrake…but simple enough to use if you don’t let it scare you.
My top three…
1) Lycoris
2) Libranet
3) Mandrake
But that’s just me….and my needs are my needs alone. others probably disagree, but that’s ok…that’s why there’s so many distros out there…
Mandrake 9 was a huge disappointment…it takes forever to boot with a default install/kernel. These “easy to use” distros are getting on my nerves because they hide WAY too much from the end user. Why must these people try and replicate WinXP?
GNOME 2 is sluggish on my P4 2.4 ghz with 512 MB of ram and a 120 GB HD. KDE isn’t much better, although it is of course the better looking desktop.
The last Mdk I ran was 8.2 and it was ok. But then I saw the light. Once you go slack, you never go back.
Mandrake 9 for first-timers? Who thought that one up?
Read not too very far into the review and the reviewer is relating how he got USB to work glitchlessly with his Mandrake with a command-line parameter change. Yes, the very thing new users are looking for!! Xandros, for one, is a distro where USB works. Period.
The review goes into Mandrake Power Pack, which comes with Windows interoperability (Transgaming, too.) Mandrake wants you to pay more for the ability to run Windows apps, while Xandros includes Codeweaver’s Crossover – a hundred bucks worth of software all by itself – in it’s $99 price. Lindows is also busy vacuuming your wallet with these new point releases every few months, but failed to deliver on it’s we-can-run-Windows hype in a big way.
Xandros (or Libranet) are better desktop distros than Mandrake or Red Hat. The big name distros have all failed to excite the desktop market. It’s the little guys’ turn.
..any of these distros support USB2 yet?
Do any of these distros support auto detection of ISA PnP cards yet?
Major source of frustration on out older machines.
mandrake is OK, but…my top 3 for new uers would be:
1. Xandros
2. Lindows
3. RedHat 8
“But then I saw the light. Once you go slack, you never go back.”
Man, how can you even compare Slack with Mandrake? They’re not even in the same category – like comparing apples to oranges. Slackware does have a lot of advntages, but ease-of-use ‘works right out of the box’ is definitely not one of them. Well, maybe it is if you know what you’re doing, it’s probably easier to set up than Mandrake/Red Hat, but not for first-timers.
Xandros and Libranet both support USB 1.1. I don’t know if they support USB 2, but if they don’t it’s something that would quickly be corrected.
As for users living with in the ISA ghetto, Xandros, Librnet, Lindows, et al are written for Pentium 2 or better. Perhaps it’s time to be movin’ on up to PCI?
Others would probably swear by Mandrake 9, but I couldn’t get comfortable with it.
Fonts look ugly out of the box. The best way to describe them is broken. Other distro at least have their non AA fonts at least looking similar to non AA Windows. But I guess that is not only a Mandrake 9 problem, try turning off AA fonts in Redhat 8.
Also is it just me or do others think that the Mandrake installation is not exactly that easy to do. I have always found the Redhat’s installation easier.
“comparing apples to oranges”
It’s easy to compare two fruit. Just like it’s easy to compre two cars. Whoever inveted that saying should be shot.
sorry for the off topic post.
I recently installed Linux on my Eurocom 3100C a 466 Mhz desktop replacement notebook with 96Mo of ram. ANd yes the install went like a charm autodetecting all from the modem to the video card all is configured and up. But is it normal for it to 1) have a i686 optimised kernel installed ? and 2) that wheather be it under gnome or kde that all is dog slow? 15-30 sec before any app opens up!!! I mean Yeah for usability and applications it truly can replace windows, but BOOOOO for making a decent computer feel like a 486.
My 2 cents
akhar
I have epox8k3a+ motherboard, with highpoint raid controller. And mandrake installer won’t recongnize my harddrives installed in raid configuration (ofcourse on raid channel). anybody know any workaround, other than having them off from raid channel ?
“Mandrake wants you to pay more for the ability to run Windows apps, while Xandros includes Codeweaver’s Crossover – a hundred bucks worth of software all by itself – in it’s $99 price.”
Last I checked, the MDK Power Pack edition was only $69 which is alot cheaper than the current Xandros offering (not that there is anything wrong with Xandros. It’s a fine looking OS and I’ll probably use it or Lycoris some time in the future on one of my machines) but who cares if you’re running MS office on a Linux machine when you’ve got StarOffice, OpenOffice, Halcom, KOffice, Abiword, etc, etc which all work fine and don’t support a bad habit.
I always like to intstall and review a large number of different Linux distributions. Mandrake is by far my least favorite. It seems like they always release their products about 3 months too soon. Their product looks extremely nice, but always strikes me as being very buggy (which is not the way to impress new users).
For new users, I would recommend:
Xandros
Lycoris
Libranet
In just that order.
no offense, but I would be inclined to say that Red Hat 8.0 has now taken the best general purpose crown back
I was not impress by Mandrake 9.0 either. In less than a week, I ran into so many bugs that it was not fun to continue using it. Most of their configuration tool are not intuitive and I manage to crash them almost every time. The distribution looks more like a collection of softwares put together without a coherent organization and any real testing.
I think Redhat 8.0 is a more better quality product, much more robust, tested and well organised.
Running Red Hat 8.0 & Mandrake 9.0 on two different machines: MDK 9.0 installed without any problem on both machines while RH 8.0 installation went ok on only one and crashed everytime on the other (never seen MDK installation crashing on any machine by the way) + RH 8.0 had many many desktop freezes which made me getting mad (and my mouse cursor as well), and also X breaks regularly for no reason. Never seen that under any version of Mandrake. So OK, RH8.0 desktop might have interesting things & look but I wouldn’t use it for anything! On the other hand, MDK9.0 might have a few glitches, but I can work with it, all day, and I feel confortable with it 🙂
Every review of Linux ive read in the last 2 years always miss the point entirely. Especially the ones that claim “Linux is ready for the desktop”. Linux is not ready for the desktop
Yes-modern Linux distros are easy to install
Yes-modern Linux distros detect most hardware during install
Yes-there are various full featured Office suites available
Yes-there is loads of software available
The problem with Linux is 3rd party hardware support. Noone ever seems to mention this. Linux will die unless it gets third party companies writing Linux drivers for hardware.
And to get this it needs a platform that doesnt change every week. Just look at the nvidia drivers-they have different ones for different kernels and different distributions.People who write the drivers for thier hardware want just ONE platform (eg the WDM).
There also needs to be a standard,easy way to install these drivers without recompiling kernels or compiling code.
Id needs to get to the stage where i can go out and buy a piece of hardware and install the supplied Linux drivers on my 3 year old distribution and not have to upgrade or compile anything (like i can with win2000).
Thats when Linux will be ready for the desktop
“I’d needs to get to the stage where i can go out and buy a piece of hardware and install the supplied Linux drivers on my 3 year old distribution and not have to upgrade or compile anything. Thats when Linux will be ready for the deskto”
I both agree and disagree with that.It depends which desktop market we are talking. Some companies bought hardware every 3 or 4 years, most PC are the same and they do not upgrade them. These companies just need their system to be set up once and for all, maintain by a reliable provider and that’s it!
But in general, I agree with you that it is not acceptable for the desktop market to have to recompile the kernel to install new hardware. That’s a very serious flaw in Linux.
Linux in its entirety is still ugly. I mean, lets face it…besides stability and reliabilty, in order for a product (they do sell them, right?) to take off REALLY needs to be an eyecandy cosmetically, intuitive and fast. I don’t like Bill but unfortunately, I can’t help to admire their product.
Mandrake is still feels like an OS that was forced on the desktop which was primarily made for other tasks. So goes the story of Linux. I’m just glad that Redhat is on its way to better cosmetics (if you can swallow its sluggishness).
I am a Linux user (preferred Mandrake for years and now using Psyche 8.0) but it seems linux is never for the desktop. I know many think it otherwise but look at the whole OS mess from a distance… sorry guys Windows and MAC OS still stands out.
There maybe distros out that are still simple and light and beautiful. But the most popular ones are bloating, ugly, UNintuitive, puzzling, no-standard interfaces. I think they should hire a pre-schooler as an adviser on intuitiveness :-).
Distro companies are just feasting upon poor linux that was made primarily not as a desktop OS. Heck, I think Linus started it as an alternative to the expensive UNIX and not to compete on the desktop.
mandrake 9 is a big, bloated, bug fest.red hat 8 is another big distro, better than M9 IMO, but the two things these two do that bug me is not install things like flash automatically. or in RH’s case, not give you something like mp3 playback out of the box. lindows doesn’t come with anything out of the box, you have to pay for it initially, and then you have to figure out what you want to install through cnr.
i really believe that Lycoris is the best bet for a new user because everything is preinstalled and preconfigured with full multimedia capability. and it’s full default install is only like 800 megs. sure you need to add openoffice, but you can do that for free, and the install is pretty easy.
try watching a total newbie try to install flash. it’s a joke. little things like that really turn off new users.
some people may say that distors like lycoris HIDE the true power of linux. how can you possibly say that when there’s a friggin konsole icon right on the kicker? sure, if you want to compile stuff, you need to download and install the devtools cd. big deal, two cd’s instead of three like RH and mandy.
and Lycoris also has IRIS, which will eventually get populated with more apps, and the apps that get added are what newbies would want. how many of lindows cnr apps would a newbie need? half of them are programming tools…big deal.
the important thing to remember is that distors like this are geared to TOTAL NEWBIES. Lycoris make a choice of what they consider are the best apps to install and preconfigure to meet most simple desktop users needs. everything else is still there…it’s linux with a KDE desktop. nothing is *hidden*.
and again, you can download and try it for free, which you can’t do with lindows or xandros.
i really think lycoris has the edge for new users. the other big distros are too complicated and/or bloated to give someone who is not a geek a good first impression.
i think they’ll hit a home run with BERYK when it comes out.
it’ll be interesting to seee who survives in a couple years. I hope it’s lycoris, but they don’t have the marketing dollars like Lindows. xandros appears to be a good choice as well…but you can’t try it for free…
Lycoris, wins it hands down at this time as far as i’m concerned.
Don’t want to be the pedant but comparing apples to oranges is fair.
1. Everyone knows what it means – communication has been carried out.
2. The comparison means comparing apples to oranges rather than comparing Golden Delicious to Cox’s Pippins.
3. Comparing Ferrari Testarossas and Mini Coopers is an equivalent argument and that’s comparing 2 cars.
etc…
Well, it looks like I’m the only one happy with Mandrake LOL. Just out of curiosity where is the bloat? I picked what I wanted installed, I also shut off all non-essential daemons that were set to boot by default, I only installed KDE but still have the GNOME libs, etc. I chose not to install alot of the extra software until I need it. I only installed a few GNOME apps like evolution for one. My fonts look great and I’m not even using AA. My P2 450 128MB ram boots faster than when I had RedHat 7.2 installed. Konq file browser opens fast.. in fact all my KDE apps open fast.
Where are the speed issues, I hammered this computer quite a bit – downloading ISO’s, compiling software, creating a 360MB ISO backup, all while listening to an audio CD. KDE was still highly responsive. Not sure if it’s because I’m using an i586 build instead of i386 but I don’t know… the only time I noticed degradation was with Sun ONE studio since I didn’t meet the ram requirement (shy by 128MB)
~ Just wanted to test out java though.
Where are the distro bugs? My setup is as solid as a rock. No freezes, hiccups, nothing. I notice buggy software for sure. KDE is no panacea. Some of their apps like KOrganizer all of a sudden decide to time shift all of my scheduled appts by 4 hours ?? That has nothing to do with Mandrake though. RedHat package manager crashes if you hammer the UI too quickly. So sure there are buggy apps. Same thing happened with the package manager when I was running red hat But what is meant by “buggy distro”? Are we talking the aggregate collection of software or something about how things are set up? I’m curious to get some specifics on this because I havn’t noticed anything annoying about Mandrake other than some changes of perfectly good KDE admin tools like the menu manager for example. They replaced it with a stripped down version with a GNOMEish look to it.
The other thing I find interesting is that it seems that distros like mandrake,lycoris, xandros, are only being recommended for newbies. I’m no computer newbie and not a linux newbie either. I have no desire to spend the majority of my time working with the operating system layer. GUI stuff saves me time. Productivity is in the application layer.
I mean from OS Concepts (Silbershatz/Galvin 5th edition) – “An operating system is a program that acts as an intermediary between a user [of the computer] and the hardware. The purpose [of an operating system] is to provide an environment in which a user can execute programs in a convienent and efficient manner.”
I mean it’s one thing to optimize and customize, but to accept that in order to for things to function properly day to day that someone is required to get their hands involved with OS internals all the time is just non-productive. Just because you *can* do it, doesn’t mean that you should have to or want to for that matter.
So, long story short, I am all for ease of use, usability and user friendliness in order to make more efficient use of my time. I don’t mind working with non-graphical installers, and having to configure cryptic options if there is no other choice, but there is. Why not recommend distros like xandros, lycoris, and mandrake to non-newbies? What is wrong with ease of use?
…could I take a review seriously from such a fugly website.
“Perhaps it’s time to be movin’ on up to PCI?”
Sure, send me some $$$ so I can get a newer mobo and some PCI cards to replace the perfectly functional ISA ones in our existing hardware.
When I started using Linux, it made older hardware work much better than if it were running, or was able to run, the existing dominant software. Doesn’t seem so anymore.
Out here in California Fry’s stocks Mandrake (standard and power pack) for $39 and $89, respectively…
Brad, while there ARE millions of older systems out there, there are millions of newer systems out there (and millions more to come) stuffed with fan-cooled graphics cards, a gig of SDRAM goodness, and FSB processors spiraling upwards to 4 GHz. If Linux is to succeed on the desktop it MUST evolve – older hardware will inevitably be left out.
I know for a fact that Mandrake 9.0 supports USB 2.0.
“there are millions of newer systems out there (and millions more to come) stuffed with fan-cooled graphics cards”
Yeah I know. A friend of mine has one of those fan cooled dual chip accelerator cards in his machine.
It will not work, as it’s not supported yet, even thought it’s been out for about a year or so.
I have been a regular reader of OSNEWS and any review I have seen about Linux distros or even arguments for migrating to Linux focus only on ease of installation, recognition of existing hardware, availability of Office Suites and ease of updating from the disto manufacturer’s site or CDs. Unfortunately for me as a recent convert to Linux (from the Windoze world) this is not enough. All distros that come out nowadays (or the majority of them) have all these features. However as a Windoze user there are things I could do (I am not talking availability of specialized software here, but basic OS features) that I just can’t do in Linux. Linux will only be accepted into the home or desktop market when these things are made easy for duds like me to do.
Examples (and these are distro-independent):
1. I like to use Galeon or Mozilla as my browsers of choice and KMail as my email client of choice. However there is no way for me to easily say that any mailto: link that I click will always be opened in KMail. If I click an email link in Mozilla it opens Mozilla Mail and not KMail.
2. Vice versa: If I click on a URL in KMail it will by default open it only in Konqueror. Of course I can right-click and copy to clipboard which will give me the option to open it in Konqueror or Netscape or Mozilla, but that is not the solution, it is a work-around. And incidentally I do not even have Netscape on my machine and so that option should not even be shown!
3. Coming back to email clients: Linux should have a standard for storing email. I know it stores it as text and that is good. However I am talking about eestablishing standards in terms of location of the mailboxes and so on like BeOS does. One can use any email client in BeOS and also use multiple clients and yet all mail, previous and current and future, will always be accessible. It is not the case in Linux. Is it so hard to do this? When I switched from KMail to Mozilla Mail to Evolution to try out these for a few days (remember I had all my old Windoze email that was migrated to Linux too), I had to have a Linux-savvy friend move mailboxes from here to there to everywhere every time because each client stores emails in different directories!
4. I tried to use KOrganizer to manage my tasks and appointments, I did everything according to the manual, but I never got any reminders at all. I tried KOrganizer in Red Hat 7.3 and in 8.0. I now run 8.0. I RTFMed KOrganizer to death and still could not get the reminders to work. I finally wrote the author and he said I was supposed to run t he alarm daemon and also I had to save my calendar. I was not aware that these were pre-requisites for the reminders to work, these were not mentioned in the documentation. As a dumb Windoze user I am used to being mollycoddled when it comes to documentation. By the way, I ran the alarm daemon and saved my calendar and the reminders still do not work and I have no idea why! So I just stopped using KOrganizer and am desperately looking for something to manage my appointments and tasks.
5. Installing new software (not from Red Hat’s web site or the installation CDs) is another major problem in Linux. When I download something and install it, I do not find it in my menu or the Kicker or anywhere. The only way I can run it is to open a Terminal window and type the program name followed by an ampersand. And if I do not know the program name, I am screwed.
6. Linux is supposed to be stable. Unfortunately for me it has not been so. The Kicker crashes and restarts itself every now and then, KMail crashes every now and then, my DVD drive is always on /dev/cdrom instead of /dev/dvd (it was the case even on RH 7.3), my DVD drive does not recognize DVDs at all (it says something to the effect of invalid media or incorrect file system or something like that), I am suddenly unable to watch MPEG movies from XMMS (I have no idea why, it was working all along and just stopped working). Anyway, all I use my machine for now is KMail and Mozilla! CD writing has started to create coasters now in the last few days. My drive is fine. I know that because I have VMWARE installed and it runs Win2K and I am able to write good CDs from Win2K.
Conclusion:
I am looking for reviews, not just from OSNEWS, but from any site that reviews Linux distros, that deal with things like this instead of all of them saying basically the same thing – Wow, it recognized all my hardware, wow I am able to access my Windoze partitions (by the way I have no windows partitions, I switched to Linux cold turkey. I installed VMWARE to test my CD writer), wow the desktop and icons look cool etc. Will someone oblige?
Cheers
Mohan.
good points. when we get these items figured out, linux will THEN be ready for prime time….for everyone’s prime time.
the email browser thing drives me crazy, because I use phoenix and kmail…it’s annoting that clicking a link that was emailed to me brings up konqueror. why does this have to be so difficult?
it’s easy to forget some of the real usability issues, as we linux users tend to learn to fix something then do it instinctively the next time we reinstall. new users would never figure out this stuff and just go back to windows.
again, good post there buddy.
I agree with tilt. I’m a linuxnewby and i had no problems at all to install Redhat 7.3 and 8.0, Mandrake 8.2 and 9.0, no problems whatsoever, but what stopped me from using it is that programs that worked out of the box, stopped working the next day or the day after. No more internet, no more Licq and so on. And sound works with Xmms, but not with Xine. After a while looking at the soundconfiguration tools (lot of them, ????), Xine has sound, xmms doesn’t work anymore and so on. And then these daemons are whatever it is, i have to turn out what i don’t use, but i don’t know or understand what can or cannot turn out, without breaking some more apps! That’s why Linux is not ready for us simple windowsusers, not the install of the distro. I would love to use Linux on my desktop, but for me it’s not ready yet!
English is not my first or second language, so sorry ….
“5. Installing new software (not from Red Hat’s web site or the installation CDs) is another major problem in Linux. When I download something and install it, I do not find it in my menu or the Kicker or anywhere. The only way I can run it is to open a Terminal window and type the program name followed by an ampersand. And if I do not know the program name, I am screwed.”
This can be an issue at first. Some programs play nice with the KDE menu, some don’t. If you right click on the K button that brings up the menu, you’ll see an option “menu editor”. It will let you place a menu item instead of having to open a terminal and run in the background.
“[i]CD writing has started to create coasters now in the last few days. My drive is fine. I know that because I have VMWARE installed and it runs Win2K and I am able to write good CDs from Win2K.[i]”
This one is definitely tricky since there are so many things that could potentially go wrong. I have an old mitsumi cr-2801TE, which is a 2x write 4x read. Definitely not state of the art
They stopped supporting this model so it will only write to 650 and 700 MB discs after you do a firmware upgrade. While I havn’t had any unexpected problems, the settings and discs you use while recording can cause misburn.
While I really can’t specifically address the problem you are having since I don’t know the exact circumstances, when I was ripping audio cd’s I did have a few problems. Some of the newer CD ripped perfectly. Some of my older CDs with more scratches would only rip halfway through. However, my creative labs 32x is flakey and frequently hangs on cds if they are not ‘perfect’. This happened alot in windows, I’d just get a blue screen – device not ready error and had to keep retrying over and over until the cd finally could “overcome” the error. However, in linux, I was surprised to find out that if an IO process hangs in kernel land, the process goes zombie, then eventually defunct, since killing the process could potentially leave kernel data in an inconsistent state. So the only way to kill a defunct process is either to try to kill the parent, then hopefully the ‘init’ process will kill the orphaned, defunct process, or you have to reboot heh. But anyway, I also switched cdrom drives and found out that my “cheaper” drive didn’t support DAE (digital audio extraction), so I was out of luck there. Then I changed settings so the cdwriter could be used to read the cds and it still hanged up to the same point. So, some cd’s just don’t work and that just sucks
But as a helpful hint….
if you are running a gui based cdburner or whatever, run it from the terminal with either some kind of debug option or in verbose mode and the program will usually tell you what is going wrong. Before I upgraded my firmware I attempted to burn a 700MB iso. Toward the end of the disc, I was getting io errors and track errors (but didn’t know it until I ran in verbose mode. Sometimes it would burn perfectly through to the end but when attepting to close the session, I would get a ‘non-existent track’ error. And of course thinking that I had already upgraded the firmware months ago, thought that the cdwriter must not like my cds. 
Come to find out, I double checked the firmware version and of course I didn’t have the lastest heh. After that everything worked fine.
Venom, thanks
However, I have a Lite-On cd writer which worked perfectly in 7.3, was working in 8.0 too, perfectly, till a few days ago. And no, I do not use a GUI tool to write CDs, I use the command line to create ISOs and write them onto blanks.
As for creating icons in Kicker, yeah, I discovered the method you mention, but that is not what I am talking about.
Lycosir User, thanks, I just have gotten sick of reading the same kind of reviews over and over again and thought I’d raise some real usability issues concerning getting every user in the world on Windoze to switch to Linux. I wish BeOS were alive and growing, that would have been my OS of choice over anything else, but c’est la vie
the important thing to remember is that distors like this are geared to TOTAL NEWBIES.
First off, I don’t think Mandrake is for total newbies. Total newbies should use a completely simple distro, one made for the home desktop and nothing else. Mandrake tries to be everything, which is good for me, it has Apache (I’m a PHP programmer, that’s what made me use Linux in the first place) SSH, so I can access my computer from other places, it’s install was simple, it supports most (not all) of my hardware.
Mandrake, imho, is for windows users who consider themselves power users. This group is actually really big, and I consider it Mandrake’s primary target audience. Windows power users will figure Linux out, relatively quickly (Speaking from experience) and are able to do what they want. Windows prevents them from doing some serious tweaking, Linux is good for this. Mandrake is fully functional, it might not be good for someone who’s never used a computer before, but for someone who knows what they’re doing on Windows, it is easy and powerful.
So don’t come out with all the ‘can average joe use it’ garbage, that’s not its target audience.
things these two do that bug me is not install things like flash automatically.
There is actually a reason. The mandrake distribution features open source software and only open source software. Flash is *not* open source. I’m not sure if it’s distributed in the power pack or not. It’s the same with the nividia drivers, closed source. Get over it. It doesn’t take long to install it (Download it to the plugins folder in Mozilla). I think it’s better this way anyway. It encourages Open source developers to work on their own versions, so we don’t become reliant on closed file formats. Besides, windows doesn’t come with flash (iirc, not completely sure).
Though I do hope in the next version they include phoenix (http://mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/) and Alavaro’s MSN (http://sourceforge.net/projects/amsn/) which would really make it easier for people to switch. (Used to reboot into windows to chat, not anymore,thanks to AMSN. Phoenix is also much faster than Mozilla, Mozilla is extremely slow in Mandrake (No quick start option, too much stuff I don’t want, plus phoenix has lots of innovation going into it, so much more useful.)
That’s my comments for the day.
I am running MDK for about two years.
During this period I haven’t seen such a buggy
release as 9.0. Supermount doesn’t work properly,
HPLJ has an unwanted top margin, a network
samba printer is _not_ detected properly, xpdf
and nedit complain about an absence of some files…
I guess that’s enough to mention a few.
Still, I like MDK. I (want to) believe that 9.1
will be (nearly) fine.