“With all the hoopla surrounding Linux lately I wanted to give it a try. Several people told me that for a newbie Mandrake was the way to go. As luck would have it MandrakeSoft was about to release their newest version, 9.0. I requested a copy to review from them and it was here in less than a week. A big thank you to the team at MandrakeSoft for the CD’s and for their help.” Read the review at TweakHound.
Mandrake 9.0 – A “Newbie” Ginning
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Sorry this is off-topic but that headline is absolutely awful. Eric (aka TweakHound) should be so ashamed of himself.
that headline is absolutely awful.
Are you telling me that you can’t stand the punishment?
I, of course, meant the above to be purely punintentional
Uh…I don’t get it.
has anyone else here had the same problem as me regarding XMMS’s tendancy to play MPEG videos at about one an a quarter speed in MDK9, this is extremely annoying! any ideas what i can do about it?
Why do use use XMMS to play video?! It’s basically an audio player, even if some video plugin are available.
rather use xine or mplayer
because i happen to like XMMS and previously i haven’t experienced such problems, it’s full screen performance and quality is far better than any other players i’ve tried, Xine for some reason is terribly slow in fullscreen mode, i will download and try mplayer, but really, i just want a fix for XMMS, it’s nice.
and why shouldn’t i use whatever i like to play videos?
ok, partition full seemed to be the problem, so back to XMMS nice Multimedia Player that it is
I’ve been having a helluva time getting AVI’s and DivX’s to play on my Mandrake 9 installation. All of the included players seem to not recognize these formats (even though I’ve verified the needed library’s for Divx, for example, are there).
Anyone else having this issue? It’s nice to have like Kazaa running under Linux now, but it sucks having to reboot into Windows just to see the episodes of the Simpsons I’ve downloaded. 8(=
Any ideas? Has anyone else ran into this?? Mpegs and such work fine… It’s just avi’s.
I tried MPlayer…It kept stealing all my CPU. Xine (and MPlayer for that matter) has an ugly, ugly user interface. I would like to try to use XMMS or Noatun to play movies (mpeg mostly) but I’m not sure what they need. Heck I can’t even figure out how to make Noatun play mp3s
You should take at look at PLF (Penguin Liberation Front) at http://plf.zarb.org, which supports lots of unofficial packages and plugins for Mandrake. The reason all codecs are not included in the official Mandrake are copyright-related, it seems. PLF provides all these plugins, and you can add a “software source” to your Control Center so that you just have to choose packaged and it then downloads and installs them automatically from the PLF mirror you chose.
I’ve installed the Xine-related plugins from PLF, and I didn’t have any single problem watching videos since then. :-))
of course Mandrake is the best distro of them all.
and of course the people from red hat are crowing
how they own Linux. the poor souls dont have a clue.
Mandrake for perfectionists. i bet this article really
upsets uegenia. what do u think ?
p.s. Mandrake for the rest of us too
After trying RedHat 8.0 I switched back to Slack and swore I would never use one of those cutsie-pie-for-sissy-beginner-distros ever again.
I am now eating crow because Mandrake 9.0 is the best distro I have aver run across.
I just loaded everything, and everything works! I didn’t have to fiddle around for an hour configuring everything.
I guess I have to say that “my hat is off to them”. Well done.
//and everything works! I didn’t have to fiddle around for an hour configuring everything. //
Come again? You switched *back* to Slackware, and you’re saying you didn’t have to configure anything in Slack?
Liar. Liar. Pants. On. Fire.
Dimwit.
I really like RedHat 8. Pretty much everything works out of the box in Redhat 8. The one exception is playing movies and mp3 files. It was easy enough making XMMS play mp3 files (using apt-get and the instructions in one of the OSNews articles). However, I haven’t figured out how to make noatun play mp3 files (or movies for that matter). I tried both Xine and Mplayer (using apt-get and rpm’s from freshmeat). Both the Xine and MPlayer interfaces are terrible. I actually liked Totem (a GNOME front end to Xine), but the current version keeps crashing. Xine played movies ok, but MPlayer just kept making my system hang. Any suggestions for making noatun or XMMS play mpeg movies would be greatly appreciated
I may try Mandrake soon… Not because of the movie player issue, but because of the poor Redhat support for KDE. I think KDE is a little farther ahead of GNOME at this point… Heck there isn’t even a show desktop button in GNOME. The file selector looks terrible too. That being said, the Nautilus desktop is beautiful. I have high hopes for GNOME 2.2 (anyone know when this is supposed to be released).
He was saying everything worked in mandrake 9. Hence his saying
“I am now eating crow because Mandrake 9.0 is the best distro I have aver run across.
I just loaded everything, and everything works! I didn’t have to fiddle around for an hour configuring everything.”
Its funny ’cause you called him a dimwit.
Gnome 2.2 will be released in February. But don’t expect many new features, no new file selector but a show desktop button (http://www.gnome.org/start/2.1/).
Is that something like a Widget?
(It had better be):)
those of you having trouble using noatun, doesn’t it require artsd to be started before it will run? what errors does XMMS throw up when trying to play MPEG videos and what version MPEG are they?
I made the swith to SuSE 8.1 from Mandrake 8.1… i’m gonna have to say SuSE is alot better distro. Mandrake is a good OS of beginners, but so is SuSE. I use to catch alot of signal 11 and signal 7 that would crash my X-Server. I’d get them for now reason.
SuSE has alot better support from the box and installing software packages from the cd’s are alot easier than in mandrake. it take me anywhere from 1 to 2 hours to sort through all of Mandrake software packages whereas i got everything i needed from SuSE in about 20 minutes, on top of that SuSE Professional comes with 7 cd’s… so saying “going through software packages is easier w/ SuSE” is saying alot… don’t know though, mandrake will always have a special place in my heart….
I’m finally able to play mpeg files using smpeg-xmms. I had to install xmms-dev (from rpmfind.net) because Redhat 8 didn’t come with xmms-config file. I also had install smpeg using a generic rpm I found (smpeg wouldn’t build for me). After these were in place, I was able to build smpeg-xmms easily. It seems to work very well.
Now I would like to make Noatun work… Any suggestions on making it play mp3 or mpeg movie files?
“I made the swith to SuSE 8.1 from Mandrake 8.1… i’m gonna have to say SuSE is alot better distro. Mandrake is a good OS of beginners, but so is SuSE. I use to catch alot of signal 11 and signal 7 that would crash my X-Server. I’d get them for now reason.
SuSE has alot better support from the box and installing software packages from the cd’s are alot easier than in mandrake. it take me anywhere from 1 to 2 hours to sort through all of Mandrake software packages whereas i got everything i needed from SuSE in about 20 minutes, on top of that SuSE Professional comes with 7 cd’s… so saying “going through software packages is easier w/ SuSE” is saying alot… don’t know though, mandrake will always have a special place in my heart…. ”
isn’t that to be expected though, after all 8.1 is the latest SUSE, 8.0 is a rather old MDK 9 is current and there were 8.1 and 8.2 before it.
there’s really not much point trying to get noatun to work unless you’re a fan of QT, aRts and plain nasty interfaces, i know i’m not. stick with XMMS now it’s working.
I just like to have everything working…. XMMS is a superb player.
well, when i started the aRts demon manually and then ran noatun i was able to play mpeg video with it, but it’s not much use really.
One additional comment on the install. I started the install, and while it’s not as pretty as Xandros’, it looked do-able – until I accepted the defaults for partition sizes. It turns out that what I accepted wasn’t big enough to install any applications to speak of, and by the time you find that out, there’s no going back. You’re screwed. Even re-booting did no good; it just picked up the install at the same point. I had to blow it out and I reinstalled Xandros.