“The first thing I noticed about the new Mandrake 9.0 Linux is that the goofy cross-eyed penguin is gone. Mandrake is pointing itself in a more sophisticated direction – it’s not drab like Red Hat, but elegant and inviting. It looks expensive.” Read the review at NewsForge.
Mandrake 9.0: It Takes Two, Baby
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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It just boot and hang after the kernel reaching PCI probing during the installation so I can’t install it at all on my Fujitsu Lifebook. Linux matter? NOOO since my notebook is running XP and RH8. IT IS Mandrake matter (and Suse too).
MD9 also fail during configuration on my server. Well, I just can say it is still not suitable for me.
Mandrake still *looks* shite, even though it may be technically the best thing ever. At least Red Hat looks presentable.
How come there are still loads of reviews for MD 9? Shouldn’t there be a MD 9.1 by now or something. Everywhere i go i see “Review MD 9”, Distrowatch does this every week, its like trying to remind me how rubbish it is.
I’ve tried it and it takes 2nd place to SuSE and RH.
There are distros for everything. If you just want a desktop system, get SuSE. Otherwise, there are several other serious distros out there: Slackware, Redhat, Debian and Gentoo.
Everything else is either too specialized or not worth mentioning. Either that or I forgot it
How come there are still loads of reviews for MD 9? Shouldn’t there be a MD 9.1 by now or something.
Yeah, I’m a little confused about that… It was released before RedHat 8.0, and only now are the majority of the reviews coming out. Maybe it took second place to other OS’s at the time in terms of peoples immediate interest.
Anyway, I still use Mandrake, and there are alot of things I like about it, far more than I dislike. I agree it looks pretty terrible to begin with, but if you head over to kdelook.org and that can be changed rather quickly.
I happen to think that mandrake is far from elegant. I think it looks pretty bad actually. I actually started my linux experience on mandrake, and thought I would never leave it. Once I tried different distrobutions, I saw how blind I was.
Mandrake’s control center is a good idea, but it always ended up locking on me, particularly when I tried to do network configuration. I usually ended up using webmin (which works without a flaw. I have one server left running mandrake, and the only reason it is still running it is because I have too much customized stuff on it to spend time converting to a new box.
I think mandrake has too much sloppy programming behind it, and it really causes a lot of instabilty in the GUI. I think Mandrake is too caught up in the add new features, raise the version number game. They need to have a massive code freeze, and do some serious bug checking of their code. Unfortunately, they can’t afford to do that.
Redhat is my distro of choice, mainly because of apt-rpm, I use the redhat network occasionally, since you are entitled to one free machine, I keep my laptop up to date with that, and apt-rpm. I’d rank SUSE second, and then probably debian, and then mandrake.
I dunno. As a Windows guy now taking the plunge into Linux (just curious what the hoopla is, even though I’ve ranted against Linux loyalists in the past) I chose Mandrake. 8.2 was decent, but didn’t detect most of my hardware. Redhat seems kinda daunting to install and doesn’t seem to be as plug and play friendly as Mandrake. The only thing I had to tweak was sound as I use an old Soundblaster AWE 32 and that was a simple Google search and then a running of the ISA tools to find the card.
The only thing I find weird is how interconnected everything seems to be in Linux. I use Netscape 7 to surf and I fired up AIM to communicate with someone I know. Afterwards, it seemed as though the PC was running really sluggish. I tried to print an Open Office doc and it would only print a quarter of a page or nothing at all. After a shut down, everything worked right until I ran Netscape again. Then I had issues with printing again. I blew away Netscape and reinstalled it and the problem went away. Just weird how AIM (I’m assuming that was what the problem was) caused my printing and the rest of the PC to choke.
Other than that, I’m really liking the fact I can surf, have a doc open, compile a program, AND have streaming music play without sound hiccups.
A lot of people emphasize the actual install of the distro to the complete abandonment of everything else.
The install is the easy part people. Tell the people how hard is was to get the MS fonts installed, the Nvidia drivers installed or the Matrox or ATI drivers for that matter. How easy is it to find the popular linux apps for the distro. How did the distro feel on the long haul like after three months of use?
These are things I would like to see tackled in a review.
Am I the only one? Thought I might do a living with Redhat8 review right before 8.1 was released public. See if I could submit it here or something. What do people think?
There was a great customization article on RH8 that covered apt and synaptic and plugins and configuring KDE back to some of the beloved defaults etc…etc.. That one rocked. I was thinking something along those lines but aimed more at what it was like to live with the OS over a long period of time.
does mandrake support conexant HSF(winmodems)..
actually conexant released drivers for redhat, mandrake,suse and even the source code.
http://www.mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv/
does mandrake support conexant HSF(winmodems)..
actually conexant released drivers for redhat, mandrake,suse and even the source code.
if you got the source, then you can build it on mandrake as well. and since mandrake is (or was) mainly on rh based, i don’t see a problem installing a package on mdk.
getting them to work with mdk, there’s the fun part.
i still have it installed in a partition… i never use it though. i tried many such as rh8, lycoris, lindows3, xandros, suse and a couple winlinux distros. didn’t like any of them, all were boring, slow, bug ridden, and had hardware/software issues.
also what happened to making linux fast like beos? did the community give up? or is it impossible with linux, to be efficient with a gui? so they’re making it easier to install software, play some games, configure the system, but not making it run faster than the beast that is XP?
Mandrake 9.0 is at best, poorly refined. One of the greatest disappointments of 2002 in my opinion. While companies like Suse and Red Hat have made huge leaps and bounds, Mandrake have been toying with what they want to obsess with next.
Mandrake: __TEST__ all of your packages __THOUROUGHLY__ before release and keep things like flashy init interfaces to last if at all. Face it: supermount is not yet ready for prime time either.
Debian is much better and less bloated.
I just installed Mandrake 9.0 on a Thinkpad 770Z and other than having a problem getting the PCMCIA modem and Card Bus working its been an overall good experience. Compared to my previous installs of Corel Linux and FreeBSD I would say it fairly painless and should be easy for anyone with decent hardware. The install sure is fast and in my few days of experience the system is pretty responsive on a not so cutting-edge piece of equiptment.
I think Mandrake is on the right course here to become a distribution that just might lure some folks away from the Redmond crowd.
Now if I could just get some sound working!!!
Apt-get and Uprmi are a must if you use MDK 9.0. They are very useful tools in updating, and adding new software that would normally not come with your install. Both tells deliver in so many levels that to live without them would lessen the experince.
http://plf.zarb.org/%7Enanardon/urpmiweb.php#third
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/contrib/texstar/linu…
P.S. If your CLI handicapped then set urpmi via the MDK Control-Center and install the Synaptic package which is the GUI front-end of apt-get.