Andrew D. Balsa has been following the progress of Mandrake Linux 9.1 and its hectic pace of development. In the first two articles of this series he described his initial impressions of both betas to give us the taste of things to come. In this third part he delves deeper. He investigates various ways to improve that desktop look – with anti-aliasing, true type fonts, menu and cursor shadows, desktop icons and KGamma colour calibration. All accompanied by suggestions to developers and some new screenshots.
Mandrake Linux 9.1 – The Beauty and the Beast
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Looks pretty good. Can it kick out RH now?
P.S.: What effect does mandrake’s financial woes have on development?
Pfiuuu, i was really frightened.
A Linux “review”, and especially about the favorite distro of every Linux troll, without the famous “it’s rocks!” mantra…
Thank you ‘anopenscroll’ ;-)))
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Screenshot 8: Incredible! Beta 2 installing inside Beta 2!
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BeOS could do that computing ages ago and with no need of an emulator. How does it go?: “complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems.”
Ok, mebbe my title was wrong. I don’t use MDK since 8.0 though, so I was just hoping for this one to be more innovative.
This release of Mandrake will probably only have 9000 bugs instead of the 9873 that release 9.0 did.
The review should perhaps be prefaced with a statement to the fact that the screenshots displaying antialiased text are optimized for LCD screens (I think Microsoft calls this ClearType). They look a little weird on a CRT display.
Beep !
9000 bugs, you know what? its very few. -873 bugs will have been a great work. Do you know that Mozilla alone have 12000 bugs (ok including RFE) ?
The French courts accepted Mandrake’s plans and gave them temporary bankrupt protection
The screen shots look nice and also the fonts.
There are several options. If you display fonts on your CRT intended for an LCD then yeah – it’ll look a little weird
They look a little weird on my LCD too — though I *am* using the analog connector rather than the DVI one. To me, the effect is like as if you were looking at your screen with a pair of powerful but inexpensive refractive binoculars and each glyph had slight chromatic aberrations around them.
I’m using RH8 and don’t like the subpixel font rendering at all. Though, what *really* irks me is that, using GNOME, I can’t use all the good `ole bitmap fonts for the desktop/nautilus. They just don’t show up in the font prefs panel. If anyone can tell me how to do this I’d be much obliged. Seems like a pretty heinous bug, but I must be doing something wrong.
[repeatedly tapping shoes together 3 times]
There’s no fonts like bitmapped.
There’s no fonts like bitmapped..
There’s no fonts like bitmapped…
I think you didn’t understand the utility of that. It is extremely useful in many cases. For instance if you want to launch Windows while running Linux on a SPARC! Could your “wonderful” (but dead!) BeOS do that? I guess it couldn’t. Needless to say it has numerous other applications like testing your own programs on a wide variety of processors you don’t personnally own. Wouldn’t it be nice to see if your latest program works on an Athlon64?
Could your “wonderful” (but dead!) BeOS do that? I guess it couldn’t.
Um yes, since Bochs is ported to BeOS too.
Hello,
Just to explain why I tested the install of Mandrake 9.1 Beta 2 inside bochs running on Mandrake 9.1 beta 2:
– It was my idea of a simple stability test. Mdk 9.1b2 passed this test with flying colors.
– It was fun for me, in the same way that recursive jokes are fun to geeks.
– It gave me a chance to show the great work from the bochs team.
– It was fun.
This was not intended as a proof of anything, I am not trying to prove that Linux is better/worse than <put your favorite OS here>. And I am certainly not going to compare Mandrake 9.1b2 with <put any other Linux distribution/release here>.
So, can we just go back to the fun part? 🙂
Andrew
– It was fun for me, in the same way that recursive jokes are fun to geeks.
I’ve got another mission for you. Run the Windows version of VMWare in Linux (using Wine) and boot Linux
I simply wonder how many develepors are working for Mandrake at this moment ? Are they paid right now for doing this release ?
KDE is a greart project. But am I the only one to think that this keramik style and these crystal icons are WAY too “playskool”-style ? I really like the clean look of GNOME/Bluecurve.
I know you can use Bluecurve on KDE but I just don’t understand why KDE guys chose keramik.crystal as their defaults.
In fact, the most surprising for me is that lots of people seem to actually like this look…
yes.. just installed kde 3.1; Pure playskool. I like the work, even crystal is OK, but keramik is sure sucky.
Availability of Mandrake RPMs was always a bit of a problem, some software I use was never available for it. With recent Mandrake troubles I worry that more software is going to only be available as generic RPMs, which often don’t install properly IME.
Come on…. for all that is holy. People are actually taking time to type a rant about KDEs default icons and theme. I for one happen to love the Keramik theme and cyrstal icons….. But for those that dont, youre a couple mouse clicks away from changing those defaults to somthing else. Or, download performance liquid from Mosfets as another great alternative. KDE-look.org also has a wealth of stuff. Whats funny though is Keramik and crystal are among the highest rated on KDE-look.org.
johnG –
turn off XFT for your gnome (export GDK_USE_XFT=0) and see if they turn up in font list.
Heheheh… I also think Keramik is butt ugly and was wondering if it was just me! 🙂
I love KDE and still don’t understand why Keramik was chosen as default theme instead of Mosfet’s High Performance Liquid, which is a lot better looking IMHO. Also, Conectiva Crystal icons are great and I use them nowadays but the old HiColor were great, too.
Cheers,
DeadFish Man
How can I get bluecurve for SuSE 8.1 KDE?
If anyone can tell me I would appreciate it.
I’m using beta2 of Mandrake 9.1 Yes the defualt icon seet blows major donkeys, BUT go to kde-look.org and download any of the numerous better icon scemes available there. What I like about Mandrake 9.1 beta 2 is that it intuitive and user friendly (as much so as linux can be) right out of the box. So the look might not be great by default but that’s nothing you can’t change with a few clicks of your mouse. About the only anaomoly I’m noticing with MDK 9.1 is some weird non-stardard version of Gtk that ships with it. It’s on my system yet fails in dependency tests. ah well. Maybe the kinks will be worked out if the final release of 9.1 ever see the light of day.
abb wrote:
> turn off XFT for your gnome (export GDK_USE_XFT=0) and see
> if they turn up in font list.
Thanks abb! I set GDK_USE_XFT to 0 in my .bash_profile, logged out then back in (with RH8, that restarts X), and the bitmapped fonts came up in my font pref panel.
With your tip, I now found a note in
/usr/share/doc/gtk2-2.0.6/README
which says:
* Xft support is not on by default. To turn it on set the environment
variable GDK_USE_XFT to ‘1’
GDK_USE_XFT=1
export GDK_USE_XFT
Thanks again.