The fourth installment of our series of Mandrake 9.1 reviews is now available for your consumption. This time, Andrew D. Balsa focuses his attention on the recently released third beta, coming on three CDs. He notes the improvements in the installation routine, marvels at the new desktop features, tries out a few of his “geek hardware” and is pleasantly surprised by their compatibility with the new Mandrake.
Mandrake 9.1 – More is [more | less | don’t know anymore]
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Why is this guy so obsessed with “red translucent cursors.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a red cursor.
And then the first section of his review is devoted to Kgamma and Ksensors which aren’t included in the beta 4 release. Mandrake’s ultimate goal is to cut down on the number of CDs people have to download–not increase them with trivial/minority preferred applications like Kgamma or the ugly Ksensors.
Other than that, it was a good ‘minireview.’
…definitely not a last will and testament. i have always liked mandrake for its bleeding-edge packages over the tried and tested ones on redhat. when its on the desktop, nothing else is more thorough in linux world than mandrake.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a red cursor.
”
I just installed ArkLinux on one of my machines the other day
and it also had the “red translucent cursor”
after seeing it I thought it was awesome!
i wonder if mdk are continuing with the minimal (X free, forgive the pun) install. if so I hope that gets some testing time too.
i also wonder what the state of the mandrake kernel is with regard to pre-emption and the scheduler? iirc rob love got rid of the last bottleneck recently.
a little off-topic but i hope they include some of the more work related tools in there too … lyx 1.3, octave, R, … and not just concentrate on tweekers like kgamma.
interestingly, a year or two ago, there was little choice for me… it was mandrake quite clearly… good hardware detection, god config tools, optimisation, red-hat-ish,… now the choices are lot more muddy and cloudy… i think there is an element of following the crowd… if enough people use mandrake then i’ll use it too because they’ll also have something to say about its bugs and workarounds… and maybe even create packages for it… even if distro XYZ-ix is better. i know knoppix is good – but i don’t trust enough people will support it.
with the emergence of a plethora of distros I think it is ever more important to formulate and stick to standards. otherwise we’re in danger of spreading the magic too thin and losing critical mass.
The link provided in the article points at a web site that has the subject header of the article in huge print, then a search engine beneath it. When you put Mandrake Linux 9.1 into the box and hit search, there are no results. Searching for Mandrake points to articles but none of them review 9.1. Am I missing something?
Works here. Try another browser, or another ISP.
Nice article with a lot of screen shots. Nice and comprehensive. I wonder what will happen to Mandrake Linux after MandrakeSoft bankrupts. Mandrake Linux is an essential Linux distro and it is too important…so I hope the development continues.
Novell has a Red blinking cursor in the pre 5.x days
~J
Alex; “Mandrake Linux is an essential Linux distro and it is too important…so I hope the development continues.”
BUY or they die!!!!!!
Is that the default on the install?
Seems kinda hard on anyone that happens to be colourblind to red (There’s more of them than you think).
Well, first, I am not obsessed with the red cursors, I just reported that they are missing in Beta 3.
Second, KGamma is an essential utility if you happen to have two monitors with different gamma settings. And now it´s part of KDE. As for KSensors, it´s not a tweaking utility, but a hardware monitoring tool. Both take very little space and hence could easily fit on CD3.
Last, development is going on at a brisk pace at MandrakeSoft, so I see no reason why 9.1 wouldn´t come out in late March/early April, as planned.
Andrew
PS: I also think lyx 1.3 is great, I´ll try to install it on Beta 4 and make some screenshots.
Oops. Spoke too harshly I guess–I didn’t think the author would actually read the comments on this site. 😉
I’ve never seen a red cursor but in my mind it just appeared to be a horrible idea–I guess I’ll have to see this for myself to truly find out.
“Both take very little space and hence could easily fit on CD3.”
Kgamma and Ksensor may be a nice thing to have but I believe Mandrake went into this with the goal of cutting down their packages to fit on 1 CD. And when you’re squeezing things onto 1 CD, every little meg saved helps. But as you say, if there is a CD 2 | CD 3 in the download edition (I hope not) then adding those 2 apps would make sense.
I personally would prefer that Mandrake focuses on delivering 1 CD with the most essential/most requested applications in a high quality manner and putting all the not so popular, not so necessary things on their “Contrib” FTPs or on additional CDs in retail boxed sets. This would save them quite a bit of work (less packages to focus on developing/fixing)and bandwidth (their own server and 3rd party mirror servers and the end users).
I would love to see in the next review some tests with md9.1 as guest… I tried it last night and can’t get networking “working”… md9.0 does work fine on my Windows 2000 host platform…
Anyone else maybe ?
-fredo
That´s exactly the point of this article. Do you really want a Mandrake 9.1 distribution on a single CD? or do you want a ¨fat¨ distribution with everything and the kitchen sink, on 3/4/5 CDs?
Honestly I don´t think a single CD distribution would do justice to the MandrakeSoft developers. The tradition of Mandrake Linux is that it´s a complete distribution. And I like it that way.
To get the red cursor you need a 4.2.99 XFree86, then follow the instructions in one of my articles. And also there is a new set of cursors under development at KDE-Look, check it out.
On running 9.1 Beta as guest: check out my next article, there is a surprise. 😉
Andrew
PS: Of course I read OSNews. Specially Eugenia´s articles. 🙂
>> On running 9.1 Beta as guest: check out my next article,
>> there is a surprise. 😉
When when when and where ? =:-)
-fredo
I agree with “buy or they die”
My question is what do I buy? My local computer store is selling Mandrake v9.0.
I don’t want to buy v9.0 knowing that v9.1 is due for release. I guess Mandrake will have to wait until release of 9.1 before I buy.
Does this make sense? Or am I missing something?
– Bruce