When I first started playing with Linux (RedHat Distribution — Version 5.2 Deluxe), it was a present from a father’s friend in Boston. As I recall that is the only version of RedHat I ever got to work correctly without any major problems (like “Kernel Segmentation Error” or something to that effect).Note: The author of this article is not a native english speaker. Please excuse the grammar used at times… Also, please note that all opinions are those of the author and not necessarily those of osnews.com.
Introduction
I then remember I faded away back into the Windows world (I was pretty young back then so I don’t remember much). After a few years (before 2 years or so), I remembered Linux again when someone started saying how cool it was and stuff so I tried to find a distro for me, so I found a distro called Mandrake (version 8.0 back then).
Mandrake has progressed a lot since then and the rest of this “review” will talk about their latest version 9.1.
Part I – Installation and first impressions
As soon as I finished downloading Mandrake 9.1 (all 3 CDs), I put it into my DVD-ROM drive (I also got a SONY CD-Writer but I didn’t want to take any chances because it didn’t work with Mandrake 9.0) and then — because I was on windows at the time — the autorun came up and i pressed “Install Mandrake Linux”, so it rebooted and entered mdk’s installation.
I now, like an average user would do started to panic, this is how it was: *starts trying to move mouse* –but the cursor wouldn’t move! Mandrake Linux always worked with this mouse… I rebooted, but it did it again. I did not let that to stop me from installing Mandrake so i tried to use tab and to my surprise, it worked! But could the average user do this or just have the patience to just use the keyboard?
After installing it with the keyboard I was wondering if the mouse was going to work when I reboot and I kept on thinking about it because my mouse was PS2, not a USB one which people are saying there are problems sometimes. It booted up into Mandrake and it all worked, so I was so relieved!
I might know a thing or two but when it comes down to manually installing new drivers I am useless and I don’t know where to start, but happily it didn’t come down to that 🙂
I started to go around looking at what differences there were from 9.0 and there were a LOT of differences! The MandrakeGalaxy theme (Gnome and KDE) were set up automatically and it gave all my applications the same look. The Mandrake Control Center was layed out differently than 9.0 as well, new icons and colors.
I installed the ISDN drivers with my internal ISDN modem and got online within minutes. The first thing I did was to run MandrakeUpdate and selected the secsup mirror. After the waiting for it to download the small update list, there were about 4 updates available so I selected all four and tried to update, but it couldn’t download the files — so i thought I’ll do this later because maybe the mirrors are full at that moment.
I finished looking around and familiarising myself with the changes and decided to actually use it….
Part II – Oh No!!!
I was trying to see if “kopete”, a famous multi-IM client for KDE came with Mandrake, but it didn’t. I had to go to Kopete’s site and download a 3rd party Mandrake 9.0 kopete package which kept crashing in certain stuff. I was very disappointed because of this.
I started to customize KDE the way I wanted it and I found this “Terminals” menu which had about 7 different consoles and I ask everybody, WHY? All anybody would need is Konsole if you are under KDE or whatever the Gnome one is if your in Gnome. Just think, if there wasn’t TOO many of the same stuff, maybe mandrakesoft could be less than 3 CDs, or look more polished.
Most people just use what came with their distribution and do not care or know how to install other software, like kopete for example, and then they go around flaming the distributions for having poor Instant Messaging Support. Kopete is good enough to replace ALL IM programs that come with Mandrake, and soon with the 0.7 release, it’ll have perfect IRC Support and a new Yahoo! IM Plugin 🙂
I opened up OpenOffice.org and KWord and I was surprised to see that Mandrake made a good job on the fonts all over the distribution, which was very nice for a change. I decided to install the NVidia drivers, which I optained from Texstar’s place. His RPMs automatically edited my /etc/X11/XF86Config-4! The biggest surprise came when the NVidia drivers in 9.1 didn’t ruin my fonts as it happened in the past.
Note from author: In order to be able to use OpenGL I had to, as root, chmod 777 /dev/nvidia0 and some other thing in /dev/, which you can find by typing “glxgears”, if the opengl gears come up, your ok, if not, chmod the thing it says in the error.
I just wanted to see just how much better Mandrake 9.1 was…. so i launched up K3b, which at last came with Mandrake. Its setup tool at last knew that my Reader was a reader and not a writer and that my writer existed. After the K3b Setup finished, I restarted k3b and went into the Settings, where it did not remember that my burner/reader even existed. I have never managed to burn or even get close to burning in Linux before.
Editor’s request: Please do not tell me to use console tools to do this, I don’t want to, and neither does the average guy want to 🙂
Part III – Conclusion
Mandrake Linux is getting there, but there is still a long way to go. I love linux a lot, but something just keeps making me stick to dual booting with windows — mostly the games.
Once and if Linux in general (addressed to ALL distros) get their act together, fix dependency hells, hardware support etc.. it might be a viable alternative to Windows.
I would also like to take the opportunity to say that the Download edition is not the same as the Standard edition which is on Sale. The Standard edition contains more drivers and a lot more stuff you’d normally have to manually download and install.
he was pretty young back when 5.2 was out? and he thinks mandrake 8.0 was “way back then”
damn…I am getting old.
I’d be curious to know under what circumstances
was this error exlusive to Red Hat (as opposed to
bad hardware, say). You can accuse Red Hat of many
things, but shipping shoddy kernels isn’t one of them.
why is it that every review I read about linux ends with the conclusion that its ” not quite there yet”. It seems like linux is stuck in this “zone”. Can We all have a big party when Linux gets “there” I’am an ex Amiga/BeOS user
and I’m stuck in Windows hell to get my work done. If Linux ever gets “there” or Microsoft ever gets a real threat from another OS, Will someone call/email me so I can run to the store to get some supplies. Thanx in advance!!!
In both senses. Some of the things he mentioned simply are not true.
For example:
Everything can be installed from only 2 cds and there are not 7 different terminal programs, only 3.
Anyway, my experience was very nice. I really like 9.1. While maybe it is not ready for everyone it is the ebst distro I’ve tried so far.
BTW: I think Linux will be truly considered an alternative by common users in late 2003 6-9 months from now. Why?
– Distributions are increasingly focusing on the desktops and developers are also pushing the desktop momentum
– Kernel 2.6
– ReiserFS 2
– KDE 3.2 (with many improvements in usability, new apps like Kroupware and many will be very mature like KDEvelop 3 etc.)
-GNOME 2.4 (also apps like Galeon 2,GIMP 1.4, and many others will be ready and integrated well into GNOME)
– New Ximian products, Evolution 2, Red Carpet 2, Ximian Desktop 2 etc.
– New OpenOffice.org/Staroffice
– new Mozilla
– new GCC
– Mplayer
AND SO ON, there will be an incredible amount of new/improved applications and technologies. Speed improvements and because Linux will make headway into businesses it will soon gain the attention of average desktop users.
been burned by Linux distros MANY times especcially when they were praised for being excellent… but once I finally got CD 1 and was too impatient to download CD2 and CD3 as the servers are extremely slow I installed 9.1….and guess what? ALL and I do mean ALL of my previous problems with linux are GONE!!! I mean COMPLETELY gone!!!! Sound works automagically, Network works automagically, mp3s can be playe doff my windows xp partitions… I mean every complaint I had with Linux besides Games is completely gone with this release! I cannot wait until i can make a full install after i download CD2 and maybe CD3! aight well, off I go. Just thought i’d give some possitive review for thoise users like me who have been burned repeatedly by linux and arent encouraged by these reviews.
I agree with Mario on the 6-9 months…
I first tried linux “way back when” mandrake 8.0 first came out.
I remember installing it easily but kde2 disappointed me. It wasn’t very stable (could have been because I didn’t know what I was doing and screwed around with it too much). The wasn’t any kde messengers for msn only gaim and everybuddy were the ones that I had found. Mozilla was only at 0.8 and crashed basically every time I used it. Konqueror was slow, no tabs, didn’t work with java (sort of did). There was no “real” office suite. Openoffice was proably beta (I don’t know if it even existed), koffice was still very early in progress and didn’t do what I needed. StarOffice was 5.2 and I couldn’t even install it.
But now, kde and gnome are very pleasing to the eye (i think). There are a ton of messengers, mozilla and all of its cousins are just great. Openoffice is getting better (new beta out).
My point is that there has been so much improvement in the last 2 years that given the time linux will eventually take off.
p.s.
I don’t use mandrake but it looks like 9.1 is their best release yet!
It’ll be there when linux standardizes on ONE of each after in the default installation. One of each what? One desktop, one font server, one shell, one kernel, one set of libraries, etc etc etc etc. If one distribution of linux isnt binary compatible with another, it’ll never be there. Don’t tell the average joe to compile a program so they could run it. Being there means the average joe just runs things and it works. No other knowledge on their end should be required in order to get something to work. And thats the problem of why linux will never be there.
It seems that “there” is Windows. People seem to think linux will be there, when they can take everything they have learnt in windows and apply it to linux “out of the box” ™.
At the moment, linux != windows. In time, the various elements most complained about by windows switchers may improve. However, that would accelerate greatly if there were more linux users. So if you’re a windows user, who is genuinely interested in improving desktop computing, wants to get rid of the MS monopoly and the stifling influence that has on innovation, then suck it up for a bit, and install linux. It’ll be hard, you’ll have to learn some stuff, and you’ll get frustrated from time to time, but in the end, we’ll all be better for it.
Posting reviews about how linux != windows is pointless in my view. We all know that – there is no new ground being broken here. They only way to improve linux is to install linux and use it.
All these reviews of the different linux distributions are interesting but come to the same conclusion. Linux is not ready for the desktop or linux is not ready for Joe {Jane} User. Depending on who Joe {Jane} User is, I think linux would be fine for the most part. If Joe {Jane} has never used a computer before, training will be easier. How many techs have had to explain what an USB port was? Or the difference between an iconized program and a windowed program? How about explaining that programs use RAM and store data on the hard drive? These types of issues are raised no matter if the person is using Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux. Most of the reviews I have seen on this site, take the perspective of someone that actually knows Microsoft Windows pretty well. This user knows how to burn CDS, create MS Word documents, able to hook up a USB camera, and other things that a complete PC novice would not know how to do or even understand. Why not do a review from the point of view that you are a teacher teaching a complete PC novice how to use the computer? How do you connect to the internet? How do you create a resume? Burn music CDs? Send and receive email? If there are many steps and long explanations, then the operating system is not too user friendly. But even a complicated operating system can be learned. It just takes more effort. Linux is a good operating system but in many areas you need to put more effort into performing tasks.
Actually, e-mail, web, wordprocessing are all bassically one or two step in Mandrake 9.1… I know this and I have used it for about 1 hour maybe less.
Just as installing linux will improve linux, it will also improve windows. If MS has to compete with another OS, rather than just with its own previous OS’s, innovation in desktop computing must surely improve. As everyone knows, a monopoly stifles innovation.
In my view, pointing out issues with linux is important in improving it, however, I don’t know that requiring that it be like windows is the be all and end all. I often think that people’s familiarity with windows clouds their perspective, when considering ease of use. I think when evaluating linux, and it’s short-comings, it is important to make sure that benchmarking against windows is a good idea, and that a person’s familiarity with a system (be it linux or windows) does not play too high a role in the evaluation.
I suspect that in the reviews of Mandrake we have seen on OSNews today, the reviewers have been guilty of this, which has meant for pretty meaningless reviews.
Sorry to post again, but I pressed the submit button before finishing – an unfortunate metaphor for life.
Yet another uninformative review. How is it humanly possible to post two uninformative “reviews” of Mandrake in one day. Please tell me I’m seeing double!
At one time the author complains that his favourite IM app is not included (it is actually on the Mandrake mirrors – just check!), and at another time complains about too many choices of terminal programs. Will these people ever learn? I hope so, then I won’t have to post these negative comments here.
>two uninformative “reviews” of Mandrake in one day.
Send us yours then. We will post it. We are open to all experiences with any OS.
I just install it 2 days ago. Hardware: Celeron 1.2 ghz, 512 meg ram, 1 80g WD SE HD, 1 40 g WD HD, sb live! platinum with live drive, ati radeon 9000 128M, 3com nic, cd and cdrw drives, abit st6 mb. Install had one hitch, the sb live! was set to use the audigy() driver, I changed it during install to the correct driver. Thanks to XFree86 4.3, the radeon card was setup fine to do 1280×1024 on my 21″ Phillips monitor. After reboot, all hardware was working with the exception of the live drive (I use headphones connected to the 1/4″ jack on the live drive during late hours).
I brought up KDE and it looks very nice, the galaxy theme is the best theme Mandrake has used, and I personally like it better than RedHat’s bluecurve. The font rendering is also very nice. I have a collection of truetype fonts and installing them is always one of the first things I do. These fonts live on a Windows 2000 server on my network so I fired up LinNeighborhood and mapped a few drives with no problem and copied over the fonts. I used drakefont to install the fonts but there is a problem here. When you select advanced options and browse for a folder, the text box that is supposed to change to the path you browse to, doesn’t. It never changes from it’s default text which says something like “select folder…”. You have to delete that text and manually type the path. Then it works fine, it’s an annoyance at most. Also, I should point out that I installed the fonts while in KDE, but later I loaded up gnome and the fonts were not available. I had to create a .fonts directory in my home folder and copy them there.
Most apps seemed to work fine and seemed pretty snappy. I did have some problems with kde locking up, in fact it locked up to the point I had to do a hard reset, I could not kill X and had not gotten around to setting up ssh yet. So I changed to Gnome, which I’m beginning to like more and more.
Overall I thought the overall speed felt on par with Windows 2000 which is also on the same machine and faster than RedHat 8.0 which had been on the machine. Then today I installed FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 with KDE 3.2 and Gnome 2.2. After using it for a couple of hours and rebooting into Mandrake, Mandrake felt positively snail-like. Conclusion: This is the best Mandrake to date, it’s not perfect, but judged on ease of use, ease of install, and most complete feeling overall package, it has set the bar for RedHat 9 and SuSE 8.2.
final thought: FreeBSD 4.8 is simply amazing…
IMO, Mandrake is closest to replace Windows than any other Linux distro. Mandrake and Redhat are taking turns sniffing each others butt, releasing versions at almost the same time. Apparently, they hate each other. This time around though, based on reviews here, Mandrake 9.1 is clearly the one leading over Redhat 9.0.
However, I am getting tired of these reviews. Yes, yes. Linux is not anywhere closer to replacing Windows. Live with that fact for now. And yes, we want Mandrake not to die and continue developement of their excellent and ambitious distro. But too much could be a conspiracy going…
Linux will be there when enough people are using it for 3rd party hardware and software vendors to support it to the same level as windows or even Mac are supported… This will probably mean a tool or service will have to be implimented to deal with incompatablities between Linux distros and various hardware platforms (Linux runs on everything from Apples iPod to SGI’s Altix 3000 – a 64 processor Itanium2 number cruncher)
If linux gets a strong position in the market place the ubiquity of the Intel architecture could well be challenged.
I general Linux could boot a lot faster – XP has really raised the bar on this one. Hardware configuration and auto-detection is improving at a rapid rate but still has a ways to go.
All these reviews of the different linux distributions are interesting but come to the same conclusion. Linux is not ready for the desktop or linux is not ready for Joe {Jane} User.
This is close, but not dead on. I would say we can clearly see that linux is not close enough to windows for people who aren’t willing to learn a new OS to easily switch. Is this a problem? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t really see a point in making any linux software more windows-esque. KDE is familiar enough for most windows users to get the hang of. That is where they will be doing most of their work anyways.
I mean, if you want linux to be windows xp… why not use windows xp?
There’s three things A Desktop OS (TM) needs to compete:
1) Hardware support (also autodetection)
2) Software (gotta have the applications, and it needs to be easy to install ’em)
3) Consistent, intuitive experience
Support is also nice.
When reviews declare linux to be “not ready,” they really complain about these three things. The particular reviewer’s rather new USB-something-or-other didn’t get autodetected, it was hard to install application foo, and the different ui toolkits or frontends didn’t interpolate, and things seemed “broken” or maybe just a bit “unpolished.”
That’s basically the three things every Linux distro review says about the distro, and follows up with “getting better, but not as good as Windows.”
Hardware support is basically there with certain distros like Xandros, and most desktop distros would do well to implement a Knoppix-like hardware autodetection scheme. 3d graphics cards can be problematic, and 3d in general is a Big Pain (TM), for developers and gamers alike.
The software will be there in about a year. Once GNOME 2.4 rolls around, and big name apps like Evolution have migrated, and GNOME has integrated OOo, you can expect Linux desktops to have the 90% of applications that almost everyone needs and just lack the last 10% of applications contracted out specifically by companies for special use.
Finally, GNOME 2.4 and KDE 3.2 will have the ui consistency that is currently lacking. They will play well with eachother, but will be mature enough to stand on their own. I think, however, they will need to wait for the next major version changes after that to really be a positive experience that stands out, rather than mimics.
Actually… So why bash Linux on this side? It seems that you guys want Linux to be really better than Windows on EVERY aspect, compatible, with all drivers out of the box!
Please give us some reviews of people trying to install winXP, or switching from Mac to windows, or from windwos to Mac…
Would it be that different? Of course not. Migrating IS hard and will remain that way.
for me, linux is all about ability to choose what fits yours needs.
Most people that use Linux has experience with Windows, and that’s what Linux needs to compete with if they want to replace Windows on the desktop.
There are three things that needs to be improved:
1. Professional software. Linux is great for development and with OpenOffice it’s also usefull in an office environment, but there are still problems. GIMP can’t replace Photoshop. There’s no replacement for Dreamweaver, 3D Studio, QuarkXPress/Pagemaker etc.
2. Games. Most users at home wants to play games. Who wants to reboot the computer when you want to play a game? I know that there are some games for Linux, but while most games are made for Windows, you still have the problem of rebooting the machine. What Linux needs is a professional library for developing games. Perhaps we could have a DirectX port (in source code form, not emulation), so that people can compile the game for both Linux and Windows with minimal changes.
3. Standard installation. Why does every distro have it’s own directory structure? Does an email program really need the latest GCC? When I want to install a program, I want it to be as “simple” as Windows. I know that most distributions have their own package system where you can install custom-made packages, but is that really nescessary? Why can’t we have a standard installation routine that everyone can use? Sometimes we even have different RPMs for different versions of the same distribution!
What is he _talking_ about??? Mandrake 9.1 is simply excellent!
Installing is so easy. There are almost no questions you have to answer, oh well, your language yes.
But after that it just installs itself. My usb-mouse worked perfectly.
There is no need to set up anything for Internet, just start the browser, that’s what I call easy.
And kopete IS there! At least on the mandrake ftp so it should be on the cd:s. Did he really look?
Like the author, I too had my DVD and CDRW drives “disappear” from both k3b and the desktop after running the k3b setup. However, this was fixed with a reboot and I can now burn CDRs with no problem.
Btw has anyone gotten the zeroconf capability in Mandrake 9.1 to work yet? I’ve got a Mac (OS X 10.2) and a Mandrake 9.1 machine plugged into the same network, but I haven’t been able to get the Rendezvous scanner on the Mac to “see” the Mandrake 9.1 machine.
When I installed Mandrake 9.0 it auto booted into the graphics program, and presented me with…..
…… a 100% black screen.
Nothing I typed would get any response from the beast at all. Ctrl-Alt-Del did result in a moment of disk activity.
“Not quite there yet” for the desk-top is right.
So I switched off. What else could I do?
For a comparison, I have installed windows on dozens of different machines, mostly home brew, starting with Windows 3.0. ALL worked. ALL autodetected correctly or permitted manufacturer supplied drives to be installed. All networked.
Over the years I have installed various distros of Linux – probably about 6.
Mandrake 9 was the first (of two) to actually find my network cards, and to network with anything!
Only 1 has installed and worked as advertised – and that (SME server) is not a desk top, but a special for building a firewall/email/DNS/server. It is neither a good test (no graphics, no installed software) nor is it actually right (I can not print without taking special action to connect to the printer, due to a SAMBA/windows incompatibility).
In my view, linux is closer to the desktop now than it has ever been, but we are still 3 years away from having an alternative to windows for Joe/Jane user.
(Mandrake 9.1 RC2 is nice and I did solve the black screen problem).
3. Standard installation. Why does every distro have it’s own directory structure? Does an email program really need the latest GCC? When I want to install a program, I want it to be as “simple” as Windows.
That’s what YOU think / want. If a Linux distribution was to not include GCC in the base install, I’d have a lot of second thoughts about trying it.
Yes, I know RedHat doesn’t install GCC by default.
No, I don’t use RedHat.
> I was trying to see if “kopete”, a famous multi-IM client for KDE came with Mandrake, but it didn’t.
Sure it does. According to the package list it’s on the second CD.
If all the computers hardware is supported out the box and you never upgrade hardware then there’s no problem. But even if it was possible to include drivers for every existing device with a distribution, users upgrading with new hardware would still have to manually install drivers in Linux.
Installing and configuring drivers may be trivial to experienced Linux users, but it’s far more involved and complex in Linux. In Windows even users who know almost nothing about the hardware they’re installing can insert the CD that came with the device and follow on screen prompts. Using the CLI and editing config files requires far more knowledge of both the hardware and the OS.
I’m sure there are good reasons for the complexity of this in Linux, but surely there’s a way of making it easy for the user? NeXTSTEP was UNIX based, yet installing drivers was simple with it’s graphical Configure.app, isn’t something similar possible in Linux?
Something that is even cooler is the fact that these projects have postitive spin offs for other operating systems such as FreeBSD, Solaris and so-forth.
That is the one cool thing I do like about opensource, the ability to port applications to your particular operating system.
As for usability and so forth, one only needs to look at the people now involved. Sure, they don’t have the same ideas and Microsoft, however, they are making their respective projects usable and accessable.
The reason I really like your article is you give a perspective from the non-pizza eating, CodeRed-drinking, coffee-guzzling, supergeek point of view. You demonstrate clearly what someone who installs Linux (Mandrake) for the very first time will feel and think. The “not quite up to it/almost there” conclusion is quite understandable in your case and does not detract from the experience you have shared with us. Thanks!
What is sounds like is you want something easy to use like a Mac. Once Mono becomes available and people start writing programs for it, all one will have to do is uncompress it then run it. Now setup files and crap, it simply works out of the box. Basically, the same type of installation one would do if they were installing Office 98 on a Mac.
Supergeek 😉
I must be the most un-geekish of the geek crowd. I prefer a spicy curry over a pizza, a bottle of Diet Coke instead of “code-red” and I don’t drink coffee, I prefer tea. 😉
the only prob with linux is,
-not every hardware manufacturer make driver linux.
-very little and not widely available ported games from win.
-almost every average or newbie computer users’ scared first and try later.
having these obstacles and with linux current progress, i say Linux is a great OS. imagine if windows doesn’t gained support from hardware manufacturers, i doubt it will as famous as today
Kopete 0.6.1a is included in CD2 of the full 9.1. Check your CD again.
Instead of this Linux-distribution mess, I can recommend FreeBSD 5.0 to you guys. It’s a nice, stable and non-confusing system…
—
Anders
Couldn’t you refer to these as something more accurate than “reviews”? Experiences? Opinions? Testimonials? When I hear “review” I expect something more objective, not one person’s experience.
It has become a fashion just to write how they have installed certain XXX linux on their system. Review, i dont think, fits in this. What eugenia does is review. Technical strengths and weakness of a OS and installation is a part of it. Not entirely of it. But what i see, now a days, how one installed and what problems he had with it esp hardware probs. Moreover, for me, all screenshots looks the same bcoz most of them use the same DE mostly KDE and a few gnome. What difference does it make if you post kde 3.x shots from RH, suse or mandrake.In recent times, control centers screen shots. No technical reviews at all. all instllation and few candy shots. Do you think is this the reviews to be read by OS news readers, Eugenia ?? some tech points from real penguinists. I hope i will see it soon rather than this kind of installation reviews.
First you complain about Mandrake having too many consoles, and then you whine because *your* favourite IM client isn’t on the default install?!
kopete is packaged for Mandrake. It’s not even in contrib, it’s in main. That means it’s virtually certain to be on the CDs (I use Cooker so I don’t have the CDs and I can’t check, but almost everything in main is on the CDs). Just go to a console and do “urpmi kopete” or search for kopete from rpmdrake. Done. sheesh.
To anonymous from norway:
games: Linux has several toolkits for developing games, including SDL, and you can make perfectly good 3D games with OpenGL. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with Linux as a game development platform except not enough people use it, so most developers don’t care about it. Don’t expect this to change for a while. Games development is a mass market game. Linux isn’t a mass market. There’s zip all the Linux distributions can really do about it, except keep converting users until there’s enough to get more companies porting their games to Linux. id and Bioware show it’s perfectly possibly if developers are willing to try.
packaging: read my long explanation of why Linux style software packaging is both Good and Necessary on the previous n00b 9.1 osnews review. and distributions don’t, by and large, have different directory structures. most of them adhere to the LSB directory structure. sure, some might put some software in /opt that others put in /usr, but it doesn’t really make a hell of a lot of difference.
i tried mdk 9.1 and i think it was pretty good but i couldnt connect to the internet with my cable modem
and i found no way to log-on as root with a graphical interface
that’s because you shouldn’t log on as root into the GUI. it’s bad and wrong, don’t do it. =)
if you really really have a legitimate need to do it – and there are not very many at all – then you need to configure Mandrake’s KDM a little bit, or alternatively use the software management tools to uninstall “mdkkdm” and install “kdebase-kdm” instead. that’ll give you the vanilla KDE version of KDM, which will let you login as root.
There are exactly two things holding back the linux desktop… No, its not lack of developers/programs/drivers.. Those will naturally follow once these two criteria are met:
1. Faster Program Execution/Faster X
2. Extremely tight Desktop/File Manager/Browser integration. Tighter than Konq, i mean like Microsofts Explorer.
for months I’ve heard people always throw out the ‘Go Gentoo’. I’m currently in stage 3 of the install process (I started at stage 1) and can’t believe how easy the install was. All you do if follow the instructions and type a total of 14 commands to get a fully customized source based linux distro.
I seriously don’t understand why now people don’t use Gentoo.
It just doesn’t make sense to me.
Oh yeah, Mandrake is known for its rpm dependency hell (atleast Redhat mostly straightens it out with there package manager)
I don’t wanna sit in front of my PC for days. Well at least for 24 to 48 hours or … God knows how many. I agree a source based distribution is nice, but takes a serious amount of time. BTW have you tried Slackware or even FreeBSD? With FreeBSD you have ports…and since you like so much compiling from source you can do it with FreeBSD. With Slackware you’ll have to do everything yourself, or, just make compile scripts and reuse them.
Gentoo, Gentoo…. BTW It is not realy faster than other distros, but could I convince a Gentoo user that? I guess no.
No, X is not so slow anymore. I agree that it still relies on Client/Server stuff, but there is DRI and some other HW acceleration, depending on the used and avaible driver. And regarding the desktop integration: Let me tell you something: I once installed FreeBSD 4.7 and I’ve installed just X and KDE and I needed a browser. And there it was: Konquerer, not the best, but good enough. It would be a pain to have a standard desktop in Linux/*NIX, borring and M$ like in some ways. Think about it. What is realy holding us back is the lack of interest. PC’s come this days with preinstalled M$ products, so why bother with Linux anymore when I can go online and on IRC in seconds? I can play games and write email with Win… You see, that is why! No progress. And the Flame Wars, and battles in the comunity, the flamewars between farious *NIX-like OS’s… that is the truth.
These reviews are getting more and more stupid. Kopete is in one of the install CD’s. I forgot which one because I did not have to know. I simply made a search for kopete in the add software section of control center and it installed it automatically. It has just asked put the relevant cd(s) to the drive. I don’t know what these people want, how can it get easier than that?
Mandrake 9.1 is the best Linux distrubtion you can get right now. All the things they are stupidely complaining are the actual limitations of Linux itself not Mandrake’s faults. Add to that the actual limitations and incapability of the reviewer himself/herself you got such dumb reviews.
My suggestion to people: Linux is currently not plug and play in the windows sense. The reasons for that are multiple (hardware vendor support, unix foundation of linux etc.). If you don’t have the patience or inclination to learn new things, don’t try at all. And most importantly, check if your hardware is supported. Otherwise, go for a mac or XP. Currently, it takes some effort to use Linux on the desktop and there are some minor tradeoffs. But overall, I personally find it much much better than windows or mac experience.
“BTW It is not realy faster than other distros, but could I convince a Gentoo user that? I guess no.”
Yeah, actually you could. I run Gentoo, and while I love it, it doesn’t seem much faster than Mandrake 9.1. I guess the main advantage for me, is that I know how the system is put together. If I screw around with command line stuff in mandrake, I’m scared that I’ll break some of their custom scripts and stuff, but on my gentoo box I know exactly what everything does, and I can play with things all I want.
That and upgrading is so easy.
ps. I also love getting everything that comes out sooner than any other distro, but I sacrifice a little bit of stability for that ( eg. alphas & betas )
What is that about 3-5 years ago or something ?
you can do that with Mandrake, too. just run Cooker. I do. I expect I’ll be running GNOME 2.3 CVS and Evolution 1.3 soon…pray for me. =)
It doesn’t exist. Because you don’t install things with the “rpm” command you use “urpm*”
http://www.urpmi.org
I use Gentoo on my “other” machine which acts as a mail/web server. And although I love it, if I were to switch it would be to mandrake because of their lack of dependency hell.
I’ve been a RH loyalist since 4.2 but RH 8.0 disappointed me so much (I did the 8.0 install at work) that I looked elsewhere when I considered upgrading my 7.2 home machine.
I hope Mandrake staves off bankruptcy because my first impression is one of incredible AWE. The install is very nice… I like Mandrake’s Partition tool, choice of journalling file systems (I choose XFS), picked up my Windows partition/drive (for the Kids, not me), included Windows in the boot menu (lilo), etc., etc.
I have to side with the author on the stupidity of aumix, the name is not intuitive and the interface isn’t all that great either… but other than that I am REALLY impressed.
It’s also lightening fast compared to the RH 7.2 (custom kernel that was optimized for i686) install I had on here just this morning.
I think even my parents could run this distro!
Cheers
I just installed Mandrake 9.0 on a computer for a friend who has a problem telling the difference between a web-site and a browser… 🙂 Good luck. I think that he will do well.. 🙂
The article mentioned about dependancy hell. I’m not good at the command line at all, but in the last month I have learned urpmi which is little more than copy/paste. Problem in the past with dependancies are gone…
The program kopete was mentioned in these messages. I never saw it.
I clicked on Konsole
Typed su
entered my password
typed: urpmi kopete
pressed y maybe 2 times.
The program was installed.
Much easier than Windows…
MarkP
Has anybody tried the XFce MDK91 ships? In that case,
how are your click-on-desktop menus? Mine are unusable,
and I even seconed a bug report about that, filed
during RC1.
And how many of you doing a complete fresh install
ran into the “Unable to write file error” when
closing XFce. I filed a report on that but the
maintainer didn’t think it was a bug and since
no other distro used my proposed three liner fix
he didn’t bother.
(Stupid maintainer. I’m sure even Linus would have
accepted that fix
Peder