Some of the people complained about the two previous posted reviews being incoherant and you said “write your own”, so I thought I would throw my two cents in…Editorial Notice: All opinions are those of the author and not necessarily those of osnews.com
First some background about me and my machine. I’ve previously installed (and used) Mandrake 8.1, 8.2, and 9.0, along with Red Hat 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0, and finally Gentoo 1.2. And of course, every version of Windows since 3.11 for Workgroups 🙂 I was also employed in a position doing computer peripheral support for about a year, and most of the problems were with Windows, not with the product, so I know my way around a computer that has Windows from that, and I have a decent grasp of Linux from installing Gentoo 1.2, but I am by no means a Linux Guru.
My machine is an Athlon XP 1700+ on a Soyo Dragon Plus (built-in sound and wake-on LAN) that I built myself. GeForce 2 MX 400 64 MB DDR, Yamaha 44x24x44 CD-RW, Sony 16x DVD/52x CD-ROM, 256MB Atlas Precision Brand DDR-SDRAM. I’m also very proud of my aluminum Lian Li case 🙂
Enough about me, onto the part you care about: My experiences with installation AND use of Mandrake 9.1. I started the download via Bit Torrent Friday night and had all 3 .iso’s when I woke up Saturday morning. I also use this program to distribute audience recordings of bands, and I highly recommend using it whenever possible as a user, and urge people who serve to use it more frequently in situations where lots of people want the same thing at the same time (i.e. new Mandrake).
So I started the install, and if you’ve installed Mandrake before it’s pretty much the same now, only prettier and more professional looking, and a bit more organized…no more huge laundry list down the left side and no more bad English translations! I won’t go through the nitty-gritty details beyond that because there are dozens of reviews for this on the web already, just keep this in mind – it’s fast and it works. Upon finishing the installation, I was absolutely delighted to see that it not only found my printer and scanner, but configured them both and they both work out of the box! This has been my major beef with every distro I’ve tried…printer config is a bear and sorry, no scanner for you (I have an HP ScanJet 4300c)! It was REALLY disappointing with MDK 9.0 and RH 8.0, because they saw that the scanner was there and the model, and it STILL didn’t work. I did a preview scan of a piece of my wife’s notepad paper just to confirm, and sure enough it worked. Opened openoffice.org writer and printed out “this is a test” just to see and yep, heard the sounds of my HP DJ 932c start up above me on my hutch. Sweet.
We’ve knocked away two of my three main reasons for not converting to Linux for day-to-day use, so let’s address the third and final one: CD Burning. I had read a lot about k3b now being included, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
I ran through the setup utility without a hitch, everything seemed cool there and so I started the application and tried to copy a CD. No devices listed. I tried running the setup utility again, still no dice. This is disappointing. I’m figuring it’s either a bugfix issue (it is only ver. 0.8.1 of the software after all), or a simple problem that I have yet to figure out, since the setup utility correctly identifies both of my optical drives. I guess I’ll find out sooner or later.
A big part of the hype for Mandrake 9.1 is the look and feel, particularly with the new Galaxy theme, and I must say I am HIGHLY impressed. It takes Red Hat’s Bluecurve concept and caters it more towards the home Linux power user than the corporate desktop – KDE still looks like KDE and Gnome still looks like Gnome even though the menus are set up in the same manner, and both are undeniably MANDRAKE. The anti-aliased fonts all look great everywhere, so that’s another plus. Mozilla 1.3 is a really nice release; I had been using 1.0.2 on my Windows box and I definitely see now that there is no reason to do this! The new Mandrake Control Center is beautiful and intuitive…everything is grouped logically and each individual control has a short description, “use this to control xyz”. The default menu and panel organization is very clean and neat, something I can’t say about RH 8! (though I guess this is being improved in 9, but really, what the hell happened there?) And even if I didn’t like the setup, it’s very easy to change…I took a lot of the KDE programs out of the panel and put Mozilla, Open Office.org writer, the KDE calculator, System Guard (to make it more like a Windows configuration), and some other things that I use. It’s as simple as delete one icon/right-click and navigate through the menu to select the icon you want to add. I was mildly disappointed that there was no drag-and-drop, but I figured out how to do it and it’s still very easy, so no worries.
RPM installation went without a hitch. Went and got Texstar’s MS fonts package and NVIDIA drivers. For the latter, rebooted and it was done, it automagically edited the XFree86 config file from nv to nvidia. This is more a kudo for Texstar I think, but I had to add that in there because this is an essential fact of life (installing proprietary nvidia drivers) for a lot of Linux users. URPMI is also awesome, so slick and nice, I didn’t think I could like an update utility better than RH 8’s but this one blows it out of the water. It satisfies the detail side of my brain by giving you “this is the update available, this is the vulnerability that was found and is why you should upgrade”. And of course, the upgrade selection, download, and install was easy and painless. Very very impressive. Only wish there was some kind of system tray notification like in Red Hat, that’s the only thing it’s missing (or that I can’t find).
The only other grievance aside from what I’ve already mentioned is that Abiword doesn’t seem to be included, or I didn’t deselect it at install time and I would have selected it if I saw it, anyway. Not too big of a deal since it’s easy enough to obtain and install. I have yet to encounter any major omissions other than that.
In conclusion, I’m going to give my numerical ratings and overall score:
Install: 10
Configure: 8
Useability: 9
Looks: 10
Overall: 9.25
Highly recommended. This is the best distro I have ever used out of the box. If I can get my CD burning issue figured out, I’m going to become a silver member of Mandrake club and order a power pack. I’m that impressed!
Abiword’s not on the CDs as a design choice. There are two versions of abiword packaged for MDK 9.1, 1.0.4 and 1.1.3. 1.0 was removed from the main tree and also from the download CDs because of the way it insists on stuffing up the Unix font path. abiword 1.1.3 doesn’t do that, but it’s a *very* development release, and it wasn’t reckoned to be near stable enough to justify including in the main distro. Both are in 9.1 contrib, so if you want them, define an internet contrib source (hint: use urpmi.setup for this. It’s on CD3. it’s awesome.) and then install either “abiword” (for 1.0.4) or “hackabiword” (for 1.1.3).
I had the same problem with CD Burning, but all I had to do was log out and log back in. K3b setup adds users to a cd burning group, and I guess it doesn’t take effect until you log back in.
I’ll never buy Mandrake its French!
Now that I got the inevitable stupid joke out of the way I wanted to
say I’ve been using Linux for sevral years and tried just about everything EXCEPT Mandrake. Since I’m not a newbie it is no use to me. Previously I’ve told newbies who wanted linux to install Redhat 8, now I think it may start to turn, Redhat has too many legal issues that most newbies shouldn’t have to deal with like nvidia or other propriatary hardware. Perhaps now I’ll start recommending Mandrake.
There is one advantage I see Redhat having over Mandrake and that is help. When you’re hunting down a problem on google, or installing some 3rd party junk app. They almost ALWAYS have redhat specific documentation or binarys, and for a newbie thats very helpfull.
(Not another Review of Mandrake Linux 9.1)
Mandrake 9.1 is very good. But cmon…!
Well, I have to say this is the best of the RPM-based distros that I have used. I’ve used 9.0 and fell in love with it right away. MDK 9.1 just reinforced this. So far, I haven’t had any issues that would make me regret my decision to use it….except one.
As lovely as Mozilla 1.3 looks under 9.1, I have noticed that when I install the Flash 6 package from Macromedia to my ~/.mozilla/plugins folder it runs VERY slowly. I didn’t have this issue before. It’s not a big deal, but it’s an annoyance that I didn’t have before with 9.0. I did notice that when I installed the Mozilla Nightly tarball (and I don’t think it’s related to just this version), that Flash would once again run at a speedy pace, but the 1.3 version still lagged in speed. Another thing to consider is that the Mozilla installer from the nightly tarball didn’t give it the support for gtk2, unlike Moz 1.3 which seems to have gtk2 support. (I may try this again with the source tarball and see what happens)
Just a little thing to note, but all in all a GREAT distro.
BTW, if anyone knows the solution to the Flash speeed problem under 1.3 (please don’t say uninstall it), post it here.
Claudio
I’ve read about 6 or 7 so called “reviews” of Mandrake 9.1 Most of them shows that Mandrake has really done a good job with this release. However X guy complains about sound problems and Y guy complains about USB mouse and so on. Since this a phenomenom that I have seen too with RH 9 “reviews” (or previews, don’t remember). This leads me to think that Linux Distributions are a little unstable (may be this is not the right word, but ‘unpredictable’ is even worse) and that for every person there would be a different experience (I know this happens with Windows XYZ, but wide support of industry makes this happens a lot less).
I think all this articles should be renamed “My Personal Mandrake 9.1 Experience” instead of “Mandrake 9.1 Review”.
A review IS a personal experience. You can’t write a “review” without having an experiene with the product first hand.
For some reason I’m thinking Mandrake is becoming more and more bloated as Window$ is.
No problem… Just fork, and call it Freedom Linux X (heh, we already jumped ahead of RH in numbers! ahahah)
The first time, installation just hung on the third cd, and I had to restart that from the beginning. Second time, ll went well, or, almost.
I had a problem which I have never encountered before. It won’t run Mozilla, my favourite browser. All it says is ‘Illegal instruction’ if I run it from the console. Strange. Galeon consequently won’t run too. Also, Gnome is sluggish on here. I had been running Phoebe and Psyche here, but this was a little too slow. With a 1.2 Ghz Duron and 512MB RAM, it shouldn’t be so.
***Reinstalling Mozilla seems to have done the trick here now, but still, strange.
Now that Galeon also runs, I have to say, I love that when you set up stuff like proxy information in the Gnome control panel, Galeon automatically uses it, and therefore, I have not had to configure a signle thing in it to get it to run. By the way, I connect to the internet from behind a proxy, so it is always quite tricky for me to get everything to work first time.
Galaxy is good, very good, but for some reason it does not feel as complete as Bluecurve. But I like the idea of it. Give us new icons please Mandrake, outdo Redhat on this please. (By the way, I love Redhat better than Mandrake, but I would like to see them pushing each other. For progress of course.
And having a Soundblaster Live!, I really would like to see a mixer with controls for the Soundblaster for bass and treble. Linux just sounds terrible compared to Windows using a Soundblaster. Please also commit some Resources to somethign like Rhythmbox quickly, to give us a high quality Jukebox like app.
I wont review Openoffice and KOffice, But maybe I now want all the goodness of 1.1 there. I have it on Windows right nw and it looks amazing.
For some reason I’m thinking Mandrake is becoming more and more bloated as Window$ is.
i think we all need to get away from spouting clechays.
its sounds ridiculous to hear that Mandrake or Linux
or suse or whoever is becoming more and more bloated.
kde 3.1 runs faster than all the kde’s before it. there
is more software available and hopefully there will
be even more in the future.
so many times the linux people complain because some distro
isnt exactly what they would have produced. instead of complaining join the Mandrake Club and let your voice be
heard.
and there are the poeople that complain that it wont run
light lightning on a p 133. Linux and Mandrake is a modern
operating system and it least it runs on the older equiptment.
we cant expect anyone to optimize for p133.
and there is the .0 release crowd that says dont buy anthing
if it a point 0 release. its incredible.
maybe thats why red hat forget the dot
lets all join in and make Linux better instead of complaining.
A review IS a personal experience. You can’t write a “review” without having an experiene with the product first hand.
I understand that (no one will use his ESP for a review!!). But for a review I would expect (or should it be ‘I would like to see’) benchmarks, comparisons between productos/versions, expectations. Some of this reviews are very personal indeed. May be it is my fault for reading so many reviews. I appreciate the work of everyone that have written one, because it shows me the product from different subjective views.
I guess at the end of the day, only MY experience (or review?) counts .
I have to say that I haven’t had ANY issues with burning cds under linux. On my machine, using a Plexwriter 12/10/32a, I can burn much faster and with probably only 10% of the bad writes under linux as compared to windows. I use Xcdroast and now CD oven Bake. Both are solid and stable, but CD ovenbake is MUCH more usable. XCDroast is a pain to configure, but RARELY (once or twice in over 100 cds) gives coasters. Compared to my performance under windows, where about every second or third disk becomes a coaster, this is infinitely better. I only use windows to burn if I have to .
My real beef is getting progs like Dreamweaver MX to run properly via wine. When I have that, then windows will go away forever.
pros_n_cons wrote:
Previously I’ve told newbies who wanted linux to install Redhat 8, now I think it may start to turn, Redhat has too many legal issues that most newbies shouldn’t have to deal with like nvidia or other propriatary hardware.
I believe that this is exactly the *wrong* attitude. If more distros did what RH is doing, and GNU/Linux keeps gaining popularity as it has been, then hardware manufacturers would be more motivated to embrace open standards (ie. releasing specs so drivers for their hardware can be written).
Yup, I run RH8, and will buy 9 as soon as it’s available in a box. To wit, I’ll be buying my copy of YDL3 (for the Powerbook) as soon as they begin taking orders for it.
<Puddy>
Gotta support the team.
</Puddy>
Might need to put hdc=ide-scsi or hdd=ide-scsi (or both) in your lilo.conf on the append options, since K3b doesn’t do IDE devices. Run lilo (lilo -t to test first, always smart), then reboot. Worked for me.
Webmin was a pain to install w/ seperate modules, Harddrake or whatever the hardware wizard is had problems w/ my samsung LCD monitor, urpmi does NOT automagicaly solve dependencies like Mandrake claims it does, running security updates produced rpm dependency hell problems. Install was easy once I figured out the monitor problem, very clean nice look and the horrible icons from 9.0 are gone. What happened in the end? Samba wouldn’t work properly so I installed Libranet 2.7 w/ an older version of X that found my monitor right off, installed w/out a hitch, used apt-get to install KDE 3.1 and all of the webmin modules I use and the box is running perfectly as a samba file/printserver. You guys that run rpm distros really should Libranet. Debian w/ a user friendly installation. And yes I’ve tried apt4rpm and it still doesn’t work as well as Debian.
I use the plugin software from CodeWeavers and because Mandrake 9.1 uses glibc 2.3.x. The software does not run. I am also experiencing similar problems with wine. Wine complies and installs, but using Win32 software is out of the question (it just does not run).
It would have been nice if Mandrake had ensured that their distrubtion would run both of these software packages. Obviously, I would rather use native programs, but my job and my college require that I have access to some win32 programs. I don’t know about Transgaming’s winex, but I assume that it cannot run either (anyone know for sure?). Mandrake is my preferred distribution but I am disappointed with this issue.
G
Just try it hahahahah. Yea thats what I said after all the foolishness of trying to get Ogle or xine to work with a dvd drive.
you know geektoo and debian really sucks. RPM based distros will forever be king.
Having a degree in CS, I can tell you there are very few advantages that geektoo or any compiled based distro offers.
Debian is the same boat because it usually takes 6 months for any new things to be included into the network; meaning everything is tested and retested before it get included. I personally would use slackware for servers. If your an expert, you dont even mess with that apt-get crap.
What mandrake offers for newbies cannot be match by any distro out there period. After trying out mandrake 9.1, I will never install redhat for newbie or myself because mandrake is the best of slackware without linux knowledge and redhat without the bloat.
PS
Redhat should take a page out of mandrake for a change and treat both KDE and Gnome like adults. I’m sure both are mature enough to handle it.
I believe that this is exactly the *wrong* attitude. If more distros did what RH is doing, and GNU/Linux keeps gaining popularity as it has been, then hardware manufacturers would be more motivated to embrace open standards (ie. releasing specs so drivers for their hardware can be written).
Mandrake GPL does not include NVidia drivers. They have though come to an agreement regarding MP3 decoding, so they can ship an xmms that supports MP3s (but no encoders are shipped, besides oggenc …). So, users can listen to MP3s they may already legally have, while redoing them as ogg (which does take a while).
There is no reason to use RedHat over Mandrake to try and motivate hardware companies to open their specs/drivers, since Mandrake does not include any in the download edition.
What are you talking about? Geektoo? I suppose you’re talking about Gentoo. If you scroll up just a bit you’ll see I NEVER mentioned Gentoo. “Having a degree in CS” so what, apparently you can’t read. I never mentioned source based distros. I was pointing out that an older version of Libranet w/ an older version of X worked better than Mandrake’s newest and finest. Also apt still works better than urpmi. That was what I was talking about. I never mentioned servers either. However, there’s plenty of Debian servers out there. So how is Mandrake “the best of of slackware without linux knowledge?” Don’t address your arrogant rants to me since you obviously didn’t read my comment O great CS degree.
Try logging in as root (at the login screen) and then running k3b. That seems to do the trick for me (on RH8).
Originally posted by GetOutofHere (IP: —.we.client2.attbi.com)
> Debian is the same boat because it usually takes 6 months > for any new things to be included into the network;
> meaning everything is tested and retested before it get
> included. I personally would use slackware for servers.
> If your an expert, you dont even mess with that apt-get
> crap.
WTF are you talking about? Debian has a stable tree, a testing tree, and an unstable tree. You can choose from either one for three different degrees of stability. That’s right, you can choose from highly-tested stable packages, recent software in testing, or week-old software in unstable. It’s your choice.
Included into the network? A new package, after making itself into unstable, will make its way to testing, and might make its way into stable. It usually takes a week or two for a package to get into unstable, except for security updates (which are updated immediately from a central server.)
With Slackware you can’t go out and get official security updates with a few commands. With Debian, you can get official updates quickly.
Yes, I logged out and in again after running k3b setup, and k3b then works fine for me too in Mdk 9.1
I have alot of problems with Mandrake. For one, during the install, it wouldn’t run the generic XFree86 4 for my GeForce 4 card. Eventually, I figured out that if I selected manually the 4 version VESA driver, and not the auto-detected “generic” driver (which I thought was the XFree86 4 vesa driver, but perhaps it uses XFree86 version 3?) I could get it to work well enough until I installed the nvidia drivers from nvidia.
As with just about every simplified Linux install I’ve ever done, it’s remarkably easy, until even the slightest unexpected issue comes up (which always does with PC hardware), and then the easy installation becomes very difficult and frustrating.
My next problem is with the configuration menu. It’s extremely disjointed and disorganized, with many redundancies. I use my mouse left-handed, but I had to find the right mouse menu in order to configure this (there are at least 2 mouse menus, I think perhaps 3, all serving slightly different functions). There are a myriad of choices and menus and submenus. Red Hat’s configuration menus, while still flawed in that respect, is 10 times more organized than this.
The font menu appears to be somewhat broken when it comes to anti-aliased fonts. I try to use the sub-pixel hinting (which works pretty well on RH 8.0), but the menu never remembers the settings. Also, the font rendering is far worse than what other anti-aliased sub-pixel Linux distributions do. The letters are distorted, and some of the charactors appear “over inked”, or darker than the other charactors, and some of them even are a pixel or two lower than the rest. This is the worst font installation (even with the windows fonts, which was a nice feature, to automatically install the windows fonts).
Perhaps I’m not geek enough for some, but I really dont’ like spending an entire weekend weeding through and fixing the simplist problems with every major Linux distribution that I try. (Weeding through in a way that your everyday user couldn’t possibly do.)
I just want something that works, and is reasonably easy to configure to my liking. Mac OS X is that, so is Windows XP/2000. Linux, on the desktop, is far from that currently.
I’m tired of Linux reviewers sugar coating every review, and failing to be critical of the issues that need critiquing. How else is Linux going to get better? The moment someone critisizes a Linux distro, they get flamed to vermillion hells.
bax: this post is entirely useless. why not help? Mandrake doesn’t detect your monitor. fine, file a bug report with the relevant information, and it’ll get patched. *what* RPM dependencies didn’t MandrakeUpdate resolve? DETAILS, man, DETAILS. saying urpmi doesn’t automatically resolve dependencies is just plain wrong. all you can say is it possibly has a bug in your specific situation. what do you mean by samba “wouldn’t work”? DETAILS. honestly, if you’re gonna take the time to write a flame in a thread no-one will read past Wednesday, why not take a minuscule amount more time and actually help out by submitting *useful* bug reports in sensible places?
Webmin was a pain to install w/ seperate modules
Hardly, maybe too much apt-get fried ur brain. u can select webmin, just click on the little check box. now that tough
can find your monitor
how about you enter the frequency. I’m sorry, apt-get doesn’t do that.
let me see that dependancy hell. show some proof before mouthing off about rpmi.
apparently you cannot read since the title of this thread is “Yet Another Review of Mandrake 9.1” Go do your cheerleading on another thread or beg eugenia for some Libranet coverage.
WTF are you talking about? Debian has a stable tree, a testing tree, and an unstable tree. You can choose from either one for three different degrees of stability. That’s right, you can choose from highly-tested stable packages, recent software in testing, or week-old software in unstable. It’s your choice.
This is definitely true, but it isn’t an incredible flexible system. Mixing and matching between stable, testing, and unstable can be a problematic and tricky experience if you aren’t willing to jump completely off of the stable debian tree.
Most people I know who run Debian usually use the stable source for security updates and unstable or testing if they want to run newer packages that aren’t in stable. I ‘ve been doing the same on my personal box and it runs perfectly. The servers I have setup running Debian run stable since I like that additional peace of mind.
OK, I can’t show the proof of dependency hell since as I stated earlier I wiped the Mandrake install and installed Libranet. It was when I ran security updates for the first time. I also ran into dependency problems attempting to install CDBakeoven and a few other packages. In case you didn’t know, Webmin has different modules and that’s what I was trying to install. Anyway, I wasn’t “mouthing off”, urpmi still has dependency problems whether you admint it or not. I note that I didn’t use a single derogatory name for a distro I don’t like unlike your little “Geetoo” remark which I think could be construed as mouthing off, you hypocrite.
I wasn’t flaming. I recommend Mandrake as a newbie distro nad hand out copies and encourage people to buy their own if they like it. That was my personal experience that I posted. What I meant by samba wouldn’t work is that when I set it up as a WINS server, there was no WINS broadcasts and also I got the same error in /etc/init.d/smb everytime I restarted it. I removed the original package and installed a basic Samba rpm from rpmfind.net and that error went away. Anyway, it looks like criticizing a distro is BAD. I feel sorry for Eugenia since she undoubtedly puts up w/ this on a much larger scale.
It just seemed a bit of a waste of time, really.
btw, MDK’s packaged Samba works just fine on all three MDK systems in our house…
How did you install Mandrake? From CDs? Did you use all three? If not, maybe what you were trying to install depends on something on a CD you don’t have. Tell you what, live trial! I don’t have cdbakeoven on my desktop, I don’t think, I’ll ssh over to it and see if it can install it.
well, it worked, but it only needed to get the cdbakeoven package anyway. guess I have everything it depends on installed already.
but yeah, let us know how you installed. If you only grabbed 2 CDs, or something, you will run into dependency problems, because it’s pretty impossible to arrange the distro so nothing on CD1 depends on things from CD2 or CD3, and nothing on CD2 depends on things from CD3…
I did (past tense) install using the first three CDs. Now I have wiped the install and Libranet/Debian stable is working fine as my Samba file/printserver. I’m not intending to bash Mandrake, I’ve downloaded it and ran it in the past and I bought 8.2 (great release!) but it isn’t my favorite right now. I did have those problems I mentioned; I don’t see a reason to make stuff like that up. I made a point of installing all of the development packages so that I would avoid dependency problems but I believe unless you’re using the distro’s own rpms you are always going to find a dependency problem or two.
go here and get some sources. then u wont have any
dependency problems , unless u happen to hit
ogle or dvdrip at a bad moment
http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/index.php
don u just love it when someone fixes u up
And opinions vary greatly… It appears that It works brilliantly for some people and not well at all for others – depending on the hardware present…
I guess this is always going to be that way while hardware vendors don’t specifically support a particular linux platform.
What is clear is that the system is getting better… and Mandrake is one step closer to working automatically for most people. I hope when my copy arrives I am one of the lucky ones
Meanwhile the search tool in the package manager is invaluable when the automatic dependencies fail…
[root@andrew root]# urpmi cdbakeoven
ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake-devel/contrib/i586/cdbakeove…
installing /var/cache/urpmi/rpms/cdbakeoven-1.8.9-5mdk.i586.rpm
Preparing… ##################################################
1:cdbakeoven ##################################################
[root@andrew root]#
Where’s the dependency hell with CDBakeoven?
The problem with CD burning (and many other configurations) in Linux is that it works great for some, not at all for others. To fix these issues all too often requires an expertise that most do not possess.
With Mandrake 9.1, my scanner works without any configuration, but my XFree86 setup required some tweaking, and I still don’t have sound working. Fonts are ugly, and it’ll take some tinkiering to get them acceptable.
With RedHat 8.0, sound worked out of the box, as did the XFree86, as well as antialiasing, but I’ve yet to get scanning to work.
It’s these little issues here and there that plague Linux and it’s adoptability.
Thanks for your help everyone…got it figured out. I created a user for the cdwriter group like it stated, rebooted, and bang it works! I didn’t do this initially because it simply stated that if I didn’t do it, I could only burn CD’s as root. I assumed that this meant it would pull up a “give root password” prompt, but what it actually means is that you have to be logged in as root, apparently!
Which brings me to a couple of small questions I have:
1. How DO you log in as root? I only see the one username I created as an option, no root option as I am used to in the past?
2. Where can I find the config to alter KDE so that the entries on the taskbar don’t “fade out” when the name of the entry is longer than the taskbar button? For instance, “OSNews.com – Exploring th”, everything from the “n” in “exploring” onward fades out. I would like a plainer style with no fade out.
Thanks for the comments guys, and thanks in advance for any additional help you can provide!
Chris
There are legal reasons for Mandrake to disable bytecode interpreter in freetype2. After you install 9.1, go to plf ( http::/plf.zarb.org ) and install freetype2 from there. And get MS fonts from Texstar or from your Windows partition if you dual-boot. Looks really great.
I installed Mandrake 9.1 late last week and have been playing with it for a few days. I have both positive and negative comments about it, but mostly positive.
On the plus side, it’s the prettiest Linux yet, the fonts in Kedit are *finally* legible instead of nasty snaggle-toothed shapes, and it’s the only Linux distro I’ve tried that correctly identified *all* my hardware. (Athlon XP1600/ ECS K7S5A motherboard w. SIS chipset and onboard Ethernet/ 768 MB DDR 2100/ NvidiaTNT 2 32MB AGP 4x video/ Soundblaster PCI 128/ LiteOn 12x10x32 CD-RW/ Samsung SD-612 DVD drive/ RealSync PF77 17″ monitor/ Epson Perfection 1260 USB scanner).
The network was automagically configured during the install, and I was able to immediately go on-line. I use an old Pentium running Smoothwall 1.0 to connect to my ISP via old-fashioned 56K dial-up modem. The Smoothwall box provides firewalling and a DHCP server for the three different computers in my home (wife’s Windows and Mac boxes, my Linux box) which are networked with old-fashioned (and cheap) 100 MB/s Ethernet. I did not attempt to configure a modem directly from Mandrake Linux, since my Smoothwall box does that job.
While all my hardware was correctly identified, my scanner was not auto configured, and I had to read a how-to and edit the /etc/sane.d/ plustek.conf config file used with the Epson Perfection 1260 scanner. Once I did this, the scanner works perfectly. Kooka (scanner software) however has some bugs (it insisted on saving all my images to a directory deep under my .kde folder for the first three images I scanned, then suddenly offered me a previously invisible “save as” option to change this default setting).
I plugged my Nikon 995 Coolpix digital camera into a USB port. I’m used to using the command line to mount the camera as a removable USB storage device, so I was startled and surprised when two icons appeared on my desktop. One was labelled “Hard Disc (sda1) not mounted” and the other was “GTKam”. I right-clicked the Hard Disc icon, chose “mount”, and was rewarded by Konqueror opening up and showing me the contents of the cameras CompactFlash card! Access to any picture of my choice was now a mouse-click and a drag’n’drop away, the job made even easier by the thumbnails that Konqueror displayed above each image file.
Clicking on the GTKam icon produced only an error message about a “bad path”. So far I have not attempted to fix this, since I already have access to the pictures via Konqueror and don’t need GTKam, whatever it is supposed to do (?).
In the past I’ve tried – and totally failed – to use any GUI cd-burning application under Linux in the past. I tried X-Cd-Roast, Gcombust, Gnome-Toaster, and probably a couple of others, and was stymied by ludicrously complex setup and GUI interfaces every time. So for a year I’ve simply used the command line (mkisofs and cdrecord) tools, which worked perfectly on every version of Mandrake I’ve used (8.1 on).
Recently I had heard good things about K3b, so I tried launching it as root. The splash screen lingered longer than I cared for, but when the GUI came up, it was clear, logical, and well designed. My CD-RW was detected, my CD-ROM was not. A peek at /etc/lilo.conf told me that scsi emulation was not configured for my CD-ROM. I added ” hdc=ide-scsi” to the append line, ran /sbin/lilo, and rebooted. This time K3b found both my CD-ROM and CD-RW. Within minutes I was copying my first CD (yes, it was legal, I copied my Mandrake 9.1 download CDs for a friend), and it worked perfectly. Now I can mercifully forget all those command line switches to cdrecord and mkisofs that I have memorized over the last year or so. Lessee, was it “mkisofs -r -J “, or “mkisofs -R -j “?
So, to summarise:
Pros: Easy installation, great hardware detection, good to excellent new or newly improved software (some of my favorites: K3b, Konqueror, Kmail, Evolution, Gaim, Gedit, Bluefish), and finally, legible native fonts in Linux. Without a doubt, this is the best Linux distribution I have ever used. (Note to would-be flamers: this is *my* personal opinion, I have no intention to force it on you, I merely make it available to those interested, and I respect your right to have a different opinion of your own. Please do me the honour of showing me the same courtesy.)
Cons: Scanner not configured and needed geeky “edit config file” fix; K3b doesn’t see IDE devices, and Mandrake does not automatically do SCSI emulation on IDE CD-ROM’s (though it does on burners), more geeky “edit config file” fixes. GTKam doesn’t work as autoconfigured, and as of now I have no idea how to fix it.
Conclusion:
Mandrake 9.1 is the best Linux distro I’ve used yet, by a sizeable margin, but it’s still not truly plug-n-play in the way that BeOS was. Very easy to use, *once configured correctly*, but not necessarily easy for the non-geek to configure.
I would give this distro to my mother-in-law with every expectation that she would be able to use and enjoy it, but I would not expect her to be able to *configure* it herself. In fact, I’m about to do just exactly that – I’ll give her a PC I built for her, with Mandrake 9.1 installed and configured, and hopefully I’ll have to make fewer “please fix my broken Windows computer” trips.
Only you can decide if Linux is adequate for you on your desktop PC; every individual has to make that decision for himself or herself. For me, that turning point was reached with the release of Mandrake 8.1. In the interim between that release and the release of Mandrake 9.1, both Linux software and Linux distributions in general have shown tremendous improvement. Mandrake 9.1 reflects all those improvements, and in my opinion, is currently the best-of-breed Linux distro for desktop use.
A long time ago Mark Twain said “The amazing thing about a dancing bear is not how well it dances, but that it dances at all”. I feel the same way about Linux. The amazing thing about Linux (or Gnu/Linux for you purists) is not that it is perfect, but that a thing cobbled together by thousands of faceless volunteers in a worldwide virtual tower of babel, a thing that is possibly the worlds largest collaborative project, a thing originally started twenty years ago by a lonely American ideologist and capped off by the kernel created by a young Finnish student to scratch his itch for a Unix-like operating system on his 386 PC, is now not only useable but GOOD, and getting better every day.
-Nemo
—————————–footnotes——————————– ——-
I’ve messed with Linux for a couple of years, but I’m definitely a newbie, not a guru. I’m not a Windows fan, but am pragmatic about its use; I use it on several old 200 MHz Pentium PC’s at work because those old PC’s crawl under the burden of modern Linux distros but run fairly well with Win98 SE as the OS. My wife uses both Windows and MacOS at home, while I use Linux and make occasional attempts to use FreeBSD. I have no experience with servers other than the little server running my intranet at work, which is a Duron 1.3GHz PC I set up with Mandrake 8.2, so I am not qualified and have not attempted to assess Mandrake 9.1 for use as a server OS. I have no interest whatsoever in computer games, so the lack of games on Linux is not an issue for me personally. I use my desktop mostly to browse the web (starting with OSnews and Slashdot every time!) , access my email, scan images, access pictures from my digital camera, play CD’s and rip them to my hard drive, write technical documents in LaTeX, develop CGI scripts in Perl, and develop Web pages with a text editor or the Bluefish HTML editor. Oh, and print out stuff to my printer. Linux does each of these tasks somewhere along the scale from adequately to excellently.
It is actually not k3b’s problem. k3b is but a frontend to cdrdao for copying CDs, and cdrdao supports only SCSI devices for both reading and writing.
Does MDK use UTF-8 as default like RH 8 ? I think MDK is really good for newbies, but UTF-8 seems to be mainstream. Windows 2000 helped me a lot when switching everything to Unicode. Like you can have Asian language bookmark in a brower within Russian Windows 2000.
Yo it wasn’t me that bitched about dependency hell, tell that to rax or bax the wonder dog.
Never had dep hell before with mandrake.
UTF-8 is used, but not by default.
When installing and choosing your language, “Advanced” – “Use Unicode by default” and here you go. Or edit /etc/sysconfig/i18n. KDE 3 and QT 3 do use Unicode internally, but not externally unless configured so.
The wine in MDK 9.1 totally unuseable. And I tired to compile wine from source (latest snapshot) with LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 environment settings, it compiled but the result is same. I cannot run any win32 application (I tired the Baldur’s Gate and Heroes of Might and Magic III install).
Another serious problem is the Kylix 3 professional. It works fine (at least the Delphi IDE) with the XFree builtin NVidia driver (without 3D acceleration) but when I install the NVidia driver the starting of Kylix freeze the desktop. My graphic card is TNT2.
It is very interesting, because I used Mandrake 9.1 beta1 before the final 9.1 release without any wine or kylix related problem.
Darn am I P.O.ed.
I thought this one was great.
After trying mandrake 8.x, I found that I couldn’t hook up a mouse to the USB port on my laptop.
RedHat 8.0 let me do that, so I installed it on my desktop as well.
But dvds wouldn’t play without stuttering, so I thought maybe it was the video card.
Everyone assured me that the nvidia card had drivers, so I bought it.
When I had time ( after the no question return period ) I tried installing the drivers: no luck.
Discovered that Suse 8.1 had drivers, so I tried that. They worked great. glx gears went from 180 fps to 3600.
But I couldn’t even get apt-get to install for it so that I could install ogle to watch the vids. It was way behind on the gnome apps, and it was impossible to install upgrades.
So I went back to redhat 8.
Could never get the 3d nvidia drivers installed, but I managed to get smooth vids, and I had no problem upgrading all my other apps.
Tried RedHat 8.3 beta 3, and it looked beautiful. The fonts were great, and ogle installed, but still no 3d drivers for my brand new card.
So I tried mandrake 9.
It was great. The nvidia drivers installed just fine, thanks to Texstar. Apt-get is installed ( haven’t tried ogle yet ).
The gnome desktop wasn’t crippled like Suse’s. The Kde desktop worked better that redhat 8.1 (kweather is now actually visible on the panel, although not in celcius). The fonts looked good.
So now I want to get some work done, and I create a user to do it. No problem.
Later I want to install some other software (plugins for mozilla, Lyx, and anjuta ).
Where’s root?
I can’t sign in as root!!!
I can get the stuff installed using su, but I keep having to enter the password.
Where’s root?????
I try erasing the other user, in the hope that the root sign in would reappear.
No luck.
Where’s root?????
I’m tired of typing in the password everytime I want to do some little thing like copy a file from my vfat drive, or to it.
Where’s root?????
I tried to shorten my password, but it won’t let me change to a short or easily memorized password on MY OWN HOME SYSTEM.
Where’s root?????
I thought that after all the work and hassles I went through, that finally paradise ( or at least a useable operating system ) had been reached. But now I am once again in hell.
Where’s root?????
RonG; you obviously haven’t heard of security issues.
Never run X as root!
Some programs, like xscreensaver, won’t even run as root.
A couple of pointers too ease your situation though:
1. Edit /etc/inittab and change id:5(or 3):initdefault:
to id:1:initdefault:
You get single user mode, no password hassle.
2. Use autologin. Edit /etc/sysconfig/autologin, make sure
AUTOLOGIN=yes and set USER=root (haven’t tried this
but it _should_ work.
3. Use ssh and key-authorization. Run ‘ssh-keygen -b 1024
-N “” -t dsa’ as your normal user. Copy the id_dsa.pub
to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys . Now you can
‘ssh root@localhost’ w/o having to enter a password.
4. root can change a users password to something simple,
even a one character password. passwd will complain but
it still works.
5. Switch DM. Edit /etc/sysconfig/desktop and set
DISPLAYMANAGER=gdm, the edit /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf and
make sure Greeter=/usr/bin/gdmgreeter.
Now you have to enter login name instead of clicking
an icon.
6. Oh, did I mention: Never Run X As Root!
What I do is: When I need to install anything or run
tings as root I open an xterm, ssh root@localhost
(using #3 above), run ‘urpmi emacs’ or whatever.
Regards,
Peder
Oh I forgot:
I usually alias ‘ssh root@loaclhost’ to ‘su’ to even further
minimize typing (no COBOL fingers here
Peder
Well, I downloaded all 3 isos which took 48 hours on my 128k line (16k per second) and this Monday morning took it for a test run.
I had troubles right from the outset with the installer – it hung just after partitioning, or at least, it did nothing for 10 minutes, so I rebooted.
Everything ran fine until I went to configure my network card – that’s when my troubles began.
As soon as I tried to configure it, the mouse stopped working and the machine appeared to ‘hang’ again. I decided to wait this time. Eventually the machine ‘came back to life’ although I had no mouse.
To my suprise, Mandrake had added keyboard navigation to the install process, so I was able to complete the install like this.
I booted up Mandrake and first thing I noticed is that my network card was not functioning.
To cut a long story short, it appeared that my network card was using the same interrupt as my onboard sound, so I changed that by disabling my onboard sound and switching back to my trusty old SB 128 card.
Now I can’t get that to work and when I try to probe it, my mouse stops working and X hangs for over 10 minutes, forcing me to exit with the keyboard.
I can’t blame Mandrake for all these troubles – I’m going to try a re-install from scratch as I think there’s definately a conflict.
Slackware 9.0 also had troubles with my network card, however, Redhat 8.0 ran like a dream.
Yes, I have heard about security issues. But on my home PC I don’t give a rats behind about them. Or rather, I deal with them differnetly ( a locked door helps, and also the fact that I don’t leave ANYTHING on my computer that I would worry about other people seeing ).
It irritates me far more that Mandrake ( or Microsoft ) should feel that they can dictate to me how I deal with my PC.
In 9.1, you can also use Gnome Toaster which works very well for burning cd’s. Also neat is to use cdrecord and mkisofs from the command line.
What I don’t like about 9.1 is the configuration manager, drakwhateveritis, doesn’t work for installing new programs.
It didn’t work for me on 9.0 nor on 9.1 beta either. Just hangs up. Also, Staroffice doesn’t work well. It boots up, but the Staroffice logo hangs there in the middle of the screen till I kill it.
Hey peple just so you know.. K3b does not need to be reconfigured after you install MDK 9.1. Its all ready set to go.. if you reconfigure it you will mess it up but when you restart and try again everything should be there. Im sure there will be an update to fix this sometime..
Well RonG, you might not care about you own security but
when your haXXed PC is used by someone trying to break into
Pentagon to launch the Missiles, and the Feds, CIA and NSA
are shattering your “locked door” at 3am you might get
second thoughts.
I think everybody with an Internet connected PC, running
a remote administratable OS should have a little wider
perspective about security.
And Mandrake isn’t dictating how you should deal with your
PC. They are only acknowledging the common understanding
that a *NIX OS shouldn’t be run as root. If you follow
the points I gave you should have no problem logging in
as root, and you can even get a seventh option:
change startup to runlevel 3 (edit /etc/inittab and change
to id:3:initdefault: . Log in as root and run ‘startx’.
X as root with a nice red background and warnings of
you-know-what.
And there are probably more ways of getting that root login.
Peder
It is actually not k3b’s problem. k3b is but a frontend to cdrdao for copying CDs, and cdrdao supports only SCSI devices for both reading and writing.
Well, that’s not completely correct–cdrdao/cdrecord now supports ATAPI burning (but K3b hasn’t added support for it yet). This means no more “hdc=ide-scsi” or compiling the kernel with SCSI emulation support.
If you read my posting you would realize that I don’t normally work in root. But now, with the way Mandrake has things set up and my work around, I do. Thus, Mandrake has contributed to any insecurity on my system.
Stop the damm finger waving.
And lay off the weed.
Did you try typing “root” into the username box? Works fine for me.
How in the hell do you expect Mandrake to cope with dependency problems for non-Mandrake RPMs?!?!? Would you expect apt to handle dependencies for .debs that you just found lying around on a website and which had been built against another distribution? It’s NOT POSSIBLE. Buy a damn clue. If you want your distribution to work, use your distributions own RPMs, just as you use Debian’s .debs on Debian. And don’t criticise urpmi for doing something it isn’t designed to do and can’t possibly do. BUY A CLUE.
as Pedar says, the securiy problems with logging in as root are not YOURS, they’re everyone elses. weak boxes can be and ARE hacked and that’s how DDoS attacks are started. but ANYWAY.
if you REALLY, REALLY want to login as root, the easiest way is as easy as falling off a log…
urpme mdkkdm
urpmi kdebase-kdm
You get the out-of-the-box KDM, logging in as root available. You can customise the Mandrake KDM to allow it, it’s just not possible by default. (you just need to unhide the root user in KDM configuration, IIRC).
I use both OS X and Mandrake (haven’t tried 9.1 yet). I am surprised that linux distros haven’t taken the OS X approach to the whole root user issue. Instead of having to log in or su to root (the root user is disabled, but can be enabled), OS X allows users to have administrative rights.
When you need to perform an action you just issue the command with sudo e.g. sudo vi /etc/fstab – and you are prompted for the password (with a nive warning message about the dangers of sudo to bbot). Quite simple really. I do know that sudo can be used with linux – in fact i first leart about it back in the Mdk 6 days. Why distros don’t set up admin privileges like OS X – I can’t say? Simple, clean, effective – no need to worry about root at all.
After reading a great number of good reviews about MDK 9.1 I tried it yesterday 🙂 I had 8.0 on my computer and I installed MDK over it. Still I see the same ugly problems.
Installation: RH 8.0 seems to use a GTK interface for setup, so everything look “graphical” and nice. But MDK doesn’t even wrap titles (in Russian, for example) on the left bar. And when it wraps in advertisement boxes during installation, letters jump over one another 🙂
Startup: first impression is also bad, since the face browser at login screen isn’t as nice as RH 8.0 (Gnome’s) login screen.
Inside the MDK everything is OK, but still needs fixing to be as nice as RH.
As for usability, I think MDK might have better usability – it’s aimed at that and has multimedia packed with the installation and such. But the impression, it’s not as good as RH. A novice in Linux will see MDK as something not as professional as Windows (even Windows 95 is better at first boot, though not bundled with software like Linux :-)).
Lay off the weed, huh?
Interesting how you’ve managed to mis-spell my name twice
and in two different ways as well. Hard to see through the
fog?
Nevermind.
Apart from a couple of remarks I really have been trying to
help you so I don’t see what you’re referring to as finger waving.
The bottom line is:
Mandrake shouldn’t be blamed for somebody being lazy enough
not to type ‘su – ; (password) ; urpmi anjuta’ and I
shouln’t be slammered for trying to help in even further
minmizing the amount of nessecery keystrokes.
P e d e r
1) K – Configuration – KDE – System – Login Manager
2) Administrator Mode – Type Root password – User (Tab) – Uncheck “root” ( Hidden Users) – Apply
I’ve waited for about a year to actually switch out of my trusty Mandrake 8.1/Ximian Gnome configuration. When 9.1 was released, I decided to bite the bullet and set aside a Thursday evening (in case it took the weekend to get my old system back) to install the New Mandrake. Downloaded the PCMCIA floppy img, found an open ftp server typed in the info and went to bed. The next morning, I was totally impressed when I rebooted the system and EVERYTHING worked. Scanner, printer, sound, Xwin….EVERYTHING. Beat that M$. Finally a Linux system I’m going to send to my mom!
Upgrading from 9.0 to 9.1 went like a dream on a 2.4GHzCPU 512M Ram Pentium 4. The only thing that didn’t work very well was the RPM based OpenOffice, which worked but extremely slowly (about 5 minutes to load swriter ). I tried backing out this aspect of the upgrade to the 9.0 RPMs, which didn’t work at all , so I uninstalled those and downloaded the OO 1.1 beta and
installed it from the .tgz in /usr/local . This latter “fix” was easy for me but probably wouldn’t have been very easy for a newbie.
Apart from that, well done Mandrake for a great product.
sudo is packaged for mandrake, just urpmi it and set it up in /etc.
timothy: so you found a tiny text wrapping bug in the installation. OH WOE IS ME, stop the presses, hold the front page! Sheesh. and comments like “as nice” are frankly idiotic. What the hell does “nice” mean? Quantify your criticism.