After the installation and configuration articles, Tips4Free offers a full review of Mandrake 10.
Review of Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
And I’m very happy with it. I’m gona install it also on my other machines. WineX and CrossOver work fine, but I’ve already filed a bug about software suspend. The fix would be to use software suspend from swsusp.sf.net which works flawless in my experience.
!FIRST POST!
Marc
CD 1 would not boot
had to boot CD 2 and swap to CD 1
other then that… seems smooth
I installed it yesterday and it is beautiful. Fast, responsive, it suspends to the hard drive and wakes up in second, graphical acceleration works on my card, the network tools have been reworked and are much more ergonomic and easier to use.
This is without a doubt Mandrake’s best release. If they have done such a magnificent job with their community release, I think the official release which will have the added wisdom and fixed bugs of a few more weeks should be just amazing.
I have never been so happy with any computing platform. KDE 3.2 is a joy to use. Koffice is now very usable and I prefer it to OpenOffice for most things, even though its import support isn’t yet as good as OO.org’s.
I honestly believe that Mandrake is now at a stage that even a monkey can use it. It provides good secure defaults, makes it easy to install software and keep the machine updated. If everything goes according to plan, I intend to send the folks at Mandrake some money just to get the DVD version and have all the software in one easy-to-carry format.
Any one else get asked for Disk4 ?. I just cancelled and it kept going
Any one else get asked for Disk4 ?. I just cancelled and it kept going
Same here. Probably will be used for a CD full of third party nonfree binary only stuff like Java, Flash and the like.
Multiple CD installs for a basic desktop piss me off.
I posted/added comments to several bugzilla bugs. Many of these bugs are still not fixed in this release.
i.e. it has problems with HP multi-function devices.
at the end of the install, it is caught in a loop.
loop()
finds printer model
install driver – insert disc 1
install gimp/scanner support – asked to insert disc 2
error
repeat loop
Printerdrake also hangs when trying to configure the printer.
Installed 5CD powerpack version yesterday and ran into 3 issues with one of them being easy to resolve:
o X wouldn’t start with the proprietary NVIDIA
driver provided. Tried a few things then just
downloaded the latest one from NVIDIA and
it worked fine.
Just saw today in the Errata that it is a known
issue and that you can re-install the driver from
one of the cd’s.
o This motherboard has a HPT 372 raid controller
on which i have two drives in Raid0
Currently there seems to be no drivers for the
HPT372 raid controller for the 2.6.x kernels so
I can’t access my data on there
o XSane crashes when trying to access the AGFA
Snapscan 1212u scanner.
Both devices (hpt and snapscan) work flawlessly
in the previous versions of Mandrake and as I
need them I’ll be reinstalling 9.2.1 tonight and
wait (probably a few months) until I can use those
two devices with the latest version and kernel.
Otherwise I have to agree that this is a very nice
release for a 10.0 and should provide a pleasant
experience for most users out there (just make
sure your devices are all supported to work with
the new kernel).
Big
I have been toying with the idea of moving to Slackware (from Mandrake), and want to ask does anyone know which is faster?
I understand that Slack is naturally fast, but Mdk has the 2.6 kernel and latest KDE etc.
Your ass getting to the store to get me some beer is faster.
Which is faster depends on your hardware and how you set it up, which services you enable or disable and so forth.
does anyone knw that the kernel version of mandrake 10 supports centrino drivers(wireless lan) released by intel few days back?
I have been toying with the idea of moving to Slackware (from Mandrake), and want to ask does anyone know which is faster?
This is not the right question. The question should be which install/configuration will be less time consuming. Undoubtedly Mandrake is the answer. I use Mandrake 9.2, and since I am looking at doing an upgrade to 10.0 anyway, I started thinking about doing a Gentoo install on my notebook. Getting ACPI, pcmcia, DRI, etc working for my notebook on my schedule…I don’t think so.
KDE (although my preferred DE) is pissing me off of late. Under both FreeBSD, DragonFly and now apparently Mandrake, the location bar in Konqueror doesn’t retain history. Is there a new setting or something? Did I not get a memo?
does anyone knw that the kernel version of mandrake 10 supports centrino drivers(wireless lan) released by intel few days back?
Guess 🙂
I have a Highpoint 404 RAID card, and it also doesn’t work, although it does in 9.2. The problem isn’t the drivers, it is the kernel. Googling on the failure output pulled up a page that says the kernel needs a patch to work with raidtools 0.9*. I have already submitted a bug.
Same here. It’s actually quite annoying… Does anybody know about this?
I know that MDK 10.0 is not perfect, so I encourage everyone to file bug-reports at qa.mandrakesoft.com.
That way we could have one of the best linux distributions when MDK 10.0 Official Release comes out. So far I’ve found bugs, including that CD1 doesn’t boot on some systems. Just file bug-reports and contribute 5 minutes of your life to do this. It’s the best way to ensure the success of Mandrake and the quality of a distribution that we would like to use.
Marc
intel released their stuff just a few days ago as u know, and mandrake 10 was already out then (for club members).
anyways, intel’s stuff is pretty unusable right now, no WEP support being the biggest problem.
the good news is that mandrake kernel comes with the latest ndiswrapper modules. so for centrino just urpmi wireless-tools and ndiswrapper (for userspace tools), get the binary windows centrino drivers and u r ready to go..
been using it since 10beta1 and works gr8.
mail me if u need help with setting it up. [there are some gotchas like network drake detecting wireless interface as ethernet and trying to configure it as that]
buhaha, you know linux has ways to go before it catches upto windows, when the review has a step by step install for dummies with screenshots to boot.
lol
I guess that this guy never installed windows from an install CD. Some versions of windows are even bitchier to install than the worst distro on the planet. And no I’m not talking about Click > Next > Next or partitioning, but about the fact that when things go wrong during the install you’re screwed. I guess that the recovery CD’s will do for this guy.
Oh wait, he’s trolling…
Some versions of windows are even bitchier to install than the worst distro on the planet
What versions are you talking about, The latest version of windows is xp. And from experience my 10yr nephew installed it by himself on his pc.
Windows only has ONE version out, theres is no million distros like linux.
Windows only has ONE version out, theres is no million distros like linux.
Monocultures are unstable and liable to ecological collapse !
Monocultures are unstable and liable to ecological collapse !
Yeah right, it takes decades for a monopoly to be broken up, heck it took ATT almost 80 yrs.
So its mostly likely you and everyone will long be dead and so will your grandchildren and great grandchildren before such a software monocultre collapses.
“buhaha, you know linux has ways to go before it catches upto windows, when the review has a step by step install for dummies with screenshots to boot.”
Mandrake is easier to install then Windows XP. Period. End of story. You are pissing on the wrong tree here.
“Windows only has ONE version out, theres is no million distros like linux.”
Windows has Windows NT 4, 95, 98, 98SE, XP, XP Pro etc all out and running about.
no, they don’t disappear every new verion of windows like Microsoft would like.
Anyways, I’m sorry if you don’t like choice and freedom.
Mandrake is easier to install then Windows XP. Period. End of story.
Okay so what if your right, i’ll bet you a million dollars in 20 yrs nearly all the Linux distro companies will go bankrupt.
You wanna know why, because theres one thing that all linux fans have in common. None of them want to pay for software, so i ask you whose left to support your precious linux distros. NO one.
Don’t feed the trolls..it upsets their diet of scum and small beatles…
You just keep hitting on one bull troll topic after another. Maybe you could just post your list so we could all get this over with sooner. Whats next? Communism? Terrorism?
Everything went fine for me…including fonts, but, AFTER I upgraded the graphics driver to NVIDIA, all the fonts were “supersized”!
Had to manually change the font sizes, but still looks quirky to me. ( I have it down to size 8pt, but still is LARGE!!)
Config: Dell laptop C840, 1600×1200, NVIDIA GeForce 4 Go – 64Mb video, 1Gb RAM
Additionally, the sound driver Arts crashes occasionally when I login.
Other than the above, everyting else ROX!!!
If you are having trouble post a bug report so that the Offical version can be rock stable and problem free.
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/
Another broken item is drag-n-drop of page links from one Konqueror to another. That’s bugging me because I had gotten used to using it without thinking about it.
I reported my lack of USB support with my MSI KT600 Delta LSR motherboard. Also the find a file program in KDE 3.2 is crashing on my computer as well. Both bugs have been sent to Mandrake.
What versions are you talking about, The latest version of windows is xp. And from experience my 10yr nephew installed it by himself on his pc.
Did you 10 year old nephew have to upgrade his BIOS just to upgrade to Windows XP? I did. The installer would freeze at a certain point, otherwise. Not exactly a user-friendly installation, from my experience.
Just installed MDK 10, the installation, configuration, and customization process went flawlesly on my machine. I’ve
never had a problem with MDK or Suse (which is on my laptop),
A repeating question…”which is better?, which is faster?”
A> better- depends on how you use your box.
A> faster- that’s a good question… find one that seems to work
for you and stick with it.
Don’t mind me though… this is just the tale of sick and demented
Linux user about a tale to be told.
But remember this… OPENSOURCE- for the people, by the people.