Yet another review raving about Mandrake Linux 10.0 Community Edition can be found here.
Mandrake Linux 10 is a Ten
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I didnt really like it.. I tried it but it crashed on me in like 5 minutes (whats up with mandrake doing that??!!) redhat distro’s run on my PC just great..
I still try every distro mandrake releases but its just weird to see that mandrake keeps having that problem on my PC
As long as you don’t have a scsi and ide burner in your machine, things should go relatively ok.
K3b locks up good when using kernel 2.6, so you need to boot with 2.4
When using 2.4 I can’t get the nvidia driver to compile.
Maybe I’m spoiled with the easy maintainance of FreeBSD systems, but I find it all a bit confusing.
That said, the nfs and printer config tools are GREAT. No mucking around with trying to remember the fstab lines, just search and click. And it’s the first time CUPS didn’t frustrate me 🙂
<shrug> It’s still not the end all, be all of the linux distros, but it is something I’d install on my parent’s computer.
“Yet another review…”
heh heh Eugenia, knowing that you don’t particularly like 10…do I catch a note of sarcasm in that title?
No, it was as it was submitted by gSurface from Flexbeta.
is it possible to use apt-get in mandrake instead of urpmi?
I tried to install it (by ftp) on an old PII, but the installer gets stuck apparently after looking for hard drives and partitions, saying bad partitions on hda (erhh ? there is windows, and an older mandrake) and something about an unknown device sr0, sounds like it doesn’t like the scsi cd burner of the machine. No way to ignore it and continue.. I finally gave up
yes, it is … but Why should I do that ? or did u say that to start a flame ?
I’m having a lot of problems compiling from source with Mandrake 10.0… after doing ./configure it always complains about something.
Also, I haven’t been able to install the Flash plugin in any of the browsers except Firefox (that I downloaded myself). 9.2 had a similar problem, I know there was a workaround but I just don’t want to search for it again.
There’s a lack of software sources too… I can’t find rpms built for 10.0 in any of the mirrors besides the PLF. Maybe I don’t know where to search for it.
Read the errata…
You need to go to a console and type ‘mknod /dev/sr0 c 11 0’
(Welcome to the club)
Other solution: Boot with alt1 image (kernel 2.4) or use ‘noauto’ so mdk doesn’t try to detect things automatically.
Flash didn’t work, after some googling I found that making a symbolic link to a library fixed things.
Try this:
ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5.0.5 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3
After this flash works fine for me in Firefox (the only browser I use)
Mmm I’m really starting to think that I’m the only MDK-fan left around here… I’ve sarted using MDK from version 8.1 and up, I’ve never really had any problems with it. Although I must say that I was pretty f—–g relieved when I found out my LG DVD-ROM wasn’t on the death list
But seriously now. I find the 10.0 release to be a huge improvement over 9.2, and not only because KDE 3.2 and Kernel 2.6.3 are included. It’s just the overall feel and overall usability that has improved a lot, as far as I’m concerned.
My only major problem with Mandrake are (still, *sigh*) the different config tools. Altough they work just fine, they are not at the same level of quality the rest of the OS is at. I think it’s time for them to start working on that.
“raving” – lol, you make the mdk supporters sound manaically-fanatical, maybe its just early in the morning.
i might as well add a serious comment, i jumped ship from mdk to redhat because bluecurve was so nice (galaxy is ok though) but more importantly because mdk cannot compete with redhats army of 3rd party rpm packaers. i can get anything now on fedora, even when i was in the mandrake club getting some rpms was hard work.
still, to get more package availability, they need to win over more users who will package things, so hopefully this will win them more mindshare since it looks nice.
It nice to see how reviews are so positive this time round for mandrake. 9.2 (which was very good in my opinion) got a lot of bashing which was hard to understand. Nice that 10 gets more positive reviews.
Same as earthworm, I jumped ship for the same reason (packages), but went Debian via Libranet. Not as sophisticated as Mdk, but effective and stable.
Mandrake 10 is great but I’d wait for the “official” release. The partitioning tool in perticular has got problems that might not have been fixed on the ISOs being distributed currently.
Me too, I do like mandrake. As for now I play with Mdk9.2, but very very tuned, e.g. with KDE 3.2 built from source. But I know: I wouldn’t get it running as well as it is running now if I weren’t so experienced with 5 years of Debian and Slack administration. Unfortunately it does need digging in /etc
But still I am looking forward to install Mdk 10.1 (versions without a number after the dot are too dangerous for me 
daniel> You did not install gtk-devel…
Am I the only one with a positive experience with mdk10.0? All my hardware works. I have a ide cd-rw dvd+rw and a geforce4 mx 440 video card. Sound is a bit flaky though.
It does feel very betaish.
I already installed gtk2-devel
[root@hello daniel]# urpmi gtk2-devel
Everything already installed
No, the matter is that the library path is not correct. I can also not find a $LD_LIBRARY_PATH … echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH gives me nothing. so, what is the matter there ?
daniel> You did not install gtk-devel…
I personally love using FreeBSD, but will jump into a Linux Distro every now and then because they are fun and cool. Please people remeber this is for the most part test/beta at this point. Would you do a full review(good or bad) on a car that is only being tested in the lab?
And by the way so far it works great on my system no crashes no issues. Updates very easily using Mandrake’s package management tools. And looks very polished. Fonts look great! It’s a no touch Linux distro. You install it works and is preconfigured. If you like to burn the midnight oil use a distro that that takes effort to install and configure and tweak. You get more control that way but in that control you will have to put more effort. Either way the Linux user wins.
the fonts look very nice on the screenshots, nearly perfect hinting. bravo!
of course i prefer pure custom bitmap-fonts over aa-fonts, but my respect to these fonts. They look much better in comparison to the blurry rendered os-x fonts… which always give me a headache.
apple, wake up!
I had a problem installing. But when I unplugged my mouse/kb from USB and switched them to PS/2 it worked fine. Also I had to used the 2nd disc to start it(talk about bad first impression). But the install went perfectly after that. And URPMI seems to work fine too.
I do have a question though. How do you get it to install GNOME 2.6 instead of 2.4, which is what happened on mine.
Also what drivers are installed for the Radeon 9500, does anyone know, and can you install the proprietary ATI ones(I want to play UT2004).
I must say that it really flies. It just feels much faster than previous versions. I do expect several things to break in the next too days, but so far so good. I’ve always had some problems with Mandrake, but I really like it, and want it to succeed. The new config tools remind me of a bad copy of Mac OS X’s tools. I don’t find them horrible, but not really an improvement.
Are you sure you are using GTK2 in your code? Sounds to me like you should be using the original gtk-devel
I have had very little problems with 10 and I even have it installed as an upgrade from RC1 which is suprising. Every other time I tried to do an ungrade rather than a full install, it would crap out in no time flat. Only issues I’ve had so far are with KOffice, spellcheck in KOffice, and KNotes. Other than that, everything works great.
All of the people complaining about their bad experience with Mandrake 10 need to understand that the official release of MDK 10 hasn’t taken place.
This release is for power users who can cope with problems and file a bug report. By the way, if you do the updates, most of the problems have been fixed. MDK 10 is the best OS I have ever used.
I loved Mandrake 9.2; it brought back warm fuzzy memories of MDK 7.2, which was the first Linux distro to really hook me. When MDK 10 came out, I was eager for the new kernel and kde, and I felt great that I was a club member and would have access to an early torrent. Installation was as beautiful as ever on my Inspiron 5100, until network setup. They apparently have a problem with the way they have set things up here (not sure if it’s a kernel problem or a pcmcia problem). It got an endless loop of me selecting the driver for my Truemobile 1150 mini-PCI card. Post installation I was able to eventually get both my wired and wireless nics setup. However, upon reboot, my wireless card was being removed by harddrake. I did several things to try and resolve this and nothing worked, and since wireless is a showstopper, I had to say good bye to Mandrake.
I moved to Gentoo, even though I felt a little anxious about my chances of getting things correctly setup on a notebook. In the end, I have a setup with working acpi, pcmcia, 802.11b, kernel 2.6.3, supermount, alsa, kde 3.2.1, dri. I’m very happy with what has been accomplished on my notebook. The only downside is that MDK 10 takes about 45-60 minutes to install, and all of the stuff I’ve compiled on Gentoo has taken about a week to compile and configure. Yes, my time is important as I have a day job and a family. I just got less sleep than usual. 😉
May the penguin be with you whichever distro you choose.
Robert
Robert,
Your attitude is refreshing. I am with you, use whatever flavor of the penguin and do not flame other Linux users. Let’s help each other out. We do not need to waster our energy with silly distribution wars. They are all good. They are all expressions of human creativity and of resourcefullness.
Yeah, I found something that brings it from a 10 to a 1. When I do ctrl+alt+backspace, it unfailingly corrupts my filesystem.
I had a small problem with upgrading from 10 Beta 2 to 10 final. Basically, it lost all my NIC settings. Not hard to fix, and mabye my fault for using a Beta, but thought someone might have the same problem.
Well, I installed 10 on my laptop, knowing there would be packages for wireless connections (KWifiManager comes to mind, a part of the new KDE 3.2). Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a single wireless tool on any of the cds… My suspend-to-disk still doesn’t work (as expected, it’s a bit picky). I’m also not a fan of all the mdk “ads” within the OS. The mandrake star icons that aren’t easily changed, etc. The MCC seems to be a step back as far as functionality (added mouse-clicks for nearly any task). Many of the mandrake tools are still very buggy, and I often find myself in infinite loops (selecting network drivers, configure network, select driver to use, configure network, select driver…)
On the bright side of things, the new kernel is considerably faster and kde 3.2 is a nice addition.
All in all, I can deal with some bugs or blame my lack of familiarity. I think I’ll wait till the final is released, or urpmi ftps to populate with contrib’s at the very least.
yes, I’m sure ! I only copy all that was in that tutorial from gtk – and it’s a gtk2 programm.
Is there nobody here who can help me ? I rode, that it’s possible to do a simlink from /usr/include/gtk-2.0/gtk/gtk.h to /usr/include/gtk/gtk.h , and that that would solve my problem. But that is really not elegant! how can I do so that the gtk-2.0 headder files also get included then compiling ?
Are you sure you are using GTK2 in your code? Sounds to me like you should be using the original gtk-devel
“yes, it is … but Why should I do that ? or did u say that to start a flame ?”
Actually, I see the original posters point. Why learn APT, YUM, URPMI, etc., just so that you can do binary updates? APT can already be used by Debian and Fedora, and all a system admin wants is a little consistency through the distro’s. I think distro makers need to approach the package managers similar to the way they approach KDE and GNOME; they should include most and let the end users decide.
Personally I don’t like the idea of these community edition releases because they give the official version a bad name. Mandrake should have kept “10.0 Community” as “10 RCx.”
>Is there nobody here who can help me ?
well, this is not the right place to ask questions about gtk.. see mailing lists at http://www.gtk.org/mailinglists.html for some help
“pkg-config –cflags” is supposed to return the include options (you can try to run it and see what it gives), if it doesn’t return the correct include directories there is probably a problem with your installation
I had a small problem with upgrading from 10 Beta 2 to 10 final. Basically, it lost all my NIC settings. Not hard to fix, and mabye my fault for using a Beta, but thought someone might have the same problem.
10.0 Community is NOT the final. Guess what, you’re still using a beta.
it gives me that :
[daniel@hello Chapter3]$ pkg-config –cflags gtk-2.0
Package gtk-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gtk-2.0.pc’
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package ‘gtk-2.0’ found
so, is that a mandrake problem, because they don’t set PKG_CONFOG_PATH ? I’m using mandrake 10.0 (u see, that has something to do with the article:) ).
So , i will look at the archive of the gtk-mailinglist for the answer of my problem
i feel like downloading and installing mdk10community just to see if it will work nicely with my hardware or not. i have not had any showstoppers to date when useing anything from 7.2 or there about to 9.2…
it would be interesting if the people haveing problems would post theyre full hardware config as there could be something there that messes up…
Daniel, I have had exactly the same problems with gtk2 on mdk9.2-cooker (mdk10), but I thought it was just me that configured something the wrong way. Now I can see it is a bug in mandrake.
I will file a bug report when I get the time.
I also had that problem in mandrake9.2, and even in 9.1. I thought, it was my problem because I were not able to do that right … I hope, there is time to change that before mandrake10.0 final !
Daniel, I have had exactly the same problems with gtk2 on mdk9.2-cooker (mdk10), but I thought it was just me that configured something the wrong way. Now I can see it is a bug in mandrake.
I will file a bug report when I get the time.
My only major problem with Mandrake are (still, *sigh*) the different config tools. Altough they work just fine, they are not at the same level of quality the rest of the OS is at. I think it’s time for them to start working on that.
I pretty much use Webmin for everything Config wise. Throw a nice theme on it, and it looks pretty good, to boot!
ummm…
here’s a far, far, far, far, far easier solution which would’ve been my first.
# chkconfig harddrake off
there, that wasn’t very hard, was it? no more harddrake interfering with your hardware…
btw, for urpmi sources – plf and contrib – it’d be fine to use Cooker sources for 10.0 CE up until 10.0 Official is released.
[adamw@toy adamw]$ pkg-config –cflags gtk+-2.0
-I/usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include -I/usr/include/atk-1.0 -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/X11R6/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/freetype2/freetype2 -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include
[adamw@toy adamw]$
afaik, if something is asking for gtk-2.0, it’s coded wrong. gtk+-2.0 is the right name.
It’s really fast, even on an old laptop which is probably due to the 2.6 kernel.
I just bought an HP 1012 LaserJet printer and it detected it and even printed a test page during the install. Nice!
The first time I tried to boot it hung but it’s been fine since.
The menu systems for configuration are a mess IMO. Now that YAST is going open source things should get better for every distro.
I give Mandrake a -10 for it’s inability to create a usable installer. First off, I have a Duron 1ghz, with 512MB of ram and 3GB space free. I was planning on using 2GB for mandrake. Guess what? MAndrake only allows you to use up to 268MB. They failed to mention that on their website.
Also, the only way to install Mandrake was to uncheck all of the options including KDE. Only the minimum install will install due to Mandrake’s self-limitation.
Here’s a catcher, if you want to keep your WinXP installtion and install Mandrake, you are out of luck. It will totally kill your bootsector rendering your computer only able to run Mandrake.
Good thing is, it detected all of my hardware. Bad thing is, this distro is 100% worthless. When it finally boot (took about 3 hours to install) the only thing available was a analog clock, and that was it. I wasted a day downloading all three cds to have a stupid clock on my desktop.
When Mandrake decide to create a OS, they should actually put effort into it.
I’m posting from Mandrake 10 on my Dell Latitude D800. Once everything was “tweaked”, I’d say it has a much cleaner feel than anything else. It hasn’t crashed on me yet either.
I’ve had difficulty with hardware support with most every distribution. One thing that SuSE 9.0 picked up that Mandrake didn’t is the acpi. I edited lilo and Mandrake is working fine (I guess) now. No distribution has configured X properly, although Mepis got close. My screen is 1920×1260. That’s not even an option on the gui config. Overall, I think I’ve tweaked less on Mandrake and it feels more polished. So, I give it a “thumbs up”, so far.
the name Community Edition does suggest that it is a release free of bugs.
It should be RC3 or something.
I read on the Cooker mailing list (Cooker is the bleeding edge distribution of Mandrake) that CD1 wont boot on most PCs and that happened to me, so i booted off CD2 and then inserted CD1 and things went ok.
specs:
Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 motherboard with version F7 BIOS (latest BIOS)
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-7N400~*…
AMD 3000+ XP
This mobo is 400 MHz FSB capable, but the 3000+ XP i have is only 333 FSB…so i am actually underclocking it until i get the 3200+ in a few weeks.
running at 166MHz*2 (333 FSB)
1GB DDR 400 MHz RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 XT (256 MB RAM)
2*120GB Seagate 7200 RPM ATA hdds…not using SATA at the moment.
MachTV BT878 based TV card
SB Live Platinum with Live Drive II circa 1999.
onboard Realteck 8169 Gigabit NIC
onboard AC97 disabled.
onboard RAID controller disabled
onboard SATA controller disabled.
onboard parallell port disabled.
I had some weirdness around the detection of my NIC (Realteck 8169) as an nVidia blah AGP…and trying to choose it manually in the installer and then in HardDrake afterwards simply wouldnt work.
Harddrake shows it as a Realteck card so that’s good. And the card actually works.
I had sound issues with xmms but then installed the alsa plugin for it and configured it to use it instead of the default esd. Now i have sound from xmms. Same with one of the video packages (xine i think), but Totem does not work properly and crashes.
Overall though it is a snappy, responsive OS now. I didnt install KDE as i prefer Gnome but that’s a personal choice so i cant comment how KDE 3.2.x performs.
Adam W: thanks for the chkconfig tip. I shall have a look through chkconfig and see what else it does as occasionally i get NIC weirdness and have to ifup it, and i had that in 9.2 as well.
As far as ATI drivers are concerned i installed the latest RPM from ATI and glxgears i now get 330 to 350FPS (ish) instead of 30 to 40 on 9.2. I’m looking into why Enemy Territory is using Mesa instead of HWOGL, and UT2004 demo doesnt start. It doesnt stop either (stuck on the banner page) 😉 but i’ll dig into that tonight.
I’m really looking forward to the Mandrake 10 final release and will definately use it
cheers
peter
i have XP, BeOS and QNX and installing this release did *not* kill XP like what happened to Shannara above.
I used Lilo to install on the MBR of drive 1 where XP lives and it was fine.
I have done this many times on this PC while testing all the Cooker releases plus 9.1 and 9.2 – no problems.
I installed most of the options on the installer panel except KDE and Web (apache and proftp)
cheers
peter
Thank you, it works now ! you are my hero !
Umm…guys…the installer asks you where you want to install lilo (or whether you want to install it, for that matter). If you don’t want your bootsector overwritten, you should make a boot floppy instead of mindlessly clicking Next and installing lilo in the mbr.
Hi, AdamW. Thank you for your suggestion to disable harddrake to prevent it from removing wireless. This was also my thought once I had both my wired and wireless nics working. However, upon reboot, I found that my wireless nic was removed without any warning whatsoever. So, harddrake is not the root of the problem, as far as I can tell. When I realised that I was not going to get stable wireless, I knew that I was going to have to do something different. I have always hated being unable to just drop in the newest kde without breaking other packages. Gentoo may take a long while to get setup, but once it is, you can compile to your hearts content. Yeah, I know that means another 6 or 7 hours to compile the latest, greatest kde. However, it can be done. So, it satisfies me. I’m glad things worked for you, though.
Robert
yup, definitely another problem then. maybe something ACPI / APIC related. I have current Cooker (basically 10.0) on this laptop and I can use its wireless card just fine, so it’s definitely something machine-specific, I think…
to whoever asked about chkconfig – it just enables and disables services, which are all those things that run on boot. drakxservices is the Mandrake GUI tool to do the same thing.
Please take your time and do something about
mandrake because needs a lot of work in order to
become a decent os.
thanks