The second beta of Mandrakelinux 10.1 was released over the weekend and here are some of the new features as published on Mandrakeclub.com. Elsewhere, “after a month of use, I’ve decided Linux is okay but not perfect” says Roger Mier after using Mandrake 10.
Mandrakelinux 10.1 Beta 2 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Good on-going work – thanks to all the Mandrake devs/others –
From WMP crashing constantly to the mysterious happenings in KDE…doesn’t seem to matter what OS he uses.
“My old 20 gig HDD which used to have my Linux partition on it is now my little Windows drive for the games I can’t play in Linux.”
“Games I can’t play in Linux” meaning “any” I suppose. He could have just ended that sentence with “…drive for games.”
He is right about the sound, though, it sucks hind tit on Linux. Given that music files are the hottest thing on computers today, it seems the Linux boys would get around to having sound work. No matter what distro I install, I get the test sound to play and nothing else, no matter what I do. Video players flat don’t work at all for me.
Does the author appear a little confused about open source applications and Linux in general? He points out in his article that he feels Kaffeine is a better video player than Totem but these are really just frontend GUI tools for Xine. If he has a codec issue then it’s a commercial codec that was not supplied with his distribution due to licensing issues. Also, most users do not use these players for anything but video playback. For audio players most will use something like XMMS or Amarok which are developed for audio media in mind.
Regarding his comments on instant messengers for Linux distributions I really don’t see why he would try to compare Linux messengers to Trillian. Trillian Pro is similar in every respect to multichat Linux messengers but it the same in that it too does not even have VOIP. So how is it any differant than Kopete or Gaim? It would of been better to compare them to MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger both of which offer VOIP. Anyway, if he were to use Kopete v0.9.0 that comes with KDE 3.3 then he would see that Linux messenger developers have done a lot of improvements lately. Some are even working towards offering VOIP in the next few months (ie: Kopete, Gaim, aMSN). Since he never clarified what desktop version comes with Mandrake 10.1 Beta 2 I guess we have to guess what version the applications are that he was referring to.
I could go on about other points but the reality is this article is severely lacking any real information for readers considering upgrading or purchasing Mandrake 10.1 when it’s released.
Stupid. The person claims to have used Windows since 3.11 and after a month he/she/it decides they’re ready to write up their experiences with Linux? A month? LOL! I’ve been seeing more and more of these write ups lately from people claiming to have used Windows since the early versions and generally they use Linux for a month or two (if even that – and most of the time they dual boot Windows whether they admit it or not) and hammer out a quick review about their brief experiences with Linux. Had these people spent 1/4 of the time with Linux that they spent with Windows, they would have a very different view and new found appreciation and love for Linux.
Too often many a Windows user will decide to try another OS and throw up their hands only to run back to their Wintendo and breathe a sigh of relief. You see, many of these people don’t want to THINK at all. They want to point and click. That’s it folks. So if you give them something challenging, something that makes them think, they struggle. There’s a cool saying I heard a few weeks ago, I don’t remember who said it but it went something like this:
“Make people think they’re thinking and they’ll love you, make people actually think and they’ll hate you.”
^^ That pretty much describes the majority of point and click Windows users I’ve ran into since Win98 came out – all the non-computer users who couldn’t understand the command line and thought it was magic or humans communicating via a stargate gateway into another dimension.
I wasted a few minutes reading the review before I went and took a dump. My experience on the toilet brought me more enlightenment than reading that person’s review.
because you can’t get sound working in linux doesn’t mean that it sucks, it just means you’ve had bad luck getting it to work. i have full six channel sound in linux (though i still only have two speakers
) and have no problem streaming audio from the web, playing cds, mp3s, etc. you should check the gentoo forums if you’re having problems, they generally have solutions to just about anything. or perhaps your sound card isn’t fully supported.
and 1 of the 2 biggest games of the year should be available for linux in a few weeks. i don’t disagree that there’s definitely a shortage, but some of the best play on linux too!
I’ve installed SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional on several hardware configurations and found it supports hardware better than most distributions. I have not had an issue with sound. Actually the sound has really improved since recently updating to KDE 3.3. It could be in your case either the distribution is a pain to configure hardware, doesn’t auto-detect hardware like SuSE Linux or you have a really rare outdated sound card. My on board sound chip for my Abit IC7-G works just as well as my previous Creative Labs Live 5.1 PCI sound card. When I installed SuSE Linux all my hardware including my wireless devices were detected correctly and the drivers were auto-installed.
As for the video codec issue take a trip over to http://www.linuxforum.com and look at the pinned topics in “Linux Software” forum. At the end of my posts you’ll see “Video Codecs” in my signature which should help you out. There are also other links in my signature for Wine Help and an online eLibrary which covers several distributions.
“Make people think they’re thinking and they’ll love you, make people actually think and they’ll hate you.”
That pretty much sums up life in America c. 2004. Decades of spoon feeding pablum to the population has had its inevitable success.
This Roger Miller is clueless. How can he say that he has been running Linux since 1996? How is it that he never found out about easy urpmi:
http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/
Easy urpmi will allow him to easy add contrib and plf as installation sources (repositories in Mandrake’s speak) and have thousands of applications available.
OK, let’s deal with his specific complaints. Step by step:
1) Add plf and contrib as per the steps on easy urpmi.
2) urpmi mplayer-gui (This will add all of the windows codecs, gmplayer and it will allow you to play every video under the sun.
3) urpmi libdvdcss
Put a dvd in the drive and it will begin playing.
4) Usenet Reader, I love Knode. It’s fast and wonderful for text news, which is all I do, since I am not into pirating software, music or videos.
5) Bittorrent is as easy as urpmi bittorent.
He probably doesn’t know how to use the ncurses interface, which is simple and functional.
btdownloadcurses.py –url http://site.com/iso.torrent
6) Fonts. Maybe he should have looked at the font installer within MDK’s Control Center. Geesh!
And maybe if he had purchased a box, he would have gotten a manual and a clue to go with it.
7) Mandrake 10 is incredibly stable and beatiful, but most of all fast, fast, fast. Give it a try.
And a more conciliatory post for this guy:
Try Juk, as a media player. You’ll love it.
Make sure you have contrib and plf and do as follows:
urpmi Juk
And while you are it, head over to realplayer.com and download Realplayer 10 for linux which has great support for a huge number of codecs including SMIL.
I would suggest Amarok over Juk. Similar interfaces but Amarok is way more robust, more options, and more stable. You have to tweak it but you can get the whole player on the playlist window and I just love that style of player over wimamp/XMMS style players.
Dude, RTFA. It’s a positive review of Linux. The guy says it isn’t perfect, but that he likes it better than Windows.
No OS is perfect. He likes Linux better than Windows. So do you. You’re in agreement. Knee-jerk reactions such as yours don’t help.
This Roger Miller is clueless. How can he say that he has been running Linux since 1996?
That’s Mier, and he hasn’t claimed to have been running Linux since 1996. Quite the contrary, he only started using it recently.
I don’t understand you guys, this is a positive article. You’re reacting like he said that Linux sucks, while it’s quite the opposite!
Regarding the Juk vs. Amarok debate, I used to be a Juk user, but I recently switched to Amarok. It’s a really nice app, but I haven’t found how to have more than one playlist (or how to load playlists, for that matter). Anyone has an idea?
So the plf already has packages built for a beta mandrake release? Jeez, those guys are on the ball…
I don’t understand you guys, this is a positive article. You’re reacting like he said that Linux sucks, while it’s quite the opposite!
So do you condone flaming articles that are negative about Linux, regardless of their merit? Please clarify your stance on propaganda.
What’s up with that soundwrapper xmms? Seems XMMS stopped crashing after I took out that soundwrapper off the command line by Menudrake.
Anybody knows if Mandrake is ever switching to Xorg?
So do you condone flaming articles that are negative about Linux, regardless of their merit? Please clarify your stance on propaganda.
I don’t consider this a “flaming” article (I guess you meant “flamebaiting”), nor is it negative about Linux. The guy says he likes it better than Windows.
Propaganda is good if it tells the truth, bad if it doesn’t. Anything else you need to know?
Testers of this beta, or anyone else using Linux 2.6.8.1, should be aware that this kernel version has a memory leak (severe bug) which occurs when the user tries to burn an audio CD. The result is that the burn fails, the computer locks up because memory is full, and the computer has to be rebooted. Doesn’t occur when burning data CDs. A patch exists, and 2.6.8.2 might as well be released to solve this problem.
Details: http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3659#comment
I hope Mandrake, and others, will patch before they release. I’m quite sure they will. But in the meanwhile this is for the people who test this beta of this distribution. So don’t try to burn audio CD’s using this beta version of Mandrake.
Currently to upgrade from an already configured cooker repository, I do:
$urpmi.update -a
$urpmi –noclean –force –resume –no-verify-rpm –auto –auto-select
But I have found that every once in a while Mandrake will add a new package or it will change a package name (kopete vs kdenetwork-kopete during 9.x to 10.0 transition).
Is there a better way to properly d/l new packages and get rid of old ones and get a proper 10.1 distro?
X.Org should be included this new release for sure.
On the bleeding edge with kernel 2.6.8.1. While on that edge – ReiserFS4 has just entered Andrew Morton’s testbed. Maybe it will be in 2.6.9? It won’t make it into the upcoming Mandrake final but maybe the next release of Fedora or more likely SuSE. Does anyone know when they are due?
“I would suggest Amarok over Juk. Similar interfaces but Amarok is way more robust, more options, and more stable. You have to tweak it but you can get the whole player on the playlist window and I just love that style of player over wimamp/XMMS style players.”
There are two features that I prefer about Juk: its search-as-you-type playlist, multiple playlists, and scanned folders, which were not in Amarok last time I looked. And I have had zero stability issues with Juk.
Additionally, Juk in KDE 3.3 now has built-in CD-Burning to allow you to easily create music CDs.
Just finished playing with the beta. The wireless roaming/profile manager tool that Mandrake has created is very cool. Try it.
I doubt that I’ll upgrade my main machine when this comes out as Mandrake 10 has been perfect for me, but I’ll put it on my laptop where the wireless roaming is likely to come handy.
“After living with Windows XP for a few months, the fact that whenever I opened Windows Explorer it would start with no info bar at the bottom”
how about VIEW….STATUS BAR
“Windows Media Player would crash every other time I played a video, without fail, and none of my window positions would be saved when I closed them.”
HOW ABOUT USING WINDOWS CERTIFIED DRIVERS?
this is valid for any OS
I was using WinME for like 6 months with certified drivers & it was rock solid had no crash in 6 months!
“Mandrake handled my SATA drive without a hitch. Even Windows needed special attention in this area,”
how many times we have to say
Mandrake Linux 10 release date at the end of 2003
WinXP released in mid 2001
“Besides the aesthetic editing of my desktop, (which I do mostly because you can’t do it in Windows)”
WindowBlinds
StyleXP
DesktopX
LiteStep
just to name few
besides that Mandrake 10 is a really step in right direction for Linux!
Is what drives people away from linux.
This is in response to what people like Dark_Knight, 1 Goblin Turd of Wisdom, and Eu said.
Someone uses linux for a fair amount of time (2 months, was it? If everyone had to wait years before writing about their experiance in linux, we wouldn’t have any good introductary linux articles, now would we).
Then some of the more rabid “people” (I use this term loosely) come out and call the person an idiot for not knowing as much as them. “OMG BUT THERE IS LIKE THIS PROGRAM FOR THIS TASK! LOL GET THIS NEW VERSION! LOL!1!!!” Even though this is a positive article about linux, and they seem to hate the fact that he isn’t claiming that Linux is 100% perfect, and for everyone.
Calm down.
I found this review very intresting, since I’ve never tried mandrake. (More of a Debian guy.) I’m probally going to go download it and test it out tonight. =D Thanks!
This article reflects almost exactly all of my experiences with Linux distros over the past two years. Things are broken in the default install, they get fixed at the next release but new things are broken.
I’ve just finished testing Mandrake 10. I tried Audacity. On first run it gave me a message that I would not be able to record or edit any music with the program – a bit limiting for a sound editor… I could not play any of my movie files with the installed players – they all gave an error message instead. DVDs would not work either. All-in-all, a bit of a dissapointment.
On the plus side I can now get a high enough refresh rate for my monitor from the base install which is good and it was very good about playing music files of my ntfs HDD.
There’s just too much stuff in the avereage distro that just does not work as advertised. Quite puzzling really. Don’t they test their stuff? What’s the explanation?
On the other hand the annoyances the author recounts regarding XP are exactly the same as mine. The thing just feels buggy to use but few seem to want to admit that.
In all, I thought this was a good honest article.
plf has a cooker branch whose packages are built against a very well-updated cooker. if you’re on a beta mandrake that’s the best plf branch to use.
mdk already switched to x.org. all 10.1 alphas and betas should ship with it.
I really don’t understand all the negative comments. This guy switched to linux, liked it overall, had some problems and is now writing about his experience. What could possibly be wrong with that?
I know that most if not all of his problems can easily be solved if you know your way around linux better then he does. But isn’t it exactly the point that you have to know your way around the system before you are able to solve this problems? Now of course this holds true for all OSs (and Windows is in no way an exception here) but still it should be the goal of every distribution to make it as easy as possible for anyone who switches to linux. And in order to achieve that goal feedback like this is needed.
So please guys, get a grip.
Mandrake 10 was the distro that finally made me stop dual booting between Linux and Windows, I had been doing that since 1993. I always had a Windows partition kept for games etc. However one final virus just pissed me off that much, I finally plucked up the balls to reformat the drive and remove the MS stuff completely.
I don’t think I would have done it if I was not so happy using Mandrake 10.
I wrote an article and published it here a while back. It was my experiences with Mandrake 10 after using the distro for more than a month. I had mentioned any problems that I had with Manny. One of them was obviously Windows games. However, give Cedega a go !
The other problem was the Creative Webcam Vision… drivers for this have now been sorted
Easyurpmi is an excellent site, and no-one has mentioned it here yet, but when you add a plf site to urpmi, then it is also added to rpmdrake as an update source. So if you run Rpmdrake (Install Software from the menu), and click “All Packages by Group”, then all the packages in the plf repository will be listed like Video, Audio, Games etc etc lovely
So yes indeed I am extremely happy with Manny 10 and I am in the process of moving everyone I know over to it.
Amarok has had as you type playlist searching and folder automatic folder scanning since 1.0, and in 1.1 it has multiple playlist abilities, as well as smart playlists, eg favorites, least favorite, etc. Amarok also has crossfading and album cover images, only thing it lacks against juk is cd burning in 3.3.
yes, he doesn’t seem to be very knowledgeable about linux. just as every new user that moves from windows to linux-distros. they expect certain things to work out of the box and don’t want to compile everything. he represents an average user. so don’t blame him for not knowing some expert-stuff. if you want to develop a distro for the common market, than you have to know, where users have problems. and he showed clearly what he didn’t like. so, it is a good and needed feedback in order to improve mandrake. if opinions like these get ignored, then the linux-community is beginning to act like microsoft (who never listened user-complains) which would be more than sad.
i hope resierfs 4 (just announced) is included.
The main trouble with the article is, it is globally uninformed. This may be a problem of communication on Mandrake’s part, this may be because the guy did not try either the docs or the forums.
For example, PLF solves many multimedia-related troubles, and I’m pretty sure the Mandrake install mentions it (if you read the nice litle information screens during package installation).
For general package installation, urpmi and its front-ends are your friends, once urpmi has its indexes. Not everybody knows of easyurpmi, true, but it has a nice front-end in the Mandrake Control Center (the media manager, I believe).
About Thunderbird and Firefox, they may not be in Mandrake 10.0’s default selection, but they are in the contribs (including my CDs, but I have the 5-CD set, I can’t speak about the others). It’s either a matter of selecting them by hand during the install, or a trip with urpmi later.
The impression I’m left with is, the guy had some preconceived ideas about Linux, and in most cases acted on them instead of looking for the nicer solution Mandrake (or Free Software in general) provides.
All in all, the end of the matter is, don’t try to switch OSes without up-to-date documentation, or better yet, some hand-holding by somebody who knows your new OS.
Oh, and the somebody had better be modest, no elitism please, no command-line or Slackware/Gentoo fanatics: that may come later, if the new user wants to and if (s)he has not been frightened off right at the start.
One other thing, Mandrake is often derided as a newbie distribution: nobody prevents you from using vi and the command-line if you want to, I often do. The difference is, you can get your feet wet at your own speed.
Have a look at /var/log/explanations when using the drake tools, you may find interesting infos.
If you want control during install, you can also choose the expert mode and the individual package selection, flat mode. This allows you to pick and choose each and every package by hand. Of course, you won’t be finished in half an hour, count 60-120 minutes just for the selection, but that is the price to pay for control and nit-picking (take a floppy to save you selection, it works from one version to another, more or less).
Be reading you.
PS: the switch to install compiled packages where you want is –prefix (in ./configure). Just so you know. But the Mandrake contribs have nearly everything under the sun.
*Sigh*
Yes, please read the f. article.
Using linux as a server OS is pretty different from using it as a desktop OS. Not that I would use mandrake on a server (I’d prefer other distros, but that is just me) but if I did I certainly wouldn’t use easyurpmi. And believe it or not there are people that have used linux for years and haven’t used mandrake and never heard of urpmi *gasp*
So please, calm down, this guy is new to linux and especially mandrake on the desktop and he encountered some problems that probably many people encounter the first time they use. And yes, it is right to point out these problems, otherwise they simply can not be fixed.
Now if you wanted to say that you would expect a better ability of problem solving from someone who works professionally with computers I would agree but so what, this doesn’t make the problems magically go away.
I hope Mandrake uses more professional names and titles when the program is launched. If it is like this:
– big drak* family, drakroam for wireless connections
– drakbt as BitTorrent wizard;
– dcraw which allow to convert most of the raw format of digital cameras;
That’s so unprofessional, some people still live in the 70s, and 80s thinking about unix when it comes to naming stuff.
Here is a better suggestion.
drakroam = In the menu, there should be an entry called” “Wireless Connectivity” and when launched “Welcome to the Wireless Connectivity Wizard. This wizard will help you setup a wireless connection. To continue, press Next…”
drakbt = BitTorrent Wizard Connectivity, same as above
dcraw = Raw Format Converter, same as above, Welcome to the Raw Format Converter Wizrad. This wizard allows you to convert….
You get the idea? The target is Windows users so be like Windows.
“Using linux as a server OS is pretty different from using it as a desktop OS. Not that I would use mandrake on a server (I’d prefer other distros, but that is just me) but if I did I certainly wouldn’t use easyurpmi.”
Can you tell me what’s wrong with Mandrake as a server or with easy urpmi, besides the fact that it simplifies the setting of repositories for newbies?
“And believe it or not there are people that have used linux for years and haven’t used mandrake and never heard of urpmi *gasp* ”
Well,this is pretty freeking hard to believe. I would not hire an admin that could not recite what the main software installation tools are for all the major distributions.
Finally, all of the issues this guy experienced would have been solved by less than 5 minutes of reading or a quick stop by either a.o.l.m (since he claims to love usenet) or mandrakeusers.org.
Mandrake isn’t perfect… indeed.
“Can you tell me what’s wrong with Mandrake as a server or with easy urpmi, besides the fact that it simplifies the setting of repositories for newbies?”
There is probably nothing wrong with Mandrake as a server OS. I only said that I wouldn’t use it. If you want to know the reason for that. First, I’m more familiar with other distros. Second, I always thought it a good idea to only install the bare minimum of what is needed on a server, for example I really can’t see why X should be installed on a server, now there is probably a way to achieve such a setup with mandrake, however it would be easier to achieve for me with a different distribution.
And there is nothing wrong with easyurpmi, I probably didn’t make myself to clear, all I wanted to say is that there is neither a need nor do I think that it is a good idea to use unofficial repositories for a server.
And I don’t think it is hard to believe that there are linux users out there that never heard of urpmi. If they are for example debian gods why should they have heard of it?
Finally, as I said before, yes the problems are solvable and yes someone who is a computer professional should be able to solve them even if he hasn’t used mandrake before. However this still doesn’t make the problems go away and the only way to solve this is to listen to people who encountered them.
well, i read the article, but from what i read out of it, the author has not much experience with a linux-desktop. and, let us be serious: if someone is not being able/willing to compile a simple thing, how can he be called “fairly confident about my knowledge of Linux”? if he’s unable todo such things, then i do not consider him a good sys-admin. and if he tries mandrake, why didn’t he give a single look to the documentation? he would have found out about urpmi in less than one hour.
and… stop using that vulgar language. it is unnecessary and disturbing and offends many readers (e.g. me).
“After living with Windows XP for a few months, the fact that whenever I opened Windows Explorer it would start with no info bar at the bottom”
how about VIEW….STATUS BAR
Great… except it’ll randomly disappear and you’ll probably have to do that every single time you open up an Explorer window. Or did they finally get around to fixing that?
Just a quick note if you are planning on upgrading using URPMI instead of iso’s. First you need to upgrade your urpmi package with one off of cooker, apparently the hdlist format is new, and the old urpmi complains when you add the beta source as media.
Next is it looks like you need to pick the hdlist from the following directory in order for it work ftp://…./10.1/i586/media/main/media_info/media_info/hdlist.cz
Seems to do the trick and I’m upgrading right now as I type this
But AFAIK, that only will upgrade you current packages to new ones and add any required dependencies, but it will not add new stuff, like this drakroam that some one mentionet in an earlier posting.
I would like to know if there is a way (or a script) to upgrade 10.0 to 10.1, not just 10 packages to 10.1 … Probably the reason to not be able to do that is that there is no a “basic system” that should be installed … for instance, drakroam is not part of a basic MDK10.1, it is just another package, so and upgrade will fail to retrieve it …. you will hve to explicitly ask for it, which takes me to another question, is there a place or list of new packages on 10.1 ?
“Second, I always thought it a good idea to only install the bare minimum of what is needed on a server, for example I really can’t see why X should be installed on a server, now there is probably a way to achieve such a setup with mandrake, however it would be easier to achieve for me with a different distribution. ”
There are always many little tricks about most distribution’s intallation programs, which most reviewers sadly gloss over or simply do not know.
I guess we all should skim the manual, once in a while. Or tinker often enough that we stumble on the good bits.
In Mandrake’s case, choose Expert mode, and at package selection time, uncheck everything but ‘Individual Package Selection”. You will then be given the choice of several light installations, including doc-less and X-less.
Used to be, you could go under 100 megs easily, I think they got a bit of flab since, but nothing too bad.
If you want control and choice for your installed packages, most are masked unless you ask for flat-mode display (a tiny icon near the open/fold tree and floppy ones).
More available packages, but more time spent picking through it. It’s worth it.
Be reading you.
PS: if you have to do many installs, you can save the package selection on a floppy, either just after the deed or at the end, before rebooting.
Real Tinkerers(TM) choose their package selection and burn their custom install media, of course, the tools are in the mkcd package 🙂
“for instance, drakroam is not part of a basic MDK10.1, it is just another package, so and upgrade will fail to retrieve it …. you will hve to explicitly ask for it, which takes me to another question, is there a place or list of new packages on 10.1 ?”
The easiest way is to do the upgrade in expert mode, and look at what packages are available on your media, besides the obvious updates (flat mode is a pain, but gives much more choice, try it even if I sound like a broken record).
As a rule, always install Mandrake in expert mode, it’s not more difficult by itself, it just gives the option of delving deeper at each point of the install.
You can safely go with the defaults in most cases and only bother with details when it matters to you.
Be reading you.
Actually drakroam will be pulled because its a part of the drakxtools package. And those are installed on every mdk 10 that i know of. So it will pull that. As far as other new packages, I’m not sure besides looking at a list of new features or something like that. There prolly arent many anyways because 10.1 is just an incremental upgrade/fix from 10. Last i knew not a lot is going to be added.
It is good that people should share their experience of migrating to Linux. If Linux is to gain a greater share of the desktop market, we need to listen to new users to find out how they got on. As we listen to them, patterns will emerge that will help developers and companies like Mandrake.
What could discourage people from choosing Linux is the approach of certain existing Linux users who will tolerate nothing less than a glowing and erudite article from someone who finds Linux utterly flawless.
It is not flawless and probably never will be, but one day perhaps some Linux distributions will be so good that you won’t need to be a computer expert to use them.
Wouldn’t that be terrible?
@no one special:
no, the mdk installation wouldn’t mention plf.
**ALLEGEDLY**
(there, covered my ass)
the reason plf exists is to be a place where Mandrakesoft staff and the established third-party Mandrake contributors can package stuff that would cause serious legal trouble if it was in the main distro. Thus it’s key that MDKsoft can, theoretically, plausibly maintain (in a court, if necessary) that the repository has nothing at all to do with them. If it were mentioned in the Mandrake installation routine or documentation or such official material, that would no longer hold true.
naming – drak* tools are referred to by their console names at the beta stages, as mdk expects beta users to be experienced people who know what they’re doing. The reason drak* names are used, by the way, is simple – the idea is that if you type “drak” at a console then hit tab, you’ll see all the tools Mandrake makes available for you. In official release documentation and the PR stuff released when official releases come out, you’ll find the longer names used, the ones that you would find on the menu system or in the titlebar of the program window. The manuals you get when you buy a box wouldn’t talk about “drakbt” and “drakroam”.
@ralph – easyurpmi isn’t an unofficial medium. It’s an unofficial tool to help you set up media both official and unofficial. Why not go to the page and actually see for yourself? it simply lets you pick your mdk version and then pick some media – main, contrib, plf and jpackage are the main options – and spits out urpmi.addmedia commands to add these media.
I know what easyurpmi is, I have even used it. That is why I said I didn’t make myself clear in my first posting and corrected myself.
…it’s probably because of the ten or so articles a week posted here cleverly entitled “Why Linux isn’t ready for the Desktop”.