Here is an in-depth review of Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official Edition, with screenshots.
In-depth Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official Edition review
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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The page says “X.Org 6.7 (X.Org 6.8 is also available)” , however I’ve never seen 6.8 anywhere on the ftp (including in cooker). Is it offered on the DVD or comercial cd’s? ..or is this just bad information?
Well…I actually looked a little closer, and according to this: http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/dvd-media.txt
Xorg 6.8 is included on the DVD (along w/ the KDE 3.3 files..etc)
mandrake gets better and better, i look forward to when the gpl isos gets put up on the ftps
I’m first foray into the linux world was via Mandrake. I have fond memories of it. KDE was the DE I used and liked. Many years and distros later I’ve come to favor Gnome as my DE. How is the Gnome and implementtation of Gnome apps handled on this lates Mandrake. Thanks.
Gnome 2.6 is integrated VERY well with MDK 10.1. I had installed it from cooker on my 10.0 install, and even then, it was fairly polished. With 10.1, it works GREAT. I’m using it as my main DE, w/ fluxbox when I don’t need much GUI.
I played with Gnome 2.8 http://wwwra.informatik.uni-rostock.de/~waschk/Mandrake/gnome2.7/RP… …don’t let the 2.7 fool you, they’re 2.8.1 rpms. However they’re not official builds, and it’s still quite buggy. I had initially replaced 2.6 w/ these, but got a little frustrated w/ some gnome crashes and “downgraded” back to official 2.6. Overall, I prefer MDK’s Gnome to KDE now.
I recently learned you can ftp install Fedora. Can do same with Mandrake?
yes, and you have been able to for years…in fact, MDK, Red Hat, SuSE and Debian have all had this feature for years AFAIK. You can download a very small CD image called boot.iso (8MB) or two floppy images (network.img and network-drivers.img, or something like that) from any Mandrake mirror. Boot from them and you get a network install option; you set up your network, feed it the address of a Mandrake mirror, and you’re away.
Matter of fact how does Fedora deal with them as well ??? I am planning on getting a SATA drive but need to know if Linux ( Fedora or MDK ) supports SATA drives and controllers without a hassle.
Both Fedora and Mandrake supported my two SATA harddisks.I have to note that the mobo i tested on was VIA chipset based.There wasn’t a hassle at all the drivers were being recognised during the first boot.Mandrake was the only one who detected a Agfa Snapscan Touch usb scanner out of the box,all the other distros needed the niam backhand to be installed manually.The new debian installer,Fedora 3,SuSE 9.1,Mandrake 10/10.1,all support SATA drives painlessly.
I have a ASUS A7V8X mobo which is uses a KT400 chipset and which also uses a promise controller for SATA and EIDE. Do you or anyone else know if FC 3 or MDK supports this controller for SATA ??
I have Mandrake 10.0 installed on a AMD 64 3200+ with a VIA K8T800 chipset and 200GB SATA drive. It worked out of the box fine and supported all my hardware.
Using hdparm I found that my parallel IDE drive (120GB 7200RPM) actually performed slightly faster than my SATA drive. So at this point the only benefit with SATA that I can see is that the cables are thinner
How much so and could it be a driver issue or a kernel one or just the drive itself ? Is this true with Windows as well in terms of SATA preformance ?
Yes. SATA has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 150Mbyte/sec, while PATA is 100MByte/sec (or 133 for Maxtor’s unofficial extension). No available ATA hard disk can come anywhere near either speed, so speed depends entirely on the drive itself. The only situation in which an SATA controller might conceivably give slightly better performance is if you have two or more drives hooked up to the same controller, both transferring data at maximum speed; since the fastest ATA drives available, Western Digital’s Raptor line, can get up to I think 70-80MByte/sec, in this case the SATA controller ought to be able to outperform the PATA one. As you can imagine, though, it’s not a very common scenario.
Hey,
Just wondering. I’ve heard great things about urpmi but how does it handle system upgrades? Is it easy for one to upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1? How about 9.0 to 10.0?
From what I have heard it does handle full system upgrades well as long as you kill X ( ie… run at runlevel 3 ) and do it via command line but I have not tried it myself. URPMI is a great tool at keeping your system up to date and gaining access to other non-standard packages via repositories. It is just as good if not better then apt-get and synaptic. In fact I much rather use URPMI and MDK’s URPMI GUI Control center tool then synaptic GUI app. But that is just me. All you need is a good and solid set of repositories for MDK.
Ever since 9.0 I’ve upgraded my laptop via either the mdk urmpi gui or the console urpmi and I’ve never had any issues on either approach. I must admit that I’ve only tried using console urpmi to upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1, i.e., just once.
However I didn’t have any problems using console urpmi. I just did as I used to from when I used the mdk urpmi gui version. Changed the mandrake repositories to point at the new version and called “urpmi.update -a” to update my medias. Then “urpmi –auto-select” selected yes to install following packages.
Must say that I was faced with the choice of installing either one of two packages and there I missed the “learn-more” kinda button from the mdk urpmi gui version. This I overcame by calling “urpmq -if <pkg-name>”
To conclude, I’ve tried it, liked it, using it 🙂
I tried to install MDK10.1 from my DVD-RW LG4120B, it boots, loads kernel and in disk detection phase it stays in neverending loop… Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, Debian – all that linuxes installs well, but THIS CRAP NO! Last good Mandrake was 9.2, 10.x series is serious troublemaker…
You don’t need to kill X to do a full system upgrade. I’ve done it before while X was running, no problems.
Just point all your sources at the new version.
Then
urpmi.update -a
urpmi –auto-select
and prepare for a gig or so of packages to download
Anyone install this on a laptop/desktop with a Atheros chipset? I was wondering if it worked out of the box or if you had to get Madwifi and compile?
I would love to see wireless out of the box. I think it’s one of the last major hurdles Linux faces…just my $.02…
Mandrake is still my distro of choice after a few years of using Linux.
Peace.
Is there any reliable (i.e. “won’t crash Mandrake 10.1”) urpmi source for KDE 3.3 available?
Updating via urpmi will work as described above, but be prepared for some possible problems. The best update to do via urpmi was probably 9.2 – 10.0, so far. This one has a few more broken things. The devfs -> udev switch won’t be completed via urpmi, so some things that depend on udev will break. To stop the system trying to use devfs you’ll have to manually edit your bootloader configuration and take out the devfs=mount option. I don’t know if this was fixed for OE, but with CE there’s a problem with Mandrake’s customised kdm login manager; its old configuration file is no longer compatible, but the new one isn’t installed to overwrite the old one, it’s installed as kdmrc.rpmnew and the old ones stays as kdmrc. You may have to override this. Also be aware that you have to upgrade the kernel manually, –auto-select won’t pick it up; when you’re done with everything else, call urpmi kernel-2.6. If you use SATA or RAID in 10.0, from what I’ve read, Stuff May Well Break when you boot 10.1 the first time (in the case of SATA it’s because of a change in disk naming, SATA devices used to be /dev/hde onwards, now they’re /dev/sdX). This can be fixed from an emergency boot disk if you know what you’re doing.
Finally, be aware that if you update via urpmi, no *new* packages will be installed. So very useful apps which didn’t exist in 10.0 but are in the 10.1 default selection won’t get magically added on – stuff like the new drakroam wizard, for example.
That’s the urpmi updating Caveats List, basically
Not true with windows performance from my experience. It sounds like a driver issue, and it depends on which drives he is using. With windows I definitely see and feel the difference with my K8T800 based K8T Master2-Far’s SATA and raid 0’d WD Raptors’ performance (peaking at 184 MB/s). In linux I never get near the SATA HD performance I get in windows.
The only way to get “official” KDE 3.3 from Mandrake, is to purchase a commercial version, or join the Mandrake Club. However, I wouldn’t be suprised to see KDE 3.3, Gnome 2.8, and X.org 6.8 show up in Cooker w/in a month or so. GENERALLY things are decently stable when installing from cooker. …just don’t upgrade your entire distro to cooker.
GNOME 2.8 and KDE 3.3 are already in Cooker. Using Cooker RPMs on stable releases is absolutely not recommended or supported; it can break your system, and even if it doesn’t, it can certainly break future updates. Having said that, if you just updated a 10.1 install with GNOME packages from Cooker as of now, it’d probably work.
Yep, just add this urpmi media.
urpmi.addmedia club_contribs ftp://ftp.free.fr/pub/Distributions_Linux/Mandrakelinux/devel/test… with ./hdlist.cz
Bret Baptist.
The atheros madwifi drivers are included with the PowerPack versions of Mandrakelinux 10.1. They are not available in the download edition. This is because of license issues.
They work perfectly from the PowerPack install, I am using them on my laptop right now.
Bret Baptist.
The KDE 3.3.1 rpms don’t work with a 10.1. There is a dependency with a missing package.
Just for kword, which is not KDE 3.3.1. I am using the freaking things right now.
Bret Baptist.
Muchos gracias for the reply! Must get it.