The 10.1 Official is now available as CDs or DVD on a number of FTP mirrors and through Bittorrent. Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official new features are available online.
Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official is available for download (CD+DVD)
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I tried 10.1 community over the weekend and it performed just like every other version of Mandrake I have tried. It worked really well except for one vital flaw. In this case it would randomly turn off my pcmcia card slot, and without wireless support I can’t use it.
Fedora Core 3 suprised me by working right out of the box.
I installed Mandrake 10.1 a few weeks ago.It’s simple to get a very restrictive acl structure via the system configuration panel,i mostly set it on paranoid which allows the user to see only its own home directory and no more.Besides the no nonsence ease of use it detected all hardware right out of the box.
Don’t worry, this is not again someone bitching about mandrake not including kde 3.3.
However, iirc there was a semi official way to upgrade to 3.3, or even choose it at install time and I just wanted to ask if anybody tried it and if yes, did it work well?
Thanks.
But what about the 64 bit edition, why does it take so long to make an iso for that market? I am currently sitting on AMD 64 and would really like to try out the 64 bit version.
No isos available.
Yeah, I was planning on trying mandy for 64 but can’t seem to d/l it….
hmm, it can be that the pcmcia problem have been fixed in official. there is a reason why there is a community and then a official release. community is for those that want to help but cant or dont feel like running cooker all the time. if a bug show up in community then report if you care about mdk. if your just going to test the distro to see if it suits you then official is the way to go, not community.
x86-64 port is lower priority. Warly has posted on Cooker ML that ISOs for it will be available some time. The tree is available on FTP mirrors now so you could do a net install, but someone says the hdlists are broken – haven’t checked myself.
Sometimes when I log out of KDE (3.2.3) on Mandrake, it takes me back to the Login screen and clicking on Halt takes you another screen where you can either click on Halt or Reboot. Clicking on Halt on this screen does nothing, you have to click on Reboot. Has anybody else experienced this?
>> It’s simple to get a very restrictive acl structure via the system configuration panel,i mostly set it on paranoid which allows the user to see only its own home directory and no more. <<
Yes, often overlooked – the “Higher” level “locks” you in your own /home/username directory when in the GUI – very restrictive – add to that a nice default outbound drop policy in /etc/shorewall/policy and then selective outbound access rules in /etc/shorewall/rules (to only those ports you require access to) and you’ve got a good starting point
There are AMD64 ISOs on Mandrake site already.
I will be installing Mdk 10.1 on my brother’s laptop, an AMD K6 300 Mhz with 128 MBs of RAM. Thankfully, MandrakeSoft still runs on i586s. I will also be having an Ubuntu CD with me, just in case Mdk doesn’t work.
I would have left Win98SE in it, but the sound card “freezes” and the sound is getting repeated until it gets seriously in your nerves. It’s a sound driver problem, and there is no fixed driver version. Additionally, Win2k/XP don’t work on this laptop, because they don’t support its Fujitsu buggy hard drive (known limitation on MSDN). BeOS works perfectly on that laptop too, but BeOS doesn’t have modern software my brother wants to use. So, Linux it is, and of course it has to be an easy to configure Linux for my bro, so Mdk seems like the best solution now. Ubuntu is the second choice, but it doesn’t come with modem configuration stuff, so Mdk stays the best choice for this CTX eZBook 800 laptop.
By Anonymous (IP: —.microsoft.com) – Posted on 2004-12-06 23:31:00
microsoft.com 😉
Point the way, I didn’t find any, granted I didn’t scower the ftp site forerver.
I’ve been using 10.1 powerpack for the last month, and I found that it doesn’t unmount the /home partition very realiably.
Out the box, you have to patch it to avoid the nasty USB-stick lock-up/konqueror crashing bug. -But thats no biggy.
What rather gauls me about this release is just how unstable it is compared to previous releases. MDK 9.2 being the most stable MDK I’ve ever experienced. Udev might might behind the unmounting problem on shutdown, perhaps its not very well intergrated yet. Anyway, once you’ve installed all updates, you may or may not find your system becomes completely unstable. -And i mean unstable, try playing mplayer while using bit-torrent and/or using firefox and you’ll at least lose your KDE session or get a hard lock-up. Fedora Core 3 is no hot fix, I found myself reverting to MDK 10.0. So take all this with a grain of salt anyway, but don’t use 10.1 fully patched(!!!) as a production system.
Athlon 2500 Barton
Epox MOBO
Matrox G450
512MB RAM
10.0 ISOs are available for AMD64. Maybe just for members though.
What rather gauls me about this release is just how unstable it is compared to previous releases. MDK 9.2 being the most stable MDK I’ve ever experienced.
MDK 9.2 was really badly unstable on my system (a P3) – it crashed twice, going into an “eternal swap” which I had to switch off to escape from.
I fresh installed the community and used URMPI to upgrade to the official. I really was looking forward to 10.1, but is was worse for me than 10.0. The power control options worked a lot better, but the official version had problems with my 2.5 Prism card that 10.0 doesn’t. I had to give up on Madrake after lots of work, which sucks because urmpi is the best rpm tool and Mandrake has the most unofficial packages for any RPM distro.
Strange, for me 10.1 have been one of the most stable mandrakes I have used(mdker since 7), and the most polished one with the least numbers of those small annoying flaws. At least that’s my impression so far, close to 2.5 months(ftp install). My 10 install on the other hand had some problems stability wise.
Sounds to me you may have got yourself a bad install for some reason, bad CD? Or perhaps other issues caused by different hardware and software. Since I have an Nvidia to your Matrox and use Xine instead of mplayer. Use Azureus for bit-torrent (sucks up RAM real bad, but don’t crash) and my firefox RPM are rebuild to not depend on gnomelib.
Anecdotes means nothing.
I have MDK 10.1 running perfectly on my laptop, my desktop 20 other desktops at my work and a server.
My experience continues to be anecdotal as well. Only when you have looked at thousand of installations can you begin to generalize.
I ran 10.1 in OE state for about a month (while Cooker was frozen in that state) and found it perfectly stable, and the box in question is used as an HTPC box (lots of bittorrent and video file playing). I don’t use KDE, though. Looks like a YMMV issue…
What issues did you have with a Prism 2.5 card? I have the same card in my laptop and it worked fine while MDK was in 10.1 state. Recently it’s started mysteriously not working for long periods of time then suddenly working again, with no change in signal or any kind of error in the logs. I run Cooker, so it’s not 10.1 state any more, but it’s still weird. Got me scratching my head for sure. Currently my favourite theory is it’s something to do with the router (it started happening around the time I switched my router to mixed 802.11b and 802.11g mode, as I bought a 802.11g card for my desktop), but it’s hard to be sure.
I can report several servers running 10.1 quite smoothly since its release a few weeks ago, all of which were URPMI-upgraded (either from 9.x or 10.1 RC which we ran briefly because it was the first to include support for a 3ware 9000 series SATA controller). A definite incremental improvement over 10.0.
10.0 introduced some hardware compatibility issues by moving to the 2.6 kernel by default (always an easy move to a 2.4 kernel to solve stuff like that) … those issues have been mostly resolved. One of our 10.0 servers had issues after we changed the MSEC level. In addition, if you use Samba … 10.0 was the first Samba3 Mandrake, and there were some Winbind issues with ADS/Kerberos if you’re in an AD environment. The updated Samba and related packages in 10.1 work quite nicely.
9.2 and 9.1 were also very stable releases, which I’m still running on several servers and a couple of desktops.
I tried to install kde3.3, I said tried, because I thought I was doing it correctly but nothing happen when I reboot the system. I guess is I didn’t do it right.
they’ve taken so long with their delayed ISO release that they’ve fallen way behind Fedora Core 3, just like SUSE 9.2
My problems seemed to stem from the Orinoco driver Mandrake has in 10.1. I could never get it to solidly connect to my network. This, of course, is only MY experiances though.
Why old? It was released to club members about a month ago. I’m not a club member but I installed it soon after by FTP install.
Wayne
The orinoco_cs in the MDK kernel currently is just the stock one from 2.6. The author hasn’t synced into the kernel for almost a year, I think every release since then hasn’t officially been ‘final’ (they’ve all been alpha or RC or something). So if there’s something wrong with Mandrake’s orinoco it’s also broken in the stock 2.6 and is either broken in the original driver or has been fixed since last year but hasn’t been rolled into kernel 2.6 yet. Mandrake’s kernel generally doesn’t get a lot of updates to wi-fi drivers from outside the stock kernel (though ipw2100 and ipw2200 are recent exceptions). FWIW, I built the most recent release to see if it would fix my bizarre connection problem, and it didn’t. Ah well.
Why can’t I compile any Gnome apps? The pkgconfig files are NOT installed for almost any gnome/gtk app, not even gtk itself! I tried to query for -devel packages, but I seem to already have every gtk* thing installed, and yet, no pkgconfig stuff are there! What’s up with that? What the f*** is wrong with MandrakeSoft and they can’t produce a worthwhile and reliable product with no surprises for the user?
er, yes, I think you are…my /usr/lib/pkgconfig is full, and includes gtk+-2.0.pc. Are you sure you’re searching for -devel packages properly? GTK devel is libgtk+2.0_0-devel, for instance.
Where do I find that libgtk+2.0_0-devel package? Why wasn’t installed when it installed GTK/Gnome?
No, there is no .pc file here for gtk or ANY other gnome app! And I can’t find the -devel files on my 3 Mandrake CDs! If I need internet connection for that I am screwed, because when I will install mandrake on my brother’s laptop, I won’t have internet connection!
It is a development package, no need to install it for running GTK applications.
A lot of dev packages may be found on FTP mirrors, just configure urpmi/rpmdrake to point to the main/contrib media and it will do the downloading and install jobs automatically.
That’s the thing you don’t get: To install that modem driver for my brother, I need to have GTK-devel installed. It’s the chicken and the egg problem!
Eugenia
A modem driver that needs GTK ? What kind of driver is it ? Do you need a graphical interface to compile a kernel module ?
Is there a configure option with no GUI ?
BTW it is impossible to put all devel libraries on the discs. Otherwise there would be at least 5-6 CDs, like in Powerpack.
Regards.
You could always just stick all the devel libraries on a CD and take them with you. Like Zeb says, it’s a question of priorities; people like to have functional software on the images, not devel libraries. (There’s enough moaning about stuff left off as it is).
Try ./configure –help.
I am sure there is an option to deactivate the need for a GUI.
Is that a winmodem in the laptop ?
-devel packages aren’t installed when you install the libraries themselves because you don’t need the development stuff to run the software. That’s the point of splitting off -devel packages, after all. If they were installed automatically when you installed the libs there’d be no point splitting in the first place…
or was it just me?
Well very mixed experience for me. MDK was my first distro I’d used when new to linux, and I thought I’d give it another whirl. Some very nice stuff, like auto-detecting and setting up my Epson CX5400 printer/scanner/copier. However, there were some other things that had I not known more how it works under the hood, I’d have been pretty lost. For instance, I could get my modem setup with kppp (not properly with the drak tool though), get it dial out and everything. However, open up a browser, no pages, wasn’t resolving. I noticed if I tried pinging a host name, it would be using my nic, which isn’t connected to the net. To fix I had to change /etc/sysconfig/network to have the gateway dev = ppp0 rather than eth0 to which it was set. Couldn’t find the gui drak tool to set this right (probably there though so I’d think).
Other strangeness upon first bootup, it would just hang on the X startup. Would get a pointer and all that, but nothing else. So, hopped over to a virtual terminal, ran top, saw that something called drakfirstboot was hogging the cpu at around 99%. To get past it I had to give it a kill -1 pid, and then set the file in /etc/sysconfig/ to be no for first boot…
Wanting to try the 2.4 kernel instead, I noticed they had the source (heavily patched by mandrake though) in /usr/src/linux for 2.4.27. So I ran a config, did a make dep, but when I tried to make the bzImage, failed in the compile. Not sure why. The rpm however did work. That said, when I booted into 2.4, I had the darndest time accessing my cd drives for anything (chmod 666 /dev/hdc would correct that if I remember correctly).
For an easy to use, newbie friendly, distro I’ve got to wonder. I generally don’t find myself having to fight this much with other distros to get them to work. All in all though, I think I’ll hang on to it for a while longer, like I mentioned, there are some nice features to it.
One more thing, I know some distros turn on a bunch of services by default, but this was ridiculous! Easy to turn off, but again, for a newb, not good.
Sounds like a typical MDK release. Maybe I’m better off using my D/L as coasters.
Mesmeric: did you get the NVIDIA drivers to run? I’m waiting to reinstall Linux until I get that NVIDIA card under the Xmas tree (yes, I know its there….I just can’t open it until then!).
Linux,Unix,xBSD etc still aren’t optimal for the technically weak.It’s for some better to stick with windows and preferrably do as little as possible computer related activities, unless its your job.Most operating systems are thank God still quite significant configurable.It’s not a problem at all to let the build in firewall on by default with only a minimal amount of open ports like udp:53,tcp:(80/443),tcp (25/110) to the internet and blocking everything coming from it and not initialised from the client,but then you would have to assume that most of your potentional customers are proficient enough to adapt in this case the firewall rules to their needs.In my opinion it’s important knowing where you might want to draw a line.Maybe the great variety of Linux distributions are sometimes eatchothers competitors,and there’re only a handfull mature enough .
A good desktop system is the one that enables you to work with it in a very short period of time.CD/DVD – drives,printers,scanners,WEP,USB,ISDN,RAID,IDE/SCSI/ATA,sound /graphics card, should work effortlesly out of the box a few clicks away in the worst case scenario,(to be honest even in windows you have to click sometimes).It’s just annoying to have non working hardware and not being able to enjoy the equipment and/or work with it.Some distributions are coming very close to the ideal situation,well with my hardware scenario .If you would keep your current windows XP for five years and then buy a successor you have spent at most a $100 a year which the propietary OS-es also cost each upgrade (half) year.It’s especially good with the internet and everything that’s (media) related with it.A lot of good ftp clients, multiple dvd;mp3-players,cd/dvd burning programs .That’s attractive, when you don’t have to buy everything what is actually becoming elementary when computing such as a dvd-player,other media formats handling.
the amount of services turned on in MDK depends on what you install. Any server apps you install will be turned on by default. The default package selection hardly installs any, so the service count is fairly small. If you select the Server package groups you’ll wind up with a lot more stuff turned on, yes. The source tree in /usr/src/linux in Mandrake isn’t really meant for building a running kernel from, it’s there for you to build modules against. If you want to rebuild an MDK kernel it’s better to grab the .src.rpm (NOT the kernel-source.rpm) and use that. You got the 2.4 kernel source in /usr/src/linux because the kernel-source package names currently suck, and if you do urpmi kernel-source you might end up with 2.4 kernel source even if you’re running a 2.6 kernel. This is silly. It’s going to be fixed or heads will be broken.
drakfirsttime shouldn’t hang, obviously, and it doesn’t happen to everyone (doesn’t to me). Could you try running it from a console and see if you get any useful error output, or something?
The modem config tool should be able to change the gateway device, but I don’t have a modem to test with, unfortunately. Did you configure your network card before or after your modem?
mesmeric: the 6111 nvidia driver won’t work, Mandrake has a fairly recent kernel which changed something and broke nvidia drivers. 6629 should install perfectly clean, though, it does for me. You need kernel-source-stripped-2.6 or kernel-source-2.6 installed for it to build against.
Couldn’t find the gui drak tool to set this right (probably there though so I’d think).
It’s there allright, press CTRL+F2 and enter drakconf.In the drake configuration GUI open the “new connection” link and work yourself within a few clicks through the menu, the last option you can manually change is the default gateway.
What version of mandrake do you have? Must be 10 > otherwise i
don’t understand why you would run 2.4.27 instead of the default 2.6 kernel, other then for a specific reason:a patch that can only be applied for the 2.4.X kernel series.The vanilla 2.4.x kernel doesn’t support SATA harddisks but the vanilla 2.6.x kernel supports them natively.
I had the darndest time accessing my cd drives for anything (chmod 666 /dev/hdc would correct that if I remember correctly).
chmod666 has nothing todo with the access speed of your cd-drive,as it sets the file access rights , whereas all devices are displayed as objects in the”/dev/” directory.
One can access or not the drive.There isnt’t such thing as being half connected.The speed is controlled elsewhere.
The only problem you could encounter is that after having
installed the 6629 nvidia driver the module isn’t automatically loaded.This can easily be fixed with vi and putting “nvidia” in /etc/modprobe.local if i remember correctly,i had to issue /sbin/modprobe a few times to much.
Thanks for the tips, however to clarify a few issues. As to the modem thing, during install it would fail when trying to configure the modem (gave off some perl error), the nic would configure, and thus was set to be the gateway dev. Again though, using kppp I was able to configure it just fine.
I’d like to try the drakfirsttime on console myself, and see the output…
As to what tobaccofarm mentioned, no, I was definately running 10.1 official. Reason for trying it with 2.4 was that like many others, I find the 2.6 less than stable right now. (this time though I was specifically using it for something else, unrelated to MDK I found out). I wasn’t talking about speed with reference to accessing /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd. I didn’t have access rights to them, so for instance, try to play a cd, no go. I believe what I did to circumvent that was to do a chgrp on the 2 devs to belong to cdrom, and added myself to that group, and a chmod 660 on them (or something like that).
all that is handled by udev under 2.6; maybe it hasn’t been properly done for the 2.4 kernel. It’s still *supposed* to be supported, but in all honesty I’m not sure how much work is done on it, unfortunately.
I should add that, on services, the MDK installer is very clear and up-front – it goes out of its way to tell you that any servers you install will be turned on by default, and that this can theoretically present a security risk, and it tells you how to turn them off. It’s not as if anything is being enabled behind your back.
“The vanilla 2.4.x kernel doesn’t support SATA harddisks but the vanilla 2.6.x kernel supports them natively.”
SATA support was added to the vanilla 2.4 kernel in 2.4.27.
I wasn’t talking about speed with reference to accessing /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd. I didn’t have access rights to them, so for instance, try to play a cd, no go.
During the install of Mandrake 10.1 you have the chance to look at the configuration of many things before they are set for the first reboot.As you may have noticed you can put the users which you have created in the cdrom/cd-r group or in the wheel group which will allow you to su.If you set the security level to paranoid, the result will be much fewer services turned on as default,allthough even then portmap deamon is turned on but simpel to shut down.The only thing you might want to change is the option that all local users are able to reboot and halt the system in paranoid mode,which isn’t quite usefull for a desktop.The post configuration screen can’t be overlooked .
Are should be aren’t.
that’s a wonderfully Zen post when taken out of contrast.