This review takes the 10.1 Official release through its paces during a month of operation. Rather than give an at-a-glance review, LinuxForumsDOTorg sends Jeremy on a 30-day journey using Mandrake 10.1 Official to bring you this review.
A Month Later — Mandrake 10.1 Official reviewed
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
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Mandrake uses USB Hotplugging to auto-detect and access USB peripherals. Simply plug in your USB device and, if appropriate, its associated icon appears on your desktop. In the background, the device is mounted under the /mnt directory. Any device that’s read as mass media will be handled like this. My 256 Mb, USB stick, my Fuji digital camera and my SD card reader are all seen all mass media and work perfectly.
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I wish this were true! I’ve been struggling with this since I first installed 10.1 and it will not mount my USB SD card reader. It worked fine in 10.0 and does with any other disto I try it with but not with Mandrake 10.1. This seems to be a common problem it seems.
Wayne
I don’t have a problem there!
I was forced to install 10.1 just because my USBdrive didn’t want to work with 10.0. I found it working well now, thanks to udev, harddrake et al, though still I do miss as good and coherent system for removeable media as one can find in WinXP.
In WinXP you can just turn off USBdrive: the diode goes dark, and you can take it away. You cannot do it with Linux, and every time I remove the drive with diode turned on, I am affraid: did it sync correctly?
And those stalled bad entires in fstab, automagically added, but not removed, and “only root can unmount the drive”. I think there is still long way to go, though it is much much shorter than some months before.
Greetings
A.
Most distros handle USB storage well enough – you insert the disk/card and an icon appears on the desktop. Right click->unmount volume, the icon disappears and you can remove the card. Certainly better than the last WinXP machine I used for a presentation: I inserted the USB drive and the laptop popped up a message saying “Windows has installed new hardware and needs to restart”!
Perhaps this has ben solved in the udev update yesterday.
I don’t understand why reviews always discuss the audio multimedia (which is more than a match for the M$ platform) but always leave out DVD playing facilities.
Well?
because it just as easy to
1° set up a plf zone in urpmi and
just do
urpmi –medi plf mplayer (or mplayer-gui) or urpmi –media plf xine
eventually urpmi –media plf libdvd
et voila………
(most of the time anyway, you just have to install libdvd because mplayer or xine is laready installed
why there is no extra setup such as
“Would you want to watch dvd ? (you must be aware that mandrake do not endorse these files, it’s only provided for conveniance, it must be allowed by the rules of your country. without these files you’ll only be able to watch unencrypted dvd.)”, it’s beyond my understanding..
one have to google everywhere just to watch his own dvd… (I’ve been told that Fedora do not even allow the reading of mp3 by default…. great big step forward)
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Perhaps this has ben solved in the udev update yesterday.
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Unfortunately not.
‘sda1 is not a valid block device’
Is all I get when trying to mount previously and now.
With devfs in 10.0 no problem. I’ve resorted to installing Fedora Core 3 on my old Thinkpad and moving the pictures from my SD card to a floppy and copying them to this machine.
Wayne
Unfortunately the article writer doesn’t review security,which is a great plus of Mandrake 10.1,tight file structure permissions,mandrake secure kernel,libsafe,RSBAC patched kernel etc.
Gnome-volume-manager in Ubuntu 4.10
-external 20GB HD
-RCA MP3 player
-USB flashcard
-Sony digital camera
All work w/o a hitch.
My USB memory stick won’t work with some distros, because it’s not properly partitioned. There’s only /dev/sda, which is the device, but no /dev/sda1, which would be the first partition of the memory. I don’t mind this, since I know how to get it to work, but I just thought that maybe you guys have the same problem. In that case, just modify your /etc/fstab file with a following line (an example):
/dev/sda /mnt/memstick auto noauto,user,exec 0 0
Mandrake probably shows sda1-? files in the /etc directory, but if none of them is a valid block device, then the problem is probably bad partitioning.
maybe the symlinks between the new description layer
/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part9 for example
and /dev/sda9 have not been created ?
I thought it was relative to devfs daemon, maybe not….
How about the speed of usb drive?
In my experience, automounted usb drives are painfully slow in MDK 10.0. However if it is hand mounted it works fine. Did it change for 10.1
dmesg
I recently purchased a Toshiba laptop with a 15.1″ widescreen LCD, and I haven’t put my usual OS (versions of MDK) because it didn’t set-up correctly with the screen. This review certainly does not explore that aspect of the OS. Anyone have any successful experiences with similar screens and 10.1?
I guess mileage may vary. The only distros that ever possessed working USB reader hotplugging functionality even close to Windows were Xandros 2.0 and SuSE 9.0 (both 2.4 based distros). I was able to plug my key in and take it out when I was done in those distros with few problems. Every other distro I’ve tried besides those two have failed me in that regard. I guess it’s a kernel 2.6.x issue? Suse 9.1 had problems with it and last I tried was Mandrake 10.1 and still didn’t work very well for me. I don’t know. Knowing if my USB keys will work with a distro is one the main criteria I consider when choosing a distro nowadays.
Both Suse9.2 and Mandrake 10.1 found the USB-2.0 connected mass-storage device (mp3-player) “out of the box”.
…The only distros that ever possessed working USB reader hotplugging functionality even close to Windows were Xandros 2.0 and SuSE 9.0…
This is not always my experience. For example, at work, my laptop already has drive letters A through I allocated. When I first plugging in a usb stick, or a digital camera for that matter, Windows XP always assigned drive letter D. Any attempt to list the contents on the USB drive through the command line or Windows Explorer fails. Sure I know how to reassign the drive letters in Windows XP, but for the average Joe user that so many Linux reviewers are concerned about, this is a dead end for USB drive use.
I much prefer the way that most Linux distributions deal with auto mounting USB drives.
You may find help here….I did.
http://linuxwiki.org/LinuxHardware/NoteBooks/FujitsuP7010En?highlig…
There is a known problem in MDK 10.1 with certain types of USB storage, yes, unfortunately; particularly ones which are formatted in such a way that you have to mount /dev/sda and not /dev/sda1. This _is_ known and is being worked on and will hopefully be fixed for 10.2, but it’s definitely a shame.
Stop making linux look like a mac
It’s not Linux, it’s a desktop. Linux is a kernel. Wake up, colin. People can do whatever they want with their Linux desktops.
again its the hardware people thats at fault, not linux…
see that cd drive issue for older storys of same “topic”…
i guess the solution will be that linux pokes the devices partition table and do a bit of guesswork…
what kde theme is the article author using in the screenshots?
I think mandrake make a good product, and the display setup
is very good on 10.0 but 10.1 will not boot up my old dell laptop so it seems knoppix 3.3 is the best distro for that
thing, mdk 10.0 runs well but is way too slow. linux never
runs the same on different computers
The style is the standard mandrake style, thememdk. Used to be called mandrake-galaxy or galaxy I think. And probably the Baghira windowdecoration, but not 100% sure on this.
I tried Mandrake in the 7… range and it seemed ok. Since the Fedora project I loaded it perfectly on my laptop.
I am surprised they are still in business.
Yep, it really is a shame, Mandrake 10.1 updated with Gnome 2.8.1 really is the cat’s whiskers and does everything I need
except read my photos 🙁
I’m waiting patiently for the fix and will just keep moving my photos from my old Thinkpad by floppy till it’s fixed.
Wayne
I have used Mandrake 9.1 PowerPack (Bought at local bookstore) now for like 2 years, infact I’m still using it on my laptop at this very moment. *SIGH* time to upgrade. It’s totally worth spending the $$$ to get PowerPack IMHO.
Way to go Mandrake!!
I’m a Silver member in the Mandrake Club and one thing that I hate is using BitTorrent to get new release. Darn that thing is slow… It was much better when we could download it from FTP servers.
The DVD of 10.1 with PowerPack is 4.4Gig and it took more than 25 hours to download, with average speed of 50K/sec. That’s too slow. I’m used to see transfer speed in the 350K/sec on good site.
Stop making linux look like a mac
The desktop he’s running there is KDE, and it always amuses me how people say “Oh, it looks like Windows”. It doesn’t. There’s a wizard when you first log in that asks you if you want to have the look and feel of Windows, a Mac or a Unix like combination of the two. The Windows look just happens to be a default and what a lot of people choose.
No, Mandrake has not got a Mac look – he’s just configured it that way.
an d if he puts some effort into it, it can look like just about anything. nothing is defined into a set place in kde or gnome, you can drag the task area to one place. the apps menu somewhere else and so on.
in fact the mac like bar at the bottom isnt working like the mac dock. its just a edge bar set as invisible or transparent and to grow from the center out. then he have added some quickuse icons to it for his most used apps. the apps menu is up in the left corner. next to it is the task area. then you have basicly the systray and the clock. yes it looks like a retake on the mac desktop but if he wanted to he could have had the task area on a seperate menu down the side of the screen and the systay and clock on the other side. its all a matter of taste and shows the customizeability of the kde desktop (and gnome have the same ability btw).