The second beta release of Mandrake Linux is now available for download: there are cosmetic improvements in MCC and a new ALSA with source mixing (at last). Other distros would need to get the CVS version of ALSA to get dmix working automatically with the ALSA drivers.
Mandrake Linux 10.2 Beta 2 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=238&slide=1
automatic dmix is so good. yay for being able to just pause rhythmbox to watch a movie instead of having to quit it, yay! please, please, other distros include this, your users deserve it, and it’s a trivial patch I believe. btw, beta 2 fixes some of the more obvious beta 1 snafus, like the localisation stuff-up during installation. oh, and one more note – try out the kernel-multimedia kernel in contribs (set up a Cooker contrib source to get it), it rocks and has lots of useful stuff the main kernel doesn’t.
I can run rhythmbox and watch a movie…It’s called ALSA!
erm, yes, dmix is part of ALSA. it’s not enabled for the default ALSA device in most setups, you have to hack around with config files to do it. If you’re running just about any distro but MDK 10.2b2 / Cooker, and you have sound from multiple apps at once working, it’s not because you’re using ALSA, it’s because you’re using a sound server – likely esd or arts. The problem with sound servers is that they all suck. esd and arts are both horribly bug-ridden and tend to break at random (first rule of troubleshooting any audio problem on linux – kill the sound server). they also have low performance and not great sound quality. There are newer sound servers, but these are not yet default for anyone and they also generally suck (I tried polypaudio last week, it works, but the sound quality is terrible). using dmix for all audio by default is a very sane, clean and high-quality way to deal with things.
Less of the sarcasm… ALSA hasn’t done software mixing in the past. If you’ve got a decent sound card it’ll do hardware mixing, in which case it’ll work fine.
If you’re using an Intel i810, as my laptop is unfortunate enough to, then three-tenths of bugger all happens in hardware, and ALSA will only play one stream at a time.
Good on Mandrake for dealing with this in a sane fashion – one more step towards a Linux distro that doesn’t require arcane configuration to work as users expect.
Mandrake went down hill years ago and hasn’t come back up since. This doesn’t impress me.
I used to really like Mandrake. I’m still running 10.0. But 10.1 appears to be totally broken for most people that I know who run it. I like that they stay on the bleeding edge with stuff like drivers, etc. But it really does feel very unprofessional and buggy compared to some other distros I’ve tried, like SUSE.
I’ve always wanted to run a community distro, but those are usually too time consuming to setup. I tried Ubuntu (warty), which was dead easy. I’m going to look at hoary when it comes out and see if it’s worth switching, if not I’ll stick with mandrake 10.0, or maybe 10.2 if it’s stable enough. I just need Ubuntu to mature a bit more, with a few more tools, etc, so I don’t have to touch the command line to do any configuration (I’m also a KDE user, so I need Gnome to get a bit better for me to switch).
did you actually try, fr’instance, using it?
azazel: 10.1 had some nasty gotchas, yes, but for a lot of people it works very well. Did you try it on your setup? I’m not going to say it *will* be fine, but I’ll say it *might* (especially with the updates since release).
archangel: you make a good point, actually, I completely forgot about cards with ALSA-supported hardware mixers. If you have one of those, yeah, the patch won’t do much for you. Lucky little son of…(descends into mumbled obscenities)
Can they make the tray icons any bigger? I cant see the SGML brilliance or colour of the icons.
While they’re at it, can they just make the task bar take up 1/2 the screen and make it continuously ask me if i am trying to make a letter.
I’m not impressed. Dropline forever if this is the best they can come up with.
Nasty menu, just nasty:
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=238&slide=6…
Does that screenshot show that they’re using kde 3.2? Christ 3.3 has been out for years (although, I’ve never been able to find usable kde 3.2 packages for mandrake – hence I’ve moved to gentoo. It’s nice to get kde that works as the kde developers made it, rather than as Mandrake has patched and broken it. I like Mandrake, but they have done so much tweaking on kde, they don’t seem able to create stable packages any more. Maybe they should go back to vanilla kde.
Matt
Automatic dmix is also planned for Fedora Core 4, as can be seen from the following link:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2005-January/msg…
Wasn’t a first beta released not too long ago? Really seems like a quick release with little time to even test beta 1.
@Dumbkiwi
No, it is KDE 3.3.2, the side logo in the menu hasn’t been updated yet though.
Tom
They seem to be doing something right still – relatively new service….
http://iso.linuxquestions.org/
AdamW: I am grateful for this on my desktop – it’s only a SB Live, and didn’t seem like much in Windows. In Linux I realised it was actually doing something useful 🙂
Eugenia: It is, isn’t it… KDE does have a habit of getting like that – too many submenus. Mine seems to wind up with “More Applications” everywhere, which is pretty redundant when there are three items on that menu, and two under More.
One assumes that’s the standard menu – to me it’s far too short, and there’s way too much lumped under More Applications. They could take everything under there and put it in the main K menu.
And I’m not quite sure about having Emacs on the quicklaunch – the icon’s not, well, very attractive and I would have thought either people wouldn’t want to use it (it’s a skill that takes a lot of acquiring) or if they did they’d know how to put it there.
If you have only a few apps installed, it looks ridiculous if there are three items in a menu and two additional items in the “more apps” submenu. On the other hand, there are so many apps you could install; this would bloat your menu if there was no “more apps” submenu. A clever system could automatically move less common used apps to the “more apps” submenu, but IMO this would be much like the MS intellimenus, which I totally dislike.
I agree. I suspect the KDE menus simply work on each app having a set place in the menu structure – hence if it’s deemed to be uncommon (Root Konsole or Konqueror for example) it’s always placed under “More Apps”.
It’s not really a biggie to change, but personally I’d like to see more changes like that in a distro like Mandrake – one assumes they pretty much know what you’re going to have to begin with, so the default settings should be sane, even if it gets ugly when you add another 50 apps.
I’ve been running all Mandrake releases at work for the last 4 years. Currently using 10.1 and I can say that 10.1 is rick solid. The only bugs (in my case) are the fish:// bug in Konqueror on small files and a slight pbm with dual monitor from time to time, appart from that it’s wonderful and this is a setup I’m using 8+ hours a day doing heavy server side java development. P4 3.4Ghz, SiS655TX chipset, 2Gb Ram, 120Gb PATA drive, D/L DVD-RW. Nvidia 5900XT, Dual Monitor. This box has been on (almost) 24/7 since 10.1 community came out running Konsole with several tabs, IntelliJ IDE, Firefox (with 6+ tabs min.), Evolution, Several Konqueror with 4 windows in each (split horizontally and vertically), LinCVS, Kate, Xchat and Kopete. Sometimes I am out of the office for 2 weeks with all that stuff still alive and kicking when I come back!
So yes some may experience pbms (as always with software) but for many many people, Mandrake is bloody good. Point.
Eugenia – What’s nasty with the menu? Choice?
I suppose the nastiness Eugenia referred to is the cropped “KDE 3.2 – DOWNLOAD” image in the left…btw, isn’t it supposed to be KDE 3.3?
Everybody Mandrake user I know do one thing straight after installing/upgrading it: change the style to Plastik and get rid of that damn ugly blue star in the taskbar.
Isn’t it time for MDK to review a bit their default style? It’s certainly a downer to see such a great distro (IMHO) with such an ugly look.
Apart from that, I think they could make the frontend for URPMI much better, maybe closer to the redcarpet style..urpmi works great but right now it’s a bit hard for the newbie to understand all those different windows, one for media management, one for installing, one for removing..it should be one integrated window, as in the past.
Actually, after fixing the style, the second thing every mdk user do is go to easyurpmi, so why not support and integrate that site too?
>Eugenia: It is, isn’t it…
>KDE does have a habit of getting like that – too many submenus.
Eugenia is talking about the large menu of mtink, not the # of submenus.
“It’s certainly a downer to see such a great distro (IMHO) with such an ugly look. ”
I think that Mandrake looks really good as default. It looks simple in a good way. I haven’t used Mandrake ever but I’m planning to test it when 10.2 comes out as stable. I hope there won’t be much bugs in that release and the bugs are minor. Mandrake seems like a good distro and URPMI sounds good too.
I have been running Mandrake Linux for the past 4 years.
It is very stable (for my needs). My home server runs 24/7, only reboot after installing new kernel.
I am also a Ubuntu fan, a very fast and stable distro.
You choose you distro after your needs.
“Nasty menu, just nasty: “
So what’s so nasty about it?
I’ve always thought that menu organization is one of Mandrake’s great assets, particularly when it comes to KDE (stock KDE has fairly poor menu organization). Mandrake makes it really easy to find the app you’re looking for.
But since you’re a Slackware/Arch fan (based on your past posts and articles), I’m not surprised that you are turned off by Mandrake’s total ease of use.
I mean, Mandrake just isn’t hard enough, right? Real “leet” Linux users love distros that require hours to install and configure and feel like putting one’s head in a vice grip, right? 😉
There’s actually an underpublicised tool that does pretty much exactly that – it’s called urpmi.setup, I think it’s even in main these days, though I don’t know if it ships on the CDs. Which makes it a bit silly, cos you have to have urpmi sources set up to install the tool that helps you set up urpmi sources
. But it’s there. MDK is full of underpublicised neat stuff – just take a look at mklivecd, while you’re at it.
Eugenia – building the MDK menu system is a fairly non-trivial task. MDK has nearly as many packages as Debian, and the MDK policy is that every graphical application gets a menu entry. So you have to build a menu system that scales from maybe twenty entries, to over a thousand. That’s not what you’d call a simple task. The current menu system is a pretty good stab at it, though there’s endless discussion about revisions on the Cooker ML. Note that the Discovery edition has a completely different, and much more simplified, menu structure, to fit in with the smaller amount of packages and more newbie-oriented nature of that distro.
Oh, and yes, it’s KDE 3.3. GNOME 2.8 as well. The final release will be KDE 3.3 and GNOME 2.8, 3.4 and 2.10 aren’t going to be in.
I’m a Mdk user, the distro is really cool for desktops. But there are (as always) lots of room for improvements.
The first thing Mdk should rethink, is the looks of it. I mean, what’s with that yellow star logo? Come on, it is too childish. I miss, i really miss, the corporate look of Novell Linux, or Fedora, or even Windows (it’s not so corporate, but still has a little “cool” factor).
The yellow star is childish and awkward.
And the menu, i totally agree with Eugenia, it needs some UI love there. Just take a look at the menu Eugenia showed, it’s got lots of repeated apps, who the hell wants both GNOME and KDE monitoring tools? Make a choice, please. And the funny thing is that it is pretty easy to make an app show only in KDE/GNOME, and vice-versa.
Victor.
“The first thing Mdk should rethink, is the looks of it. I mean, what’s with that yellow star logo? Come on, it is too childish. I miss, i really miss, the corporate look of Novell Linux, or Fedora, or even Windows (it’s not so corporate, but still has a little “cool” factor).
And the menu, i totally agree with Eugenia, it needs some UI love there. Just take a look at the menu Eugenia showed, it’s got lots of repeated apps, who the hell wants both GNOME and KDE monitoring tools? Make a choice, please. And the funny thing is that it is pretty easy to make an app show only in KDE/GNOME, and vice-versa. “
To each his/her own I guess.
For one, I rather like the yellow star. It’s simple yet distinctive. I love the Mandrake Galaxy theme. It’s simple and clean and includes just the right amount of eye candy. For me, it is easily the most attractive theme in the Linux world, and that includes all standard KDE and Gnome themes, Ubuntu’s Human theme, SuSE’s XP-ish corporate look, Slackware/Arch/pur Debian utter blandness, and Red Hat’s Bluecurve. For me, Galaxy beats them all, easily.
Second, I love the Mandrake menus. I think they are completely logical and attractive and super easy. And I like to be able to access both Gnome and KDE apps, regardless of which one of those DEs I’m currently running. It seems rather silly to be limited to the apps of a particular DE. For me, it’s not an either/or proposition. I love both KDE and Gnome, and the apps that come with them.
It’s all personal taste, though. One person’s art is another’s garbage.
This is a great thing about Linux and the existence of so many distros. There’s something for everyone.
Does Mandrake have som kind of tool to clean out orphaned dependencies, similar to Debian’s deborphan and debfoster?
Put me on the list of people who prefer Mandrakes menus. To my taste they are by far the best I’ve seen in any distro under KDE. As a matter of fact, they are the benchmark that I judge others by.
Just my taste.
yeah, find-leaves. Apparently it’s not quite as refined as the debian tools, but it does the job.
If you don’t like the default menu than you can choose the menu you like with “menudrake”. Choose Action/Modify Menu Style and choose “Original Menu”.