The third beta of Mandrakelinux 10.2 is out and about for testing.
Mandrakelinux 10.2 Beta 3 Available
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Eugenia Loli
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As does its very active community and the fact that its #1 on distrowatch would also show that there are people that care.
> Does anyone care about Mandrake anymore?
Not me.
Seems many people moved from Mandrake to Ubuntu or Fedora.
“Does anyone care about Mandrake anymore?”
What a stupid question.
Number one at distro watch
Huge user community
Profitable company
yeah, nobody cares about Mandrake.
Perhaps a small amount of hardcore Arch or Ubuntu fanboys don’t care. But a truckload of users do care. sheeesh.
I do to, as it is the basis for pclinuxos.
I dont know why 1 person can take a product and put out a much smoother product than a company though.
Since it is so fashionable on OSNews for posters to gush over Arch or Ubuntu, and to bash Mandrake, I’m sure with this release anouncement of Mandrake 10.2 beta 3 is going to bring all of the Mandrake bashers out of the woodwork.
On balance, think it’s still fair to say that Mandrake produce one of the best all-round, free, desktop distributions out there.
I continue to recommend Mandrake as the Linux distribution of choice for new users.
Not Ubuntu because it gives a bad impression due to its arcanine appearing installer.
And I obviously don’t recommend gentoo, arch, debian etc either.
Mandrake is an excellent all-around distribution. Like many other distributions, this one has had less than stellar releases, but I have been using it since version 7.1 and love it.
Which other rpm distribution gives you 10357 packages of current software ready to install out of the box with no effort?
In fact, not even many of the Debian based distribuions can claim such large amount of available packages. Debian itself remains the largest repository of software known to man, but Debian moves too slowly for my desktop comfort, which, by the way, makes it just right for servers.
Things will improve a great deal when Sarge is finally out, but Mandrake remains my recommendation for most desktop users, with Suse a close second.
One other interesting statistic, “2100 bugs have been reported since the beginning of the development period of 10.2, and 2017 have been resolved”. That’s pretty hard work!
10.2 is going to rock!
I used mandrake 6.5 since 1999. I left mandrake after mandrake 10 was released. I figured it was time for a bit of a change so I went with Debian with its netinstaller. I like Debian very much but I still watch my first love. I am curious as always how Mandrake will always be like. I use Debian but I still have a soft spot for Mandrake. I may even use it again just for old times sake.
I found the Mandrake 8 and 9 series very buggy so I left that distro. I think the issues were well documented, so I will not elaborate on specifics here, many of which probably related to the company’s financial woes at that time.
The other reason was, I found it a little too KDE-centric when I was really much more interested in GNOME.
Has the general quality improved since that time? I am open-minded about trying it again if people find that it has improved.
I’ve been somewhat of a distro junkie since I started using Linux 3 years ago, always wanting to try new ones in order to compare and experience what’s the latest and greatest. I’ve found that I like Mepis, Knoppix, and Ubuntu quite a lot. I also liked Red Hat 9 while I was using it. But I’ve always come back to Mandrake. It is such a great all around distro. It fast, stable (nowadays, anyway), beautiful, easy to use (Drak tools rock), full featured (thousands of packages with PowerPack), and an absolute joy to use.
Mandrake is not as pure, or as fast and stable as the Slackwares, Arch’s, Gentoos, and Debians of the world. But it great for a very large variety of users.
i live(work) in the so called corporate linux world : redhat or novell.
I don’t know why so many people dismiss the importance of Mandrake as serious distribution. I’be been using Mandrake on laptops for almost 5 years and always beats the other distributions. Despite that I tried Redhat/Fedora, Slackware, Suse, Gentoo and even Ubuntu Mandrake always gives me the easiest installation/upgrade, the best performance, and a very good hardware recognition that is very important to me in a laptop. The software that comes with Mandrake is a good that the one that comes with other distributions and in PLF i can find all that doesn’t come with the official release. Despite of some bugs, the relationship quality/bugs >> 1
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/business/corporate-server
Mandrake is the only distro so far that’s found all of the hardware on my new HP laptop and run it out of the box, without any problems, grief, or bullshit whatsoever.
In other words, it Just Works. Which is what I and so many other users want more than anything. Fedora didn’t recognize half of my hardware. I don’t want to fuck around with Ubuntu or Gentoo trying to optimize my system to the Nth degerr… I HAVE a life. I want a system that allows me to get real work done so I can spend my time doing other things than fucking around with computers.
I can’t wait for the release of 10.2.
Does it find many internal modems out of the box?
Not sure what the point of your post is Adam.
> I don’t know why so many people dismiss the importance of Mandrake as serious distribution.
I don’t like Mandrake (not only the distribution) because they don’t contribute to the free software (or very very very little).
Mandrake packages programs developped/tested in Gentoo, Ubuntu or Fedora and no more.
The “new” Mandrake 10.2 use old softwares.
the point is that MDK has an excellent corporate offering, hence the idea that corporate Linux is somehow limited to RH and Novell is…wrong.
a common misconception.
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/FreeSoftwareProjects
Pretty much anything that’s a real hardware modem, yes. Winmodems are trickier, but it’s as good as any distro (i.e., not great).
> http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/FreeSoftwareProjects
I have a lot of respect for Warly.
Distrowatch monthly shows that Mandrake is beginning to decline. the 6 month stat shows Mandrake on top BUT the latest Monthly stats show a
Debian based distro on top the big U.
Mandrake has too many problematic packages NOT enough testing before release. Only testing after release. With lots of customer complaints. The endless 200+ Megabyte updates of the same packages led me away from Mandrake 10, 10.1 and so on.
MDK has not declined, just Ubuntu got a big start with all the PR and free distribution and whatnot. Same thing happened with Gentoo when it broke. They always die down and MDK goes back to the top. Not enough testing before release? Do you even see the title of this article? MDK 10.2 beta 3. There’ll be an RC1 and an RC2 before the release of Community, and then a month of fixes on that before Official comes out. That’s six releases in three months before Official is actually frozen. Is that not good enough for you?
To be fair, they’re doing something right – as ever, Mandrake are the most popular download at LQ ISO
http://iso.linuxquestions.org/
>The “new” Mandrake 10.2 use old softwares.
Huh? Look at distrowatch and tell me which app in mdk 10.2 is outdated. With 1 or 2 exceptions, they always include the latest versions.
Tom
I’ve been using Mdk since 7.1 (and benn an mdk club member for several years), and although the 9.x series was buggy (as someone else mentioned, they were having a bad time then financially), the 10.x series is great.
Myself and my partner do all our work using mdk 10.x, and although it’s not for everyone, it works very very well for us. if you have not tried it before, I’d urge you to download 10.1 Official and give it a go: it isn’t perfect, nothing is, but it’s done us proud!
spiff
I believe if Mandrake ceases to exist SuSE and RedHat – both american distros – (Redhat put a tarboosh / fez on A.C.’s head.) will fully brazen. They are all corporates in the end of the story!
The more commercial linux companies out there i.e the bigger the internal strife is, the better for the end user is.
Divide and rule!
Popeye the sailor man.
Mandrake is a great distro. Urpmi is very powerful and with a little tweaking can be the perfect intro to Linux for newbies.
The fierce love some people feel for their distro of choice astounds me. So you don’t like distribution X? Don’t use it! …or just ask for your money back.
@ anshu
“My cousin past week downloaded Mandrake 10.1 and called me he is going to install it. I yelled at him for not asking me what to download”
…so much for choice eh! </sarcasm>
> Look at distrowatch and tell me which app in mdk 10.2 is outdated.
mdk 10.2 ~ FC3 (release 11/04).
I only got round to installing beta2 last nite :-p oh well….
Its got a lot of good things and as it keeps things pretty simple as in enviroments are not pached up hacked up to shreds and the major advantage is it does not come with bluecurve… :p… rh created the most boring looking desktop in history even the command line is better to look at then that ….
Mandrake does work well (((for me))) its been sitting on my main desktop for a good few years now.. nothing has come along that as useable… I only wish mandrake and others would go over board on eyecandy……. as default…
“SuSE and RedHat – both american distros”
Nah SuSE is German
Suse is now owned by Novell, which is an american company.
Why should anyone care if someone you never met hates or loves Mandrake, and prefers distro X, Y or Z instead?
This discussion is pointless. Just use whatever you prefer, preferably support your fav distro one way or another (development, debugging, money, whatever) and get over it!!
I respect Mandrake because they are survivors. They were very close of going bankrupt but they didn’t quit and now they’re getting stable again. It should be a good example for those naysayers that repeat that Open Source is not a good business model.
Same thing happened with Gentoo when it broke. They always die down and MDK goes back to the top.
That will never happen as long as there are Universities and scientists (Gentoo).
// “SuSE and RedHat – both american distros”
//
// Nah SuSE is German
It was Once Upon A Time. Now it belongs in an american company. If this company sneezes, german branch fellows will start running to bring it a tissue!
SuSE resulted in being an obedient puppy in a snugly way. It just did deserve this end.
Mandrake, at least, has shown more respect to its community although it’s made “some” mistakes. Maybe Mandrake’s deepest secret desire is to be bought by a huge american company. Who knows? Maybe one day…
Popeye the sailor man!
I love Mandrake and i use always Mandrake but i think that in the last releases there was poor inovation.Thanks
> mdk 10.2 ~ FC3 (release 11/04).
I interpret that as “mdk 10.2 had roughly the same release date as FC3”
Only that was 10.1
If you compare the individual packages you’ll find that mdk 10.2b3 has much newer versions than FC3 (obviously, since it’s almost four months newer.)
– Peder
I dont care if Mandrake is ranked 1001 on the Distrowatch list and Ubuntu or Gentoo etc.. are used by 99% of all computers in the world. I think its great and is my favourite.
I installed it on my laptop and everything worked without extra effort. Surely there is nothing better than letting each individual choose whats best for them.
I don’t consider myself a newbie; been using linux a long time. I had tried Fedora/Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, Xandros 2 and 3, but I kept coming back to Mandrake. Sure, Mandrake has its flaws, but which distro doesn’t. What I like most about Mandrake is ease of getting the pre-built software pakages, both legal and not-so-legal ones. Why compile and configure manually each time you want to install/ugrade somethings? It gets old and tiresome after you do it a few times.
I would go back to Mandrake but my silver membership expired and I don’t want to download all of the images. When will distros start providing DVD images for the general public’s use? Cd iso images are a thing of the past!
I downloaded a DVD iso of Mandrake 10.1 Official download edition last night.
mandrake at the end-user works well – plots of packages, fairly up to date, much autodetction etc etc
but there are 2 serious issues;
* presentation – it still looks like a toy – they need to ditch their “my first computer” themes and art and go for something a bit more professional. sad, but true, that people don’t run mandrake on production sites/serers because it looks like a toy. if you were a clueless admin/manager would you chose mandrake with the childish graphics on the box, or redhat/novell/suse with the professionall look and feel. sad but its true.
* like i said, lots of things work well at the end user side of mandrake. but the base and its undelrying scripts are getting ugly and inconsistent. they need to start agian from scratch. ths is why netbsd and gentoo and debian have an advantage – their base is designed, not patched and patched and grown organically.
i beleive with these 2 improvements, mandrake will be a very strong distribution.
even a name change?
I agree that the artwork definitely could use some improvement. PCLinuxOS, which is based on Mandrake, looks MUCH better; that’s kind of sad.
Not sure what you mean about the scripts getting “ugly” and “inconsistent”…I haven’t had a (non-beta) Mandrake script failure since 9.0. IMHO, Mandrake and Suse are the leaders in linux ease-of-use and I happily submit bug reports, etc. as needed
Tried Redhat, Slackware,Gentoo, Ubuntu among others,but always came back to Mandrake.
Were they not one of the top contributors for KDE when they were doing good?.
Guess which distro HP choose to ship with their first Linux Desktop Machine?
I got a agree with the guy who said it’s fashionable to bash mandrake on OSNews. I don’t know what’s with you people, Mandrake never did anything “wrong”, and the distro is good.
If you haven’t tried Mdk 10 or later, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Mdk 10 has put Mdk on another level… in my opinion, it’s the best free distro for the desktop.
Fedora? Let’s see… doesn’t play mp3 out of the box. Ok, i can install it… now, what’s Fedora installer? Yum? Apt? Up2date? *All of them*?? Now, what’s the gui you use? Synaptic? You’ve got to be kidding me with that thing full of buttons and configurations. And to finish, does Fedora allow me to partition my disk during install? No? Oh, i see.
The reason i ditched mandrake is the package management. Rpmdrake SUCKS!!! Urpmi was ok to work with but I wanted a decent gui to do package management. Something like synaptic. I have been meaning to give pclinuxos a try but haven’t had the time. Using fedora now which has its own problems. Still looking for the perfect distro.
die down != die out. I certainly didn’t mean Gentoo is going to die, I just meant that after the initial wave, it settled down to a fairly sensible level of popularity which fits its status as an interesting niche distro. It’ll certainly survive and thrive in the future.
Fine, then install apt-get and synaptic, they’re both in contrib, and there’s at least one MDK mirror which will work with apt.
I have little idea how Linux works and little interest to be honest, but I use it and do want to support it. Please don’t ask me which kernal I’m running as I just don’t care! However, what I do know is Mandrake 10.0 installs on both my desktop and IBM think pad in around 20 mins, detects everything including wireless network and does everything I want. Best of all, I don’t have to reboot 50 times to install the updates unlike Windows, which obvously leaves more free time for going to the pub. If Linux is to become mainstream, surely this is a good thing?
I’ve tried other distributions over the last couple of years, but install problems put me off. I actually paid for an official copy of 10.0 as 30 quid seems a reasonable price to pay compared to a couple of hundred for Windows. I now feel confident in recommending Mandrake to other “home users”
There are linux users out there who think TOO HIGHLY of their own intelligence and linux expertise. They want to set themselves apart from the average linux crowd and branded Mandrake as a “newbie” distro and implied that who ever use Mandrake must not be very smart or new to linux. To these people, let me say this: if you want to whip out a text editor and console to configure system all the time with other distros and waste hours of your time, then good for you.
Mandrake is a very configurable, and flexible, distro. You can tweak your system through wizard, text editor, and/or command line. You can still learn a lot about linux just like people who use Debian, Slackware, or Gentoo if you really want to.
Some people complained about Mandrake’s urpmi. I have used yum and apt-get with and without GUI before. In my OPINION, urpmi is second to none.
I do like the option of copying the content of the cd’s to the hdd during the install…keeps you from having to mess around with shuffling cd’s later for software installs.
I tired it yesterday. It is not a bad, IMHO it is te best mandrake version what ever I seen. There is only one bigger problem: I can’t install NVIDIA drivers (the driver is compiled (after I edited the EXTRAVERSION in version.h) but the module can’t load, the insmod said invalid module format or any similar message). If the NVIDIA driver will work correctly in the next release I will replace the Fedora Core3 to this distro on my linux box.
> When will distros start providing DVD images for the general public’s use? Cd iso images are a thing of the past!
Haven’t you heard Larry Ellison: “The net is the computer”
DVD images are a thing of the past. FTP install is the future
Seriously, if you’re not on a modem why not try installing via ftp. No more hassle with scratched CD/DVDs.
– Peder
>I do like the option of copying the content of the cd’s to >the hdd during the install…keeps you from having to mess >around with shuffling cd’s later for software installs.
Where’s this option available? I never noticed it.
screw up with the new kernel build. Frankly, my advice is – don’t run the official kernel. Run kernel-multimedia from contrib. It’s not just for multimedia, despite the name – it’s a general alternative kernel with a lot of good stuff that’s not in the main kernel. nvidia drivers definitely build on that.