Ah, no. If it's working perfectly, then do a fresh install. Challenges are what make you learn.

Hallo,

I've upgraded from 9.1 and almost everything run smoothly.
I had to download and install the NVIDIA driver to make X work and to a little work to have the on board audio (on a K75SA motherboard) play again.

Hi,

I forgot to give my impression of the relative speed of the Linux distros... First, I have to specify my PC configuration. It's a PII 350MHz with a ASUS P2B motherboard and 392MB SDRAM memory, a 20Gb (7200 rpm) HDD, a 10/100 PCI network card, a GeForce2 MX400 graphic board, a SB Live! sound card, a SB Encore PC-DVD with Dxr3 decoder board and a LG CD-RW drive (not affected by the LG / Mdk 9.2 problem). Yes, this is not a fast PC (although it was back in 1998-99...). The Mandrake 9.2 distro was not really much faster than the 9.1 distro and the Fedora Core 1 distro is slightly faster than the Mandrake ones. Keep in mind that the fact that my PC is slower gives me the possibility to notice more easily these differences. With a faster PC (meaning a P4 2GHz and above), it would be more difficult to notice anything at all.

Please note that even though I have a "slow" PC, I also use Windows XP as my primary OS and it runs quite fine, in fact it is fast. I use it as a workstation and mainly for my work, i.e. Office XP Pro, Internet browsing/searching and some C/C++ and HTML/CSS/Javascript developments. Yes I do plan to buy a new PC, but because of other priorities, it will have to wait until next year. By then, I may end-up getting a P5......

Finally, didn't you noticed that although you can get specific drivers for your graphic card, it will not really give you better, smoother and faster windowing? It only gives you OpenGL capability which you will mainly notice if you play some games like TuxRacer... Although not dramatic, it is kind of annoying to see the windowing (in regards to performance, not decoration) like in the 1990-1992 era!

Mandrake 9.2 destroyed my system on an upgrade see my post in this forum.

i bought the powerpack edition of 9.2 and did a fresh install. I put GNOME as the GUI as I always do. It runs great. My Professor did an upgrade on his previously 9.1 system and he loves it. He uses Icewm as his GUI. I suggest GNOME, but KDE also ran well on my system when I installed it. But GNOME just seemed faster to me.

What's the powerpack edition like? i have the 9.2 downloadable edition. I think it may be a little faster than 9.1, i know it's a lot more prettier on the bootup screen and i like the default look of the desktop and icons.

I agree i never do a upgrade, i like the feeling of a fresh install, knowing all the clutter is now gone. I don't like the fact that i did not have the nvidia support compiled in, even though it's not too much trouble to fix it. It would be nice if it was already therem, considering how long nvidia has been around now.

Just did a fresh install of 9.2 this morning on my laptop. (with /home on a separate partition)

Its slick...VERY nice. I use the graphical lilo (which some people don't like but I do) and wow...sleek.

Only one problem so far...my sound...but then NO distro has EVER picked it up properly so....

The response time improvement seems unbelievable but I need to use it more to be sure its not just in my head.

I am thinking about putting 9.2 back on here for another go. But, I'd rather have kde 3.1.4 for reasons posted elsewhere. I was wondering if anyone has tried using tex's 3.1.4 rpms in 9.2 or if anyone has upgraded from 9.1 with tex's rpms installed? And of course, what were the results?

What do you mean by tex's rpms installed. I think that I might have had them installed but mandrake killed my computer.

Got 9.2 as a fresh install, online updates installed and could not be any happier with it all. Everything works great and quickly as well. Question:
Do the .iso files which are available for download get the updates?

I'd like to put Mandrake 9.2 on the wife's machine...

Installed 9.2 Powerpack recently onmy laptop. This is my first installation. It worked fine right off, for the most part. I have no previous experience with either Mandrake or Linux in general, but a few things bother me. I don't like the Mandrake hardware config tools. It seems simple, but it's very difficult to get anything done in the harddrake window if the hardware is not immediately detected. In particular, I'm having problems with my sound. Other than that, I'm happy. However, since this is my first try, I think I'll try a different distro for rebooting my desktop in a few months.

I am very dissatisfied with 9.2. Here's why. I did a fresh install this time 11-20-03 and tried to install the mulitmedia source and kernel. I couldn't because I didnt have ncurses-devel. I needed the kernel source so I could get my winmodem driver compiles. Ok, so I tried to install the source for the stock kernel, again I needed ncurses-devel. I browsed the 9.2 cds both in konq, and rpmdrake. Its nowhere to be found. I browsed my incomplete contrib cd's, 9.1 cd's and 9.1 contrib cd's. Not there either. This is unacceptable in my opinion. I never had this trouble in 9.1. I couldnt get on the net to download it from contrib, if it was there. Mandrake didn't include gnorpm, which lets you ignore dependency errors, so that was out of the question too. I tried rpm -ivh --force for the source rpm and that didnt work either. So most newbies would be stuck at this point. I'm only a more mature newbie myself and didn't know what else to do.

I loaded Texstar's awesome pclinuxos, and found that ncurses-devel was actually called libncurses-devel, so off I go again to find it. I located it on one of the mandrake 9.1 cd's and luckily it installed without dependency errors. I installed the source for the multimedia kernel, rebooted into that kernel, and installed my modem driver. Now here I am, I was so frustrated, that this was the first place I came. I don't remember having this problem with RC2. Anyway i'm sure this has been discussed before but, I just wanted to vent a bit and by posting this perhaps some else having this problem will search and will be able to benefit from this post.

Disgruntled Mandrake 9.2 user.
griz

On to the printerdriver, and Nvidia.

I did a fresh install but I still have my fully working 9.1 install with plenty of texstar add ons on another partition. When I get 2 hours, I'll do an upgrade and let you know.

After that, I'll test some other desktop distros

what exactly is it about 9.2 that is supposed to be better? it seems like a step backward to me.
printing to my networks remote lpr was never a problem with 9.1 but with 9.2 for every 10 pages i try to print only one comes out. where do the others go? dont ask me cause i have no idea.
and acpi is running but i used to be able to shutdown with just the power button. not anymore.
and 'pmswsusp' used to be the comand to hibernate it. i have no idea what does that now, i havent been able to suspend it yet.
i dont know, i have been touting the greatness of mdk for awhile, but maybe dusk has fallen on them now. my yearly dues will be due in february, if they dont have an update to fix these bugs by then i think i will pass.

Note: Its been 2 days and I still LOVE my 9.2 and haven't run into any problems at all.

I think you're right mbegovic, the drake config tools, while quite sophisticated, are quite inflexible in many many ways. I've run into this while using them to set up multiple network cards on my laptop. I think its the nature of GUI wizards...they can never be flexible enough without being so bloated as to lose all use.

But here's the advantage of linux...there's always more than one way to skin a cat. Since drakconf didn't work for me there, I fired up netconf and tried that...and if netconf doesn't work...there's always the command line.

That's a really cool think about linux in general...I was always frustrated in windows and I'm forced into using a "wizard" and I can't get the darn thing to do what I want it to do...

Brain Drop: From what I understand, 9.2 wasn't supposed to be a huge upgrade, more like an update across the board sort of thing...I hope you find solutions to your problems tho (wish I could help)...If 9.1 was working fine, and 9.2 isn't...9.2 isn't crucial...but for me, 9.2 is a big performance improvement on my old laptop.