I've tried installing Mandrake 3 or 4 times now, and every time I do it's missing ridiculous amounts of libs that are already installed on the system (specifically GTK). Stuff starts going crazy, espescially after I install the latest ATI drivers (which I've done so many times before on other distros I know I'm not doing anything wrong there), and in a nutshell it just goes nuts. Programs won't build, they land error after error. I can't recompile the kernel because that just loads up on errors as well.

So in a nutshell ~ I'm extremely unimpressed with Mandrake but I'd really like to stray from Redhat a little bit. I've done the power distro thing (Debian and Gentoo), and they're nice. But I'm a student and I need my computer, I don't have the time to maintain that. So I want to try out the easier distros like MDK and Suse. However, since we have a throttled LAN here I'll have to buy Suse and I can't do that until I go home on vacation in a few weeks. So at the moment, my only alternative between the three bewbie distros is Mandrake.

Does anybody else have these ridiculous problems with MDK as well? Part of my problem could stem from my 4 gigs of RAM (Lets let that one sink in for a minute....okay good ) and needing to run the install process in a horribly illegible GUI, but my roommate is having the same issues. Redhat is pretty flawless when I install every package off of the CD, but when I do it with MDK that's when things go REALLY bad. If I just select each general group of packages and not specify indiviual ones it's slightly more stable.

Does this sound like I'm smoking funny cigarettes? Cus I swear I'm not. I'm just totally confused as to what would make such a highly regarded OS go completely psycho on me.

Any input as far as why selecting every package offered on the CD would make MDK become virtually useless, or anybody who's had similar issues would be awesome.

Here's my stats:

P4 2.8 with HT
4 gigs of RAM
Dual 120gig hard drives
And I'm running dual boot with XP

Somebody pLEAsE help!

Thanks!

Does your runmate install from the same cds you do?

Hmm.

I assume you formatted your system and are starting clean (as opposed to upgrading). Its difficult to offer suggestions based on the generality of the information. I'm sure that's also a cause of your frustration. Did RedHat build flawlessly with 4 *gig* of Ram? That's crazy man. Can you try taking out some and getting down to maybe 512 and see if it works nicer then? It might be easier to install the hardware after the OS is installed.

I've never had anything but great experiences with the Mandrake installer, but you obviously have it stumped. If you managed to isolate your problem, please write back to the forums and let us know what was up.

Oh yeah, and I know you didn't mean anything by it... but a less... um... "provocative" title might endear you more to the people on this forum who can *really* help you.

well I can say your not entirely crazy I have similar problems with it athlon tbird 1ghz
1 GB DDR
geforce 4 ti 4400

for me make always seems to fail when trying to link to a lib

the problem lies in that you have more than 1gig of ram (this is a known bug in 9.1 but fix in 9.2. On install when the bootsplash screen appears hit esc and type in linux vga = 0. This will alow you to propley install it..

I have already logged a question here. I have NEVER had an issue installing a Linux distro, but 9.1 is giving me a headache! I cannot even get it to install! The graphical install is nice, but if it doesn't work what good is it? I keep getting, "I can't find any room for installing." Nice! You only have 20GB! SO WTF!!!! I thought XP took up a lot of space during it's install!!!

I can only say that I Will spend no more that 8 hours trying to install ANY OS....my family is much too important to me! I can seem my 21 month daughter walking into my office saying something like, "Daddy, no Mandrake 9.1", "Do RedHat!!!!"..she definitely has something there....

npeshman's comment makes me think you may be right bigVoice.

In regards to courtrrb ~ I'm aware of that fix, which's what makes the install process so difficult. It drastically reduces the visual quality of the install program so it's nearly impossible to select packages. You can hardly make out the check mark.

Mara ~ Yes my roommate is using the same CD's. We've been tossing around distro CD's the last few weeks and while he has some weirdo thing wrong with his box that almost every distro has issues with, Mandrake installed flawlessly like mine but once run it caused the same crazy problems.

BigVoice ~ I titled the forum that in order to get people's attention so they'd read it . Cruel I know. But it worked didn't it? Hehe, I'll give that reduced RAM thing a whirl. I've been on XP for the last 3 days and I'm beginning to twitch...

You've got a pretty damn smart kid Alex. For a while XP told me that both of my hard drives were damaged and not useable. Somehow Redhat installed onto both of them without a single complain though...hmmm...

I called Microsoft about that issue back in August. They just called me back 2 days ago. That's multi-billion dollar companies for ya...

No problems here even with my crappy kiro card. Sounds like the cd's to me or that wtf memory youve got.

Yeh cool it man, maybe you need some of those funny cigarettes after all

you have no space for mandrake because you're trying to installing it while having ntfs (xp) partitioned hard drive - that's not going to work - try formatting it to fat 32 and then installing mdk

But thanks anyway...here is my thread...

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=97931

Oh well...

didn't you say you're using xp?

I have two separate hard drives. XP is on the one, Linux is on the other (whatever distro I may be using). The distros install fine always, Mandrake just can't hold it's liquor once I run it. Everything goes to hell.

I dropped to 512mb of RAM and it gave me a sexier looking install screen (since I didn't have to drop the VGA output) buuuuut it still went crazy. Squid failed to disable during shut downs, which is a frequent problem of mine using Mandrake. It's usually the first. And then it all just goes downhill from there.

Interesting same thing here. XP is installed on the master drive a 40GB and mandrake on the secondary 100GB both are Western Digital drives.

I only had trouble once when XP got tempermental about being on the slave drive ~ Which's when Redhat conquered all...

But it's all good now, so I'm quite positive Mandrake isn't going nuts over my partitions.