format your hd for resierFS or XFS support in the install.Trust me its worth it.Ext3 sucks
just my 2 cents

I heartily concur about Reiserfs...I don't know whether Ext3 DOES suck...but when I had 9.0 and previous, I used Ext2 and it was such a HUGE pain in the ***.

Since I put in Reiserfs, its faster (seems to me anyway) and no more fsck problems.

Regarding the mouse not working following installation. I have no explanation why, but after a dozen, or so, installations on different machines, I've learned that moving the mouse around until the installation process reaches the gui part of installation results in the mouse working...everytime. Not doing that results in the mouse not working...everytime. Strange quirk
Also disabling plug-n-play is a must. Doing so, I have no problems with sound. In fact, I am amazed at how much better the sound is on the same machine using Mandrake vs. Windows,

Mandrake Linux was the only distro that I could install on my HP laptop. In my experience, It is better at detecting and configuring hardware then Red Hat, or SUSE. Suse, for example didn't install because I had a USB keyboard and mouse. I had to dig up a standard keyboard and mouse to even start the install. When I bought a new desktop computer, I tried a newer SUSE distro. This time the USB keyboard was ok, but it couldn't read from the CDROM!

Starting with 9.0, they have a common theme between KDE and GNOME. It does look good. I just enabled font smoothing, and window shadows in the KDE manager. Boy, does it look good!

There is a problem getting PDC20267 ata-raid working. The driver that FastTrak supplies is for an earlier kernel. So I have to boot from a normal IDE drive, then I can use the raid drives.

One negative, compared with Red Hat, is that Mandrake doesn't have Phone install service like Red Hat does.

One additional nice thing about mdk is that if your running on a dual-boot system w/Windows, mdk automatically mounts the windows partitions in the /mnt directory allowing you to copy files. RH doesn't do this --not to say that it couldn't, it's just not done by default.

For general info about lots of distros, check out http://www.distrowatch.com.

Heh... thanks for all the goodies you folks wrote up. I was so tempted to see what this was about I took the plunge and installed Mandrake yesterday .... and well, I'll be re-installing it today.

I downloaded and installed 9.2RC2 - it's good but something went terribly wrong and I ended up with only a scrambled line at the bottom of my monitor after attempting to install the python lib package using the GUI interface (can't remember what that install program is called). That was a little nutty. So I'll be re-installing - but 9.1 this time - I think I'll wait 'till 9.2 is a final release.

BTW, for anyone interested, Mandrake folks still haven't solved the sound problem issue at new installation. It took me a while to figure out that Mandrake installed the wrong driver for my soundcard - not once but one three different sound cards. LOL that's just weird. Finally substituted the "emu10k1" with "snd-emu10k1" and everything worked fine after that....

I've used SuSE 8.2 and Red Hat 9.0 before this and it's odd that each and every distro has some really weird thing about it that makes initial installation or use really frustrating.

Now this is all subjective, but here's my point of view - I'll just point out the quarky things:

SuSE - bad cdrw drive support - must configure on your own after installation, crippled software (K3b, mplayer...), no auto kernel-source installation, limits software package installation - have to install seperately, not much third party software support - compile on your own...

Red Hat - very bad NIC support, bad choice (IMO) of default desktop (GNOME), crippled KDE, some crippled software, seems very sluggish compared to similar installs of other distros, no "reiser" FS...

Mandrake - very bad soundcard detection and driver installation, no pine??, no pico???, auto addition of Windows partitions to /etc/fstab, software installation - very basic support module initial installation - must install a number of features after the fact (libs, sound support modules, programs) - even though I went through "expert installation mode"....

This isn't a rant or anything as much as showing how different distros are packaged and prepared. It's quite bizarre that some issues like cdrw, NIC and soundcard detection - seemingly such basic issues continue to be so problematic between the various distributions.

oh well, back to installation of Mandrake 9.1

I'm curious to learn what other issues you experience getting it all working, and how you like the final result...
Here's a few hints:

If you use the ASLA drivers, setting the aRts soundserver in KDE to NOT start by default lets some apps like Maelstrom use sound better. Also, configuring XMMS preferences to use the aRts drivers for it's output keeps KDE from crashing.

If Mandrake would just follow Knoppix's lead when it comes to sound, it would make a few million users VERY happy!

HTH,
Siri Amrit

Well the 9.2Rc2 install was a rather painless experience overall. In terms of hardware recognition the installation was easy, however there remains some confusion over how software is handled. Even in expert mode it failed to install some basic lib packages that should be considered as default - particularly when someone enters the "expert" installation mode. By default, Mandrake does not install python libs and other "basic" (?) packages leaving you in the lurch afterwards. Although python was clearly specified for installation, the lib files were not installed (with "dependency" check on!). Doesn't make much sense really but it happened. Another bizarre installation issue was with the KDE konsole. Firstly it's not part of the "default" install (using expert mode) - again rather bizarre. After selecting konsole for installation that terminal option never appeared in KDE, had to reinstall it again afterwards. There are many other examples such as this which made the software (packages) install rather confusing and frustrating when it came time to start up various programs in console mode...

Hopefully those issues will be resolved in the final release and my experiences were only due to this still being an RC.

The sound issue still has me perplexed. LOL!
How could the wrong drivers be installed? The SoundBlaster Live! card was detected and the chip properly identified but the wrong driver made the difference. I just found it rather funny at the time. How could "emu10k1" and "snd-emu10k1" be so different as to render the soundcard completely useless by using one rather than the other? Time to look into this. (I do remember RH9 using "emu10k1" and the sound was perfectly fine following installation.)


The 9.2RC2 install did a magnificent job identifying all the hardware without additional probing or prompting, even such hardware not specifically listed in Mandrake's HCL (hardware compatibility list). Mandrake is the ONLY distro so far to specifically identify my HCF GVC modem as a winmodem (HCF Rockwell chipset) and suggesting a URL where I could possibly find additional drivers for it!

For a first-time Mandrake install ever, I found it heartening and now I can't wait for the final release of 9.2 - but for now I'll install 9.1 and fiddle with that for a while. Mandrake 9.2RC2 is definitely a nice distro and it's quick on ReiserFS but the package installation issues as well as soundcard identification and driver installation really need to be looked at to make MDK9.2 a truly awesome distro.

"How could "emu10k1" and "snd-emu10k1" be so different as to render the soundcard completely useless by using one rather than the other?"

I think "emu10k1" is the OSS driver, while "snd-emu10k1" is the ALSA driver. If you have the ALSA service running at boot-time, you need to use the ALSA driver. Then, if you're using KDE, aRts will sometimes conflict with ALSA if aRts runs at KDE startup, too. See my above post.

For some unfathomable reason, the ALSA mixer is muted by default. If you have no sound, go to aumix and unmute it, and turn up the volume. There's a way to save those settings so you don't lose them at reboot, but I can't remember what they are.

"There's a way to save those settings so you don't lose them at reboot, but I can't remember what they are."

Its just the old "file --> save" that we're all used to

"Its just the old "file --> save" that we're all used to"

Doesn't work, at least not for everybody. Wish it was that simple. I had to run something like alsaconfig as root... or is it alsacontrol?