Mdk10 Alternatives
 

Hi,

Does anyone know of a good alternative to MDK (mandrake) 10? The reason is because I'm getting well.....lots of annoying small problems with '10.

I've been using the mdk/kde setup for a while now - since mdk9/kde3 (!). But with every version of mandrake I've been getting more problems - not lots but just a small increase that seem to occur more feequently.

Here's what I've experienced so far:; these have all happened at one point or another:

* Fonts decreasing in size for no apparent reason until I restarted the system.
* Sometimes in a KDE window, at the bottom where it tells you how many items have been used and how much space - I've seen "4TB and 16 million" files displayed here(!).
* On at least 1 occasion, KDE/MDK 10 refused to shut down.
* XMMS and KDE trouble: This morning I switched on my PC; apon trying to open a kde window with the star menu, mandrake 10 loaded xmms. After doing this a couple of tries xmms refused to start.
* More frequent appearences of the KDE crash window. :(
* CD Rom drive problems; if you put a cd into your cd drive you get a cd icon to click on, no problems. But remove and replace the cd in your cd drive a few times (with other cds). Eventually you can't see what is on the CD - or you get messed up files.
* Sometimes icons for USB drives don't go away. I plugged in such a device, it appeared and I could read from it but apon removing it was always left on the screen. When I tried the drive again I got a second icon!

In particular I'm more concerned about the increasing appearence of the kde crash window; under mdk9 I think I saw it once - and only once in all the time I used mdk In 9.1 it started to appear more but still quite infrequently. In 10, it almost seems to appear at least once each time I use mandrake 10. BTW in each case when I upgraded (say to 9 to 9.1, 9.1 to 10) the hard drive was wiped clean by me for the new installation.

Is it me or is mdk/kde starting to get more buggy? These problems are only small but they are annoying - and with each mdk release they seem to becoming more frequent too :( .

Thanks,

SP

Make sure you install all your updates for starters. There are a lot of bug fixes for kde in the updates and xmms will crash if you don't install some of those updates.

I too find mdk10 less stable than mdk9.2 but I think a lot of that is the 2.6 kernel. So many things changed itn 2.6 that there was bound to be some instability. I think 10.1 will be much more stable. I tried 10.1 beta and it looks pretty good for a beta.

As for alternatives you probably know what they are: suse, fedora, slackware and if you want to get adventurous, debian, gentoo.

As said there are some stability issues with MDK10 and the 2.6 kernel mainly on some hardware (artsd is also a problem in KDE)

A solution is to turn off artsd and compile a generic kernel like 2.6.7 and that way you can stay with the familiar MDK and have a nice stable OS... I have three MDK 10 installs here but only one was a little glitchy on the USB drives. It's now fine with the new kernel.

You can wait for MDK 10.1