Anyone tried Mandrake 9.1 RC1 yet?
 

I know it's only been out for two days but I was wondering if anyone has tried it yet. I looked at it on the Mandrake site and I was really wondering about the Automatic network configuration (zeroconf). Although I always stay with debian clones because of the package management (I'll take .deb and/or apt-get anyday over rpm and/or urpmi) I'll switch back to the dreaded rpms if it can connect to my Windows network. Hell, if it can connect to my network I'll just have to learn to love rpms :)

Mandrake was always a good distro in my opinion so don't think I'm bashing it, I just hate rpms.. when I first tried Linux I loaded Mandrake 5 I think.. maybe 6 and trying to use rpms almost turned me away from Linux. There were always several different rpms of the same app and I never knew which one to use, where it was installed, etc.. Then I tried a Debian clone... if it was a .deb file it would work..easy.

I'm online with it now, typing this. I found a couple of bugs, did a bug report, and within 12 hours, received an e-mail notifying that it was fixed. Very impressive.

It seems very stable, so did beta 3, so I expect the final distro to be excellent. KDE 3.1 is also beautiful, but there are some font issues still to be dealt with.

Thanks for the reply. I have been thinking about downloading it and trying it out. I really want to try that zeroconf. I hate dealing with SAMBA so I just don't log into Linux much since I can't get it to connect to my network.

Guess it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot. I'm not patient enough to wait for the final release or even RC2.

Tried to install Mandrake 9.1 RC1 2 times - installation always stops when it is to copy kde 3.1 base rpm packet. I can't do anything, only rebot :-(

a side question: If you upgrade to Mandrack 9.1 (I have 9.0), do you have to redo the NVIDIA drivers as well? I just got them working, dont' want that hassle again.

I've just installed the MDK 9.1 rc1 on my computer.
I got it working without (almost) any problem.
It's wonderfoul: KDE 3.1 is quite a sight.
And konqueror now is simply marvellous.

I said "almost" before because i got a serius issue with the bootloader.
I said during the installation to avoid to put any boot loader in th mbr, just put lilo in an other primary partition (witch has to be E).
But the thing is the i found lilo as bootloader.
It didn't work anyway:
I got Lilo and and Lilo chacksum error too.
So I got inside with the bootdisk, tried to substitute lilo with grub using the boot configurator of the Mandrake control Panel, but all I got was a funny result:
when I boot up i was getting just an 'L' followed by a whole bunch of '9': that wasn't exatly what i hoped to get.
I fixed all with the winxp cd and "fixmbr", ut now I'm scared of reboot my machine by drive E or by bootdisk....

I let you know...

Anyway, now that I tried out MDK91,
I understand why Mr Bill is so scared of...

If you have a dsl connection milk the 3 cd from the net:they really worth a shot and maybe even more