First off, kudos to the Mandrake team. The distro is generally slick; the installer is the best yet and the config tools are comprehensive and generally useful.

However, I've encountered a couple of annoying bugs - can anyone help with these, please? - and have several comments too:

Bugs:

1) It won't bring up my network when it boots. I have a network card on eth0 (and a winmodem which isn't used.) My ADSL connects over DHCP. Each time when I boot, only the local loopback device is brought up. If I do /etc/init.d/network restart, it will cheerfully bring up eth0, but it won't *really* be brought up! I have to go into harddrake, and run the config tool on the network card to make it work. Most of the settings in the wizard it has correctly remembered - the only one it forgets is that I'm on ADSL (as opposed to nothing.) How can I fix this?

2) It forgot that I'm using gdm, and now brings up what I assume is xdm. I can go in and hack the config files under /etc/X11, but this shouldn't be necessary. Anyone any idea what I can do here?


Annoyances

1) AbiWord needs to be shipped in the "Office" package. OpenOffice Writer took over 2 minutes (!) to load the first time on my system. Leaving naive users to assume that OpenOffice Writer is the pinnacle of Linux wordprocessing is a good way to damp the adoption curve.

2) The mandrake tools Install Software and Remove Software need to be integrated into an all-in-one tool (similar to Synaptic). It's ludicrous to assume that I will be either Installing or Removing, but not either or. Upgrading should also be integrated.

2b) The tools, much improved, nevertheless come badly set up, nee disabled. I downloaded the three iso installation cds, and installed from there. Urpmi (the apt-get like system) was set up to believe that I had 4 cds, and didn't recognize any of mine as being any of them. Additionally, it came with NO net-based repositories set up. Even a built-in wizard that took you through the "easy urpmi setup" steps (available on a webpage with the same name) would be advantageous to novices. It is a terrible idea to force novice users to remove all of their Urpmi repositories, and manually reinstall them.

3) Blackbox but not Fluxbox as part of the core distro? Surely shome mishtake.

4) Include xmms by default (it's a better player than either of the bundled ones) and set it up by default to use the Kjofol skins. It's slick, and every bit of slick helps.

Oh:

Annoyance 5) NONE of the general mouse setup tools give the option for left handed mice. I'm right handed, but use a trackball with my left hand - I type better with my right hand. Very annoying to have to do manually with xmodmap (xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1 5 4")

RESOLVED:

Bug 2 & Annoyance 5:

Checking ps -ax revealed that it had switched to kdm. I guess kdm got installed when I installed k3b - k3b requires some kde base libraries (annoyingly!) and urpmi sucks down pretty much most of kde. Trying to remove the package which contains kdm threatens to remove k3b (even though the kdm package is named kdm-kdebase, or similar, and contains only kdm). Bad.

Anyway, the solution is to CREATE a file called /etc/sysconfig/desktop, which contains the line:
DISPLAYMANAGER=GDM

This file is referenced by the script: /etc/X11/prefdm, and sets your preferred dm. However, why the file didn't exist after installation is beyond me - surely it should have been set up. (Let's label this Annoyance 6).


Onto Annoyance 5:

The best place for the xmodmap line, I think, is: /etc/X11/gdm/Init/Default -- this means that the left handed mouse mapping is also carried through to gdm, not only your login.

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Onto Bug 1: harddrake, once it has done configuring, runs the following:

/sbin/dhclient -1 -q -lf /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient-eth0.leases -pf /var/run/dhclient-eth0.pid -cf /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf eth0

Why is this not happening at boot?

I'll only address the one issue I can speak on. The Open Office issue you have. I have recently migrated back to Mandrake with 10 OE. The reason is the speed with which the system performs now. I had used mandy from 7.0 to 9.1 and was generally pleased but went to Debian when Woody came out. I gave Mandy 10 a try and came back. Even open office flies on my new Athlon 950 with 256meg ram. It replaced Debian which resided happily on it but was still slower. I think the new 2.6 kernel really made a difference.

I had issues with my network. I always had with mandrake's setups. But since working in Debian and really getting to know the ins and outs with it I was able to find in the sysconfig scripts where it was assigning my nic a gateway and thereby blocking my dialup access. Other than that my setup has been flawless.

Not sure what the problem is with your install cd's. if your md5sums are fine there shouldn't be a problem with your installation. I haven't gone much into urpmi but will check it out seeing how I became adept with apt-get.