Mandrake 9.2 Successes and Problems
 

Well I finally got mandrake 9.2 installed and i have been both very pleased and disappointed at the same time. First the good stuff. It was rather painless getting DVDs to play properly! Some quick plf servers and I was good to go :) Load times seem to be much faster and most everything else seems to be well organized.

Now the problems. In 9.1 i was able to just enable acpi and disable apm when installing and it would work great (this is a laptop so that's really important). In 9.2 no such luck. When i enable acpi while booting up the screen just turns black and nothing happens.

Second problem. I'm sure i'm doing something wrong on this one but every time i try and use urpmi (the main reason i use mandrake!) i get this message

medium "contrib" uses an invalid list file:
mirror is probably not up-to-date, trying to use alternate method

For some reason i can not use the contrib's right. All the other sources work fine.

Last problem is a carry over from 9.1 too. That is the Mandrake Control Center will freeze my USB mouse up. Every time i load it up the mouse will just freeze. Any ideas on how to fix this.

Well I hope i can get these little problems fixed because overall my experience has been good but it's these little problems that are tripping up my experience

I had the same mouse problem on my tower
 

I had sporatic mouse failure during install and when in 9.2 cartain apps and the controls center would lock up my mouse too. My quick and dirty solution was to take and put the usb mouse on the mouse ps2 slot with its adapter. Once I did that it was smooth sailing for the most part. I found a site that had some usb mouse config info on it but I said the hell with it after the use of the ps2 adapter cause as I look at it, it ain't broke no more. If I can find the site again I will post it here.

Thanks i would appreciate it if you found it. The problem with your solution for me is that i don't have a ps/2 port on my laptop!!!!!!!! So i need to find something else. It's not a huge problem but it's annoying to say the least. I wonder if the wrong usb drivers or something are being installed but i don't even know where to start looking (i'm a newbie).

Check your XF86Config-4 File. Have you set up your usb mouse to send its signaling through the primary mouse (your touchpad)? Once you do this, you should have proper mouse function with either, regardless of the usb mouse connection. If you haven't tried this, search LQ for the thread title "Need to Config USB Mouse".

I had installed Mandrake 9.2 and it installed ACPI automatically, but then I could never get sound to work so I took Mdk off and put on FC1 which had sound but no ACPI. I found out today what my sound problems were so I put Mandrake 9.2 back on and fixed the sound but it didn't install ACPI and my laptop now locks when I try and shutdown.

HELP?

J

My problem with Mandrake is I order the 9.2 powerpack because I couldn't download the ISO files on my 28.8 modem (its a 56K but my phone line is crappy and the telco doesn't care). Now there's already over 300 megs of updates I need! They should have held off on the release and saved me the nightmare. Took forever for my $80 pre-ordered copy to get here anyway... I've only had it for two stinkin' weeks. Seems like I paid full retail for beta software. :(

Search LQ for "Need to Config USB Mouse" thread. This solved my problem with a psaux touchpad and USB mouse on an Inspiron 8200.

Satallite Laptop
 

I recently took on two new distributions, Suse 9 and Mandrake 9.2. I have Suse 9 Pro and the power pack of MD 9.2. I think it's interesting that Suse 9 works great on my Satallite 5105 laptop: power management, sound, samba browsing, everything. However I've been extremely disappointed with Mandrakes new incarnation. Power management refuses to work, and the sound is really choppy. Does anyone else have one of the newer Satallites they managed to get it working on?

Aric

As for power management, try disabling APM and switcvhing to ACPI.

Assuming that by disable apmd you mean shut down the sevice, I istalled acpi and acpid , stopped apmd from starting automatically and made sure acpi and acpid both start. Still having the same issue with power management not working.

Any other thoughts? It must be a configuration issue somewhere because as I said everything works perfectly with Suse 9, just not wiht Mandrake 9.2.

Aric

I just upgraded from 9.1 -> 9.2 using urpmi. Absolutely everything works. Only minor problem is that the fonts on my windowbar titles and in the taskbar look less antialiased. Anyone have this issue?

Haven't tried KDE yet. Maybe I'm imagining things.

For your mandrake control center freezing your usb mouse problem. Try changing the Mouse=no to Mouse=yes in /etc/sysconfig/usb and restarting. It worked for me.

Yes I have this issue, plus a boat load of other issues with Mandrake 9.0, 9.1 and I am not going to waste my time and money on 9.2. :mad: Sorry, but I have been runing Mandrake for almost 5 years and I do not know what the French are thinking, but this 9 versions have been a bear to get working. :confused:

It use to be a lot of fun working out the FEW issues on the older versions, but 9.1 is the last straw, time to move on to a different disto.

My issues are:
System will not power down.
Screensavers do not work ( and I know why ).
Sound system did not work.
System lock ups.
Kppp did not load during install.
Gnome loaded with no menu or icons on the task bar.
Mozilla version too old to use disto plugins.
Super Mount takes forever to work.
and my favorite issue:

Used Drake to unistall Gnome so I could reinstall it, Drake worked so well that it uninstall
it's self. Yes, Drake everything and Gnome uninstalled :cry: And I still have not been able to get any of it reistalled. :rolleyes:

Soooooooooo, is that enough issues ? :D

I have gone back to 9.1, 9.2 was not compiled for the nvidia drivers, with the standard kernel from the downloadable version. It needed to be compiled from the source kernel which was not available on the 3 discs. Other than that everything else worked fine, it looked very nice. Maybe i will install if again soon.

I had a similar problem with Mandrake 9.2 and sound.

This can be solved by changing "acpi=ht" to "acpi=on" in /etc/lilo.conf and reinstalling lilo.
However this then kills the acpi power management features for some reason...