New Forum - Mandrake

Only just spotted the new "mandrake" forum. Excellent.

Hence, to anyone associated with mandrakesoft, keep up the good works and thanks for your efforts so far.

regards

John

Cool! I used RH for years -- we still use it at work -- but recently switched to Drake 9.1 and will never go back to RH! Drake is sooo refined and installed alongside XP flawlessly. Not to mention Drake's corporate policy is much nicer to users simply wanting to upgrade (RH requires/ed registration which is ludicrous!) I can't wait until 9.2 comes out! Yay Drake!

I'm glad to see the "Boss' Gael Duval will be stopping in from time to time. I have used different distro before, RH 6.2-8.1, but I still think Mandrake is the best way to go.

Most of my pet peeves have been fixed with 9.x releases. Mandrake still has a little way to go, but I believe it is ready for the desktop so much I have deleted Windows from my HD and run Mandrake as a primary OS.

Unlike Windows, when I have problem with Mandrake I can fix it, with Windows it makes it very hard to fix anything.

Gael keep up the work.

Good news after getting back from vacation...

Thanks Jeremy! Finding this forum in place made my day.

Mandrake is a great newb distro and their corporate attitude is excellent - totally committed to Free-as-in-free-speech Software and the GPL. Go Mandy!

Not without its niggles of course. I believe I'm about to run into the same 'little problem' that some have described regarding network cards and modems, and I'm right now preparing a detailed post about the nightmare I'm having with sound on my new laptop (tho' actually that's not mandrake specific, I found that out today, tho' alas not how to sort it out...details to follow elsewhere)...but on my desktop machine, apart from a few hiccups with going from 9.0 to 9.1 this distro has run flawlessly for me since January - and I knew NOTHING about LInux at the time I first installed it (or rather, I know nothing now - back then I knew less than nothing, which was probably why I jumped in with both feet )

Looking forward to reading about others experiences with the distro.

cheers

jd

I've been playing with Mandrake 7.2, 8.0, 8.2, 9.0 and 9.1 to get an installation I really like, shared with Windows on my disk. I've found a few problems that Bugzilla wouldn't be interested in because these aren't bugs of recent origin, but they may exist in current versions.

1) Mdk 9.1 seems to insist on an ext3 filesystem which first became available in version 8.2. An upgrade path starting from before 8.2 means an ext2 filesystem that 9.1 Lilo doesn't like. Maybe only the boot partition needs to be ext3, and maybe with expert mode install, one can delete and reformat that partition as ext3, haven't tried it yet.

2) There was a problem upgrading from 8.2 to 9.1 Lilo. On trying to boot, Lilo displayed "LI" in monochrome text and then hung. I used a Mandrake floppy to reboot and somehow got the problem fixed, but the upgrading to Lilo for 9.1 didn't work right. It would be better to leave the Lilo code pretty much unchanged from one version to another, right? This problem may involve a script that isn't compatible between versions.

3) Sometimes a data structure gets misread, maybe a variable added to a config file that upgrading doesn't account for. I set up my dialup internet connection in 8.0, then upgraded "packages only" to 8.2, no resetting of system info. My internet service appeared in the username box of KPPP setup, and my username appeared in the password box. This error looks like what would happen if a variable were added to KPPP and not accounted for in upgrading "packages only".

4) I wanted Scilab from version 7.2, Klyx and SmallEiffel from version 8.0, and found that it doesn't always work to use a filemanager (superuser mode) and click on the desired RPM. Klyx installed in 8.2, but it wouldn't run---maybe there's a missing library or version problem.

5) There are awful problems with deleting packages from an installation. My version of 8.2 includes Star Office. It worked with Root as I recall, but not with my regular username. So I was going to delete and re-install it. The deletion took out Gnome! The reason is that the uninstall looks for dependencies, but if it finds a dependent package, it doesn't leave it if some other package needs it. The deletion takes out the other packages too! In 9.1 as I recall, there are separate menu items for deleting and adding software. I would much prefer the old way of some package manager that can both delete and add software, not what amounts to two programs. Of course, deleting a package should only take out just what's needed while leaving other packages.

6) I've never installed a Mandrake or RH Linux that's detected my video correctly. I always set it manually to a generic resolution. For what it's worth, Windows doesn't detect the video right on this system either.

7) The hardware-detecting program that runs on bootup, detects my PCI sound card fine and Mandrake sound software setup works fine. But though the BIOS detects my PCI modem, I have to run setserial manually to get Linux to set up my modem configuration. Is there some special difficulty with setting up a hardware PCI modem? The same problem exists in Windows so I'm not trying to be critical here, just curious.

8) 9.1 ran fine on installation, but upgrading from 8.2 produced problems. Where do I sign up to beta-test the installation/upgrade routines and help to get the bugs out before a version is released?