[CLUE-Tech] Mandrake -- Hype or Cool?
Charlie Oriez
coriez at oriez.org
Fri Dec 28 18:14:16 MST 2001
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On Friday 28 December 2001 07:21, Jeffery Cann gave up the right to
remain silent by saying:
> Mandrake users -
>
> I have noticed a bit of hype surrounding this distribution,
> especially in poll questions like ' what's your favorite linux
> distribution?' or 'which distro is a windows killer'.
>
> I know it was based on RHAT, when I last looked at it (1999?) and
> you could not tell the difference. As I do not care for RHAT, I am
> curious as to the degree of divergence.
>
> So, what's good / bad about Mandrake?
>
I have not personally done installs of other distros, though I
remotely shoulder surfed a RH install once, so don't take this as a
comparison with anything else. Note there is what seems to be in my
view a significant divergence from Man7.0 to Man8.0, so I would
assume that there is also a significant divergence from RHAT to
Man8.0, based on Jeffrey's statement[0].
I have used Mandrake, starting with v7.0 and now on v8.0. I found
7.0 difficult to install but possible. Upgrades to 7.1 and 7.2 were
worse, to the point that I abandoned them (usenet discussion groups
suggest that I was not alone in this). A clean install of v8.0 was
reasonably easy. v8.1 is now out of beta. I have not installed it.
A friend of mine in Honduras is converting his internet cafe from
Win95 to Man8.0 to save licensing costs and avoid the hardware
upgrade expenses. He's a linux virgin but technically savvy, and
also reports an easy time of the installs, learning as he goes.
I think Mandrake v8.0 with the KDE desktop may be reaching to point
of simplicity of install and usage where appliance users might start
accepting it. I define an appliance user as someone like my wife,
who currently uses Win95, who doesn't care about cutting edge[1],
doesn't want to know a whole lot about the internals, but by god
wants her aps to work right when she's doing a spreadsheet or word
doc. I'm writing a BSOD emulator for her that can be triggered from
a cron process so that the last major difference between MSFT and
linux can be resolved.
I found driver support on Man8.0 to be somewhat less than perfect. I
am using an old printer, old monitor, and old graphics card. Getting
issues related to those figured out were my biggest problems. I
still don't like my printer solution[2] which produces fuzzy pages.
I think Star Office 5.2, which comes with Man 8.0, still needs work,
particularly on print capabilities. Also, the conversion of the
bullet icons from SO to MS isn't clean. ISTR also that I had to do
something extra to install and use MS fonts, but I could be wrong.
Perl V5.6 is current in the v8.0 distro, so that's cool. Man7.0 had
Perl V5.0 in the distro, so I had to do an extra install there.
Since I was, and still am, a newbie, I went to activestate and got
the binary for that instead of compiling.
I like the fact that Mandrake has a newbies help list. Volume of
traffic is high, with multiple hundreds of posts per day on the
english language version. Answers are more often than not right (or
quickly corrected when wrong), and detailed enough to solve most
problems. The list permits digest mode operation, or key word
searchable archives, if you don't want to read the average 2-300
posts per day. They also have some more advanced lists.
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/ (lists are under support)
The KDE desktop which comes with Man8.0 includes kmail as a mail
client and knode for usenet news. Both could stand enhancements,
which I would be inclined to do if I can find the time. However, the
enhancements in both cases relate to anti-spam capabilities which are
low on my list of my priorities because my ISP lets me run procmail
scripts as an alternative for mail, and usenet spam is handled well
by Chris Lewis's processes. My idea for enhancing knode is to port
the filtering capabilities found on the Windows side with Nfilter.
The author of the Nfilter client has offered me his source if I want
to make the effort at porting. My kmail enhancement ideas are in the
autobounce area which right now is somewhat limited.
I've gotten the Netscape 4.77, Opera 5.06b, and Konqueror web
browsers that came with Man8.0 working fairly easily, but never got
Lynx or Mozilla working. I don't know if this is a release problem,
or a personal problem. With three functioning browsers already, I'm
not pushing to figure it out. I also had trouble getting the
Netscape 6.1 tar ball installed when I later got it, but I'm
reasonably certain that is not a distro problem. Word is that the
problems with NS6.0 were fixed in NS6.1, so it would be nice if
Mandrake had included it in the distro.
gFTP is my preferred FTP GUI that comes with Man8.0, but I haven't
figured out from the doc how to save passwords and other site
specific stuff. I support a variety of client web sites and would
like the same functionality on gFTP that I have with WS-FTP on the
Windows side. It may be there and I'll find it when I sit down to
focus on it, but I haven't found it yet. I also think the default
web development tools are second rate[3].
HTH, YMMV
Footnotes:
[0] Note I am strictly a desktop user. I am not qualifed to express
an opinion on the server capabilities in the distro.
[1] Anyone know where the official dividing line is between cutting
edge and lunatic fringe?
[2] Epson Action Laser 1500 - which is faked to be an HP IIISI per
Epson
[3] I'd welcome suggestions there for alternatives
- --
Charles Oriez, coriez at oriez.org
39 34' 34.4"N / 105 00' 06.3"W
**
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label
on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the
Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on
another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
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From: Jason Dixon <jwdixon1 at yahoo.com>
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Subject: [CLUE-Tech] Re: [staph] Dual-Booting Linux and DOS
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http://www.mcc.ac.uk/grub/grub_13.html
-J.
--- Warren <warren at guano.org> wrote:
> Are there any GRUB users here?
>
> I'm setting up a Linux/DOS (Yes, DR-DOS) dual-boot
> box with 2 IDE
> drives; drive 1 (hda) is a 2GB drive with Linux set
> to "master" and
> drive 2 (hdb) is a 1.6GB drive with DOS and FAT set
> to "slave". Both
> are on the same cable.
>
> My grub.conf looks like:
>
> title Red Hat Linux (2.4.7-10)
> root (hd0,0)
> kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda2
> initrd /initrd-2.4.7-10.img
>
> title DOS
> root(hd1,0)
> chainloader +1
>
>
> RH boots fine, but selecting DOS give me the error:
>
> Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format
>
>
> What dumbass error am I making?
>
> --
>
> </W>
>
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