[oclug]Mandrake woes

[Rod Giffin]

On Friday 18 October 2002 18:32, Dave Edwards wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-10-18 at 18:06, Rod Giffin wrote:
> > That's right.  WinXP and Win2K are both NT kernels, and yes they are
> > supposed to be on a primary partition to boot.  I had a system that dual
> > booted XP and Mandrake 9.0 last weekend (although it now just boots
> > Linux...)  I had installed Linux on a secondary drive.  There were no
> > issues booting either XP or Linux.
>
> And how are you finding MDK-9.0?  It received a negative review on
> Newsforge.

Ya. I read that - at least the Oct 2 review.  I laughed.  I thought the writer 
was an idiot.  The kill button (links to xkill) is there, in the Applications 
-> Monitoring menu instead of on the desktop where it can be covered by an 
unresponsive window.    And if he wants plugins for Moz, he ought to download 
Netscape 7.0.  It's free too.  However, for some unknown reason, my install 
recognized swf and pdf, and worked appropriatly,  His didn't.  I agree though 
that there is still a way to go before my father will be likely to use Linux 
over Windows - and that is my benchmark for that issue.

Mandrake 9 recognized the integrated sound and ethernet in a brand new Asus 
motherboard (P4S533).  Windows XP and Windows 2000 Advanced Server did not.  
I had to flash the BIOS for XP to recognize anything.

I gotta say it's a lot better than the last RedHat distribution I had 
(7.something... two distributions ago) and both Mandrake 8.0 and 8.2.  I'm an 
old Slakware guy from like '94, so the directory structure in /etc and /usr 
still sometimes takes me by surprize.

The real issues I do have with it are almost entirely related to KDE and Gnome 
- both of which I think are just so much bloatware - although I've been using 
both quite a lot this last year.  If I find that's an issue, there are 10 
other lighter weight xwindow managers I can use :)

Mandrake 9.0 is definatly sluggish booting into KDE or Gnome from a cold boot.  
But once it's up and running the first time after you turn your system on, 
logging out and in is really fast - under 10 seconds on both of the systems 
I've got it running on right now. (P3-800 / P4 2400)  This improvement, plus 
the improvement in the Mandrake Control Center make it almost as easy to 
administer as Windows XP - and certainly easier to administer than Windows 
2000 Advanced Server, which I also run.

Rod.