Well, so much for that little excursion. Madrake 9.1 is not for me :-(
While the install was pleasant and the first few hours were an interesting adventure, KDE proved to be too featureful at the expense of usability on basic issues and Mandrake's value add wasn't as "friendly" as what Red Hat offers. My three big early disappointments were that Mandrake didn't make wireless configuration (and network in general) nearly easy enough, KDE didn't make an easy task out of something as simple as adding a volume control to the panel, and the combination of Mandrake's additions to the K Menu (start menu thing) and the stock items was just a mess (attempting to customize only made things worse).
I'm sure it's all quite easy for those who have been using that distro and that desktop for a while, but it wasn't good enough for me. Too bad.
I'm off to install the new Red Hat Linux beta, Severn. I'll let you all know how that turns out.
Where do you find the beta? I'd like to try Mandrake but I've had nothing but problems with the installation. It complains about an I/O error at the very early stage (before the graphical installation appears) and halt.
I did manage to install Red Hat 9 but wasn't too pleased with Gnome, it was just too plain and you couldn't customize it to be more like Windows Explorer. However, I love beta software, so I want to try this beta!
Posted by: David Tenser on July 26, 2003 06:23 AMI had only bad reports of the last Mandrake, so I'm not surprised of your report :)
I had lots of good reports from Knoppix installationsm though, you may try it maybe :)
See http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
It's a Live-Linux (i.e. a bootable Linux distribution that fits on one CD), but that can be installed :)
If you're into "Just Works" software (like Firebird!), then Red Hat is probably what you'll want to stick with, and GNOME is definitely the desktop to run. Other distros have some neat features, and KDE certainly has some cool and powerful stuff included, but neither one compares to the Just Works attitude displayed in Red Hat and GNOME, IMHO.
I hope Severn works out well for you.
Posted by: jck on July 29, 2003 04:06 PMI wiped Mandrake 9.0 and installed Mandrake 9.1 day before yesterday. So far I don't see a lot of difference, except that 9.0 had bootup delay problem I could never resolve, and 9.1 fixed that.
I like a couple things about Mandrake that I really find tough to do without that RH doesn't have.
#1-to access HPFS in RH you must compile a custom kernel. HPFS is built into the stock mdk kernels. As an OS/2 user, I must have HPFS access, and all those extra hours of configure and build after a fresh RH install in order to get at all my goodies is simply unreasonable. RH had HPFS built in up until about 6.3 or so. That's when I found Mandrake 7.
#2-NUM I don't know how people can stand for the numpad to not produce numbers. I set NUM on in the BIOS, and I expect a friendly OS to accept that setting as "the way it must be". Last RH's I tried have no numlock rpm. In contrast, num is on by default in mdk.
Anyway, mdk runs the nightlies fine, which is most of what I use it for.
Todo: figure out the build with GTK2 & FT2 fuss.
Posted by: Felix Miata on August 1, 2003 05:47 PM