[aRTee]

I have just uploaded my new review about Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official Edition.

Give it a read, feedback in this thread please.

For small corrections (grammar/style/spelling errors for example) you can just PM me.

[arctic]

nice review. i mostly had similar, good impressions with 10.1. the one thing that i do not understand is the bloody 2.6 kernel bug that regularly 'kills' router connections is not fixed yet. it was already known when 2.6.3 was out and now we have 2.6.9 and the bug is still there. will nobody fix this???... hundreds of linux-users are cursing this bug since several months. at least there is the 2.4-enterprise kernel in mandrake, although it is only a bad alternative imho, because it is built for multi-processor boxes. and then there are troubles with k3b and 2.4 kernels... doh.
one of the little extra things that i loved is the addition of the new windowmaker-version. looks a lot better now, just like openoffice (the ultimate office box for mandrake now).

[ChrisM]

Once again aRTee has delivered :thumbs:

I've just had a quick scan, and was pleased to see the mention of urpmi and the case of bad signatures. You are absolutely right in that it does confuse novices - I've come across this kind of situation with urpmi a couple of times as well as in the MCC (In know its the graphical face of urpmi). On at least a couple of occasions that I've come across bad signatures I've raised it here @ MUB - on other occasions I simply don't do the install cos I aint confident/experienced to know what's good/bad/indifferent.

Might be good to mention that its poss to upgrade a CE version to official through urpmi.

I've said this before elsewhere @ MUB, aRtee's site rocks :drum: :drum: :drum:

[mintshows]

The page says "X.Org 6.7 (X.Org 6.8 is also available)" , however I've never seen 6.8 anywhere (officially) on the ftp (including in cooker). Is it offered on the DVD or comercial cd's? ..or is this just bad information?

------------EDITED-------------------
...............Answered my own question....... as stated in: http://www.mandrake....r/dvd-media.txt , xorg-6.8 is on the DVD ...along w/ kde 3.3..etc

This post has been edited by mintshows: 10 November 2004 - 02:08 AM

[mousematt]

Great review aRTee!

It was a great idea to install and review MDKL 10.1 on a number of different machines. One question: does 10.1 satisfy your laptop challenge?

[gregor]

There is another way to fix xmms problem if you use KDE. You can install xmms-arts and select arts output in xmms. This is better because sound still works in other applications that use arts.

So you can't download xorg-6.8 RPM (seperatly) even if you are a club member?

[chocobanana]

Greetings

Just liked to say this is one of the best and most comprehensive reviews I ever read!

I'd like to point out the fact that you concentrated mainly in the distro's build and functional quality, and testing it on several different systems is really a plus showing lots of dedication.

Also, by evaluating the distro itself and not the bundled software which you can find in other distros or separately definitly make this a genuine Linux distribution review!

Thanks for your work :D

P.S.: Have you ever considered reviewing other distors like the new Fedora Core or the next Gentoo?

[aRTee]

To all:
thanks for the positive remarks.

Quote

Might be good to mention that its poss to upgrade a CE version to official through urpmi.

Good idea; I did mention that I upgraded one system from CE to OE...


mousematt,

Quote

One question: does 10.1 satisfy your laptop challenge?

Well, the challenge is to the manufacturers to make and sell laptops with/for linux...
In any case, I'm quite impressed, the laptop problems I saw (apart from the kde issues that the updates solve) were due to that bad bios.
It seems they really are good at wireless stuff...


gregor, thanks for the info. There's more than one way I guess.


chocobanana,
thanks for your feedback.

Quote

Have you ever considered reviewing other distors like the new Fedora Core or the next Gentoo?

No, I won't have time. I have to get reacquainted with my wife, so I'll be offline for a few days (weeks, months... or so...) :P

Seriously, this took an awful lot of time, don't forget that some systems were not at my place (dell1 and 2 are at my place of work), so I had to stay longer to 'do my thing'. Good thing it's possible to do a usb harddrive installation though.

[GrueMaster]

Great review! I've been using Mandrake since 7.xx (been so long, I can't remember exactly which version).

One thing, you had an issue (minor) with your card reader?

Quote

My multi-card-reader works fine, except for one thing: if I don't disconnect it but just take out the memory card or insert another one, this doesn't get seen by the kernel (I monitored with tail -f /var/log/messages), so no device (/dev/sd__) is created, which makes it quite impossible to use the device. Unplugging the card-reader completely works fine, so I have no issues, but I do wonder how built in cardreaders are supposed to be used.

That's actually normal. Think of the card reader as a KA floppy drive (KA - Kick***). The same behavior is seen in Windows XP (I can't. choose what I use at work).

I'm sure there is some method of doing a media detect, as in Windows, it will show the label of the memory drive, if one is defined.

Wish I had the bucks to get the DVD. Unfortunately, I'm just a poor struggling IT worker with a big mortgage waiting to download the DE.

GrueMaster

[aRTee]

GrueMaster, thanks for your info on XP. I'm not XPerienced one might say... :D

I have used my cardreader on XP a couple of times though, and I think I did exchange cards without disconnecting the reader, just didn't try to read inbetween - this may also work on linux.

What helps to get the device (card in the reader) seen is to run mcc or harddrake2. But it takes some time to get seen - up to 5 minutes, and it doesn't always work. So with an external reader it's much easier to disconnect, swap cards, then reconnect.

And actually, at work we don't get to choose either, I just got to run linux since I manouvred myself into the test...

[hounsell]

Has anybody tried 10.1 on an IBM Thinkpad 600E? I know it is a very old laptop but I am stuck with 9.2 because 10.0 broke sndconfig. Also how good is Mandrake with viewing commerical DVDs? What sort of hoops do I need to jump through to get that working?

[aRTee]

I don't have a TP 600E, but if it's only about sndconfig, I have used it, in 10.0, on a Compaq Deskpro sff with isa audio. Ok, that was 10.0.2 - 2nd clubmember edition, but it worked fine.

Note that there is also alsaconf; I just used this yesterday on a very old P166MMX, 48MBram -like a science project, ... it actually installed (with some remarks) and worked fine, albeit terribly slow...

In any case, for the sound, all you have to do is stick in the same settings that you have in your working 9.2 system, so just check your /etc/modules.conf and put the audio device related lines in your 10.1 system, the file has changed to /etc/modprobe.conf, but the syntax should be the same.

As for commercial dvd viewing, this has not been a hard nut to crack since oh, 4 years or so. Read my site, config page, -- set up urpmi with easyurpmi and do
urpmi libdvdcss
and you're good to play any dvd. Even if your dvdrom is set to another region.

[devries]

The review made it to the mandrake-linux.com/nl mainpage. (Since november 10). Great work.

[AussieJohn]

Hello Chrism.
I tried that urpmi from 10.1-CE to OE on three occassions and despite the very best of care, I always ended up with an unreliable and grossly unstable, often freezing. Totally unusable.

On the other hand I reinstalled Mandrake10-OE and did the urpmi to mandrake10.1-OE. The first time I tried this approach I selected ALL the appropriate updates for everything already installed in 10-OE in one big hit and after 2 days and nights of stop start mayhem it was still too unreliable.
So I restarted from scratch doing 10-OE again then urpmi but doing it sections at a time and then when it showed signs of not progressing properly, it was necessary to fully reboot twice in row each time before things were stable enough to proceed with more downloads until it was finally all done.
Everything seemed to be finally completed and working okay then suddenly I could not log in because it said that ../ ... was full. What with a 5Gb partition and only 2.4Gb of programs ???
Got out the PCLinuxOS Live CD and went into find out why. By checking through every part of the root partitions I found in /usr/lib that a folder for Open Office had 2.2Gb of data in it (yes that figure is correct) and when I opened it I found masses of core dumps totalling nearly 2GB and the complete OpenOffice program there as well.

Using PCLinuxOS as root I deleted all the dumps. Rebooted into my OS again and did an MCC un-install process of Open Office and the went back to /usr/lib and deleted the OpenOffice folder. During this whole upgrade process, somehow it had managed to install OpenOffice or a repeat of it into /usr/lib and because it was perpetually trying to start up and failing it was making these core dumps constantly.

What I am working from at this moment is the upgrade which also took nearly all of my waking hours of two days. It now appears to be quite stable and pretty fast.
Thank god for small mercies.

It was a learning experience alright but would I do it again.
Absolutely not. What I did learn was not justified by the time spent learning it.

I am waiting for my 4 CDROM set of Mandrake10.1-OE to see if it verifys my present setup.

Would I encourage anyone else to try this idea ??? No way. It simply IS NOT worth the effort no matter how good I now know urpmi to be.

Cheers. John

[Poke_53272]

hounsell, on Nov 15 2004, 07:24 AM, said:

Has anybody tried 10.1 on an IBM Thinkpad 600E? I know it is a very old laptop but I am stuck with 9.2 because 10.0 broke sndconfig. Also how good is Mandrake with viewing commerical DVDs? What sort of hoops do I need to jump through to get that working?
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, on an IBM Thinkpad 600E.
The only Distribution who works well, past the installation on this Notebook is Suse Linux >= Suse 9.1

Mandrake has problems with this Soundcard.
I've tried every tips from internet to make this soundcard working on mandrake. but until now, no one little noise from this notebook exept the speaker beeps.

I know. Its a problem of my knowledge about linux.
I'm still a lamer.

but I'll not give up!