I have been looking at the massive update for LM9.1 in http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/advisorie...e=MDKA-2003:004 and I am sure that none of the updates in:
http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/advisorie...tes.php?dis=9.0
http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/advisorie...tes.php?dis=8.2
http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/advisorie...tes.php?dis=8.1
http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/advisorie...tes.php?dis=8.0
is as big as the latest LM9.1 update. So the first thing that comes to my mind is whether this was a suitable release in the first place or was a 9.1rc3 pushed out as 9.1-final just to compete with redhat and suse and to handle the bankruptcy problem ?

OK, which begs the question,...

Are the fixes going to be on the released/boxed copy CDs or are they already being printed???

and,...

Does the update feature still pretty much suck???

well i thought that there should have been another RC but im still happy with 9.1

The most disappointing thing is...

approx. 50 updates so far...

approx. 25 updates are MDK developed software...

I agree there were many bugs discovered recently... But half the updates were about MDKs own software...

Disappointing... We shoul dbe doing more testing for MDK and they should give us more time to test and report bugs.

I really got the impression it was rushed. Someone somewhere said "We gotta get it out tomorrow" and they did. I used to work under management like that... usually in a few days it would be... "where did all these bugs come from? I thought you said it was ready?" so on so on.

The old you can have it fast or you can have it right.

A sign at a manufacturing plant I visited (actually have been working in collaboration since 1997)

"Why is it we never have time to do it right the first time, but we always have time to do it again?"

Again,...

My question is whether the 9.1 avaialble on the website is the one that's going to end up on the distribution disks.

????

Are the disks even available yet???

It's anybody's guess, but I doubt that the boxed versions will include the updates unless the boxed sets are delayed in arrival significantly and I doubt they want to go down that road again. When I ordered my boxed set in March the delivery date was estimated as mid April.

As to the original question of whether 9.1 was released too soon, if you mean too soon for the delivery of a suitably polished end product, I think the answer has to be yes and I think it was something most of those involved in the RC process saw coming. However, given Mandrake's financial woes, releasing a product that was less than ready may have been necessary for it's economic survival. Releasing a new product is pretty much the only way they can generate any cashflow. It may have very well come down to we release it now, worts and all, and fix it latter or there won't be a tomorrow.

I think it was rushed. The 9.1 installer can hang at certain locations, and then yesterday I found that inputting in Chinese does not work right. Well, I'll see if I can fix it. But Mandrake 9.1 definitely is different from 9.0 in many regards. If Mandrake can make it thru another release, I hope they can concentratre on bug fixing rather than adding new features next time.

I've just downloaded 98 MB program improvements!!!! Luckily I've broadband....

All this just makes me want to keep running and updating my rock-stable 8.2 install. Not much new in 9.1 I have any need for or interest in, and I have a very complicatied installation that takes a long time to get just right.

That said, after playin' around some with RedHat, Suse, and Debian on a spare machine, I still think Mandrake is the best overall distribution and I'll probably upgrade to the next release (although I'd really like to wait for the 2.6 kernel). But I will IF, and only if, they really concentrate on the bugs. I mean, I understand they really needed to get a new release out to stay alive, but I'm not buying this one (though I admit I downloaded it just in case it's the last Mandrake). It's not the money - I've been a Silver Club member for 2 years and bought boxed copies of 8.0 Standard, 8.0 PowerPack, and 8.2 PowerPack. But I'm not going through days of re-loading and configuring unless I know I'm gonna be happy when I'm done.

In my opinion, LM9.0 was definitely more polished than LM9.1. In fact, my LM9.0 (with texstar KDE-3.1/qt-3.1.1) was much more stable. In fact I reported a bunch of repeated bugs in the RC1, RC2 and final stage of LM9.1. I can still see some 80% of the bugs just lying UNCONFIRMED. The question is that if mandrake does not solve these repeated bugs for the stable distribution (instead of wasting time updating their cooker), how can they expect to stay in business ?

I haven't even bothered trying 9.1 (still using 8.1). But from what I've been reading, this is going to leave a bad taste in people's mouths again. I feel sorry for Mandrake. They just keep digging themselves a deeper and deeper hole. I guess maybe if they can hang in there long enough, then one day everyone will have fast broadband access and getting updates wont be an issue anymore.

Glitz.

Sheeesh, the list is huge, could someone point me to a place where i can get an archive that has all the files ????, cause downloading them all by hand is a consuming process.

I have rarely seen such stupidity emanating from a company hanging by a thread when their own custom packages for configuring and running the distro are do full of errors that they have to post updates before the boxes hit the stores. This does not bode well for the future of Mandrakesoft. It would be interesting to see how many of the problems are of Mandrakesoft's sloppy quality control and how much is third party such as the security problems in KDE (which are not yet in Updates but are in cooker).

Adding to that is having would-be PR man Gael Duval shooting his mouth off that the Club is the most important revenue stream over Mandrakestore sales and retail sales on the open market.
( http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3131 ) According to him they are going to more subscription based services. I know have Knoppix and should that happen with downloads I'm gone to Debian.

Counterspy

basing on the posts, then i would say yes. basing on my (1 week) experience then i would say no as i havent encountered anything yet (knocking on wood).

ciao!

So you haven't experienced any of the problems that others have faced???

I'm left wondering if those problems are truely earth-shattering or whether they are just unique to people with funky configurations?!?! My suspiscions are that the issues people have with it are really over-blown, particularly given the results of the one review poll, which are overwhelmingly positive.

You realy think that the installer hang problem described in detail in (experienced and investigated by at least three people in that thread alone) http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=3863 is due to "funky configurations" ? Just to let you know I have not had this sort of problems in LM 8.1/8.2/9.0. And you should have a look at mandrake bugzilla to get an idea of so many critical bugs just lying unattended. And add to that the huge update for LM9.1 for mandrake's own tools. The thing is most people do not investigate various possible configurations to produce bugs. They report problems only when they get hit. That does not mean the bugs do not exist. The reason for that is a hurried release: an RC3 being relabelled final.

I'll first state that I haven't tried this myself. (still on 9.0 with the latest Mandrake kernel, haven't felt a need to upgrade yet) However, everything I've read states that 9.1 was much better than its predecessors, in both usability and bug-ness (for lack of a better word, made up or otherwise....). Not having looked at the bug list myself (where can I see this list?), are these 80% of unconfirmed bugs unconfirmed simply because they are in software that isn't used by the majority of users? I would think it's a better idea to concentrate on those that would affect the majority of users. Now, if they are in the everyday software, then my point is moot, but otherwise, perhaps this is something to think about.

both right. im not getting hit because i dont use the tools that have updates. checkout this post of mine to better explain why.

i dont get to use my pc much lately so i expect to get hit somewhere down the road. but for now my 9.1 is performing better than 9.0 in terms of my daily use. the only bug i have encountered so far is gnucash segfaulting but i think that has something to do with guile.

like i said, a boon for others, a bane for some.

ciao!

no the update feature does not suck. it isn't perfect and there will be little "niggly bits" buts it's a heckuvalot better than something like say a win98 -> XP upgrade. I've done them both and the 9.0 -> 9.1 (i used rc version) was better than win2win upgrade. I was testing out the upgrade feature for cooker however (had no probs) and didn't use it when installing 9.1.

I totally agree with you on the mdk updates bits. the mandrake galaxy and mdkkdm were horribly rushed bits of software imho and should have been tested further. as for the rest. Sec updates which mdk can't do much about, (~10 i think) and then your normal exploits. utf support was also rushed i think and i'm going to steer as far away from it as possible
::
jocasta is in mdk 9.1 perfection
::

There really is no other way to do it, do you expect mdk's q&a to go out and configure every single possible combo possible. it just isn't going to happen.

actually the reason for that is people not reporting bugs as soon as they get them. i've seen people on the cooker mailing list reporting bugs in the beta isos when the rc's had already been released.
Another thing you are leaving out is that most of the bugs you see there are carried over. Someone gets a bug fixed and instead of being marked as resolved it gets left there. When i installed 9.1 I had the latest cooker updates and my bugs were unresolved. After starting up 9.1 my bugs miraculously disappeared (confirming a suspicion that the bugs were caused by old files in /home which I cleaned prior to installing). I made a point to go and mark my bug reports as resolved as soon as i installed 9.1 and found them gone not everyone does that. As soon as the release comes and there probs are solved they unsubscribe to the mailing list and that's it.

Except for nvidia related problems which i found out was the fault of my mobo, not a one. MDK is perfect for me. I started experiencing problems with starting mdk apps when i enabled dead-keys last night but i knew enough about utf probs to disable them. I'm in a little place called perfection right now.
uptime 3 days and counting last crash was caused by playing ut which as i said is a mobo prob (don't buy ecs, they suck).

I was referring to bugs I myself reported. The number 80% is approximate. The bugs cover all types:
install problems
sound configuration
video/X configuration
GUI (KDE) problems
mandrake configuration tools
kernel related (supermount)
network configuration
Obviously, I have not left much out.

How am I supposed to know what software is is used by majority/minority of users ? This is not the correct attitude of an user. An user should report a bug he/she experiences without worrying about whether the same bug has been experienced by 99.99% of other users. Its the developers' job to decide whether the bug is worth fixing and popularity of the bug is one factor that may be considered in deciding that.

Why do people fail to realize that:
I cannot reproduce a bug != the bug does cannot affect another user
Do a search in this forum and u will know that upgrade is a big pain. And comparing it to MS windows upgrade is pointless. We want mandrake linux to work well.

No. I expect individual users to do that. And many dedicated users do that.

Thats a very misleading view. Have you also counted the number of bugs that were reported right on time ? That number would be pretty high too.

My experience is to the contrary. I have seen bugs being carried from 9.1rc1 to 9.1rc2 to 9.1final because they could be reproduced in each case. In addition, I have seen bugs recklessly being marked as "fixed" and then reappearing in the very next release.

You are missing the point. Cooker is unstable and we need stable bug fixes. Fixing stuff in cooker helps only those few who can risk breaking their system. Installing from cooker may fix a few bugs but will always create a bunch of new ones.

This was exactly the point I was getting at. The developers would concentrate first and foremost on the bugs that would be encountered most frequently by the majority of users. Therefore, the ones that were reported the most often would get priority attention.

Many of the bugs I have reported have been confirmed by 3rd parties. Besides, thats one of the many criteria. There are other criteria like how crtitcal the bug is. A system installation bug is much more important than a GUI font bug. Another example is the security updates that appear constantly. How many regular users actually face these security-related bugs ? Actually, very few, because it requires lots of skills to exploit/expose them. Inspite of that, these are fixed first.

So,...

I'm strongly considering upgrading to 9.1 from 8.2, specifically for advanced power management support (I currently must hit the power and reset buttons simultaneously to get the machine to shut off), and updated KDE/Gnome. Are you people saying that I should hold off until 9.2 or something???

Keep in mind that I was effected by the 8.2 AMD K6 bug and worked around it with the patch without problem. I also tend to tweak and fix my own video problems myself (I custom-edit my XFree86Config-4 file). I don't use server stuff, although I may want to use SAMBA in the future to connect my Win XPee laptop (a business requirement, not my choice) to my home machine via ethernet to access the web and printing. I use CUPS for printing, StarOffice for word Processing, and Konqueror is my default web browser. I'm not concerned with anti-aliased fonts (I use an LCD monitor w/ a 15 pin VGA connector)

Would going to 9.1 be a mistake for me??? Suggestions???

More consequences of a rush-hour release:
http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=4540
http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=4539

I don't know. Is it just mandrake. RedHat 9 has 38 updates so far.

Maybe the six month release cycle is just too short to do proper testing.

Take a look at https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh9-errata.html . There are 14 updates, 12 of which are security updates. Only one bug-fix relates to a redhat-made package, unlike in case of LM9.1 (which has about 10 updates for mandrake made tools).

Here's the comparison:
Total size of the updated rpms
ftp://updates.redhat.com/9/en/os/i386/ - 118.1 MB
ftp://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linux/Mand...pdates/9.1/RPMS - 125.1MB

Total number of updated rpms
RH9.0 - 39 rpms
LM9.1 - 93 items

A one year cycle would mean less revenue.

Not necessarily, a one-year cycle could mean less support problem in release management. But again I think Red Hat's main revenue stream comes from corporate Advanced server edition, which is upgrade about once per year, or even less often.

The problem always is that open source package update & release is never meant to comply with business upgrade cycle. The year 2002-2003 has so many noticeable changes in desktop (Xft2, Fontconfig, Qt3.0+ & GTK2.0+ plus various apps upgrades) and kernel area (2.6 is coming summer, and glibc and gcc had numerous upgrades) and also the increasing user base that support problem becomes much a greater problem than before.

Once these changes become more stabilized, I think we will have less of a trouble; but I agree Mandrake's own tools are rushed, just that the rapid evolution is increasingly rapid and more update and patches would be expected, at least in the coming year or so (not to mention what the XFree86 fork project can contribute to the scene with more patches against the official tree by different Linux distributors out there...).

Whats true for the server market is not true for the desktop market. Desktop stuff has to be more bleeding edge because users want the latest in GUI, multimedia, graphics, office-suite etc. Also, note that a server release is based on a desktop release that has been tested by a large user base for quite some-time. Hence the desktop cycle must be much less than the server release cycle, to allow for adequate testing by the user base.

The irony is the server revenue is subsidizing the desktop side of it. An average desktop Linux box cost much less than a server version of it. Not to mention the downloadable ISOs. However, it's only fair to say 'subsidizing' when the users don't work on ANY development or testing; in the case of Linux community, this is the opposite, the users are also the developers and also the beta testers and hence the distributors can benefit from them as kind of voluntary labor. In any case I see Linux is a different community altogether - not just different from Windows, from also very different from Mac user community altogether.

Makes me wonder if the change in RH numbering (no moe .1's .2's .3's) is a signal that they may just be releasing a single version per year...

I really would not mind. After having gone from ML8.2 to ML9 to RH8 to RH9 (and trying to find a copy of ML9.1 so I have one more to go this year)... I owuld not mind sticking with one (RH9 or ML9.1) for at lest one year.

It appears that the fixes of
http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/advisorie...e=MDKA-2003:004
were not proper fixes. So mandrake needed to "fix" these fixes and here are the latest updates in
http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/advisorie...MDKA-2003:004-1

This may explain why some bugs did not go away inspite of updating packages that were supposed to fix the bugs.

ral said:

>I would not mind sticking with one (RH9 or ML9.1) for at least one year.<

I agree. Like I said early in this thread, I'm still using 8.2 and will for quite a while. I run Fluxbox and some text apps like Mutt and Links anyway, so I don't much care about the latest KDE or Gnome eye-candy. And my setup is so complicated that reinstalls just to keep things on the cutting edge is just too much hassle. Besides, I need this machine for daily money-making activities too, so I'm more concerned with stability and reliablity than new goodies.

I am gonna put another machine together out of spare parts just for fooling around with. I had one for a while, played around with Debian, RedHat, etc., but I gave it to charity.

As for my main machine, I think I might upgrade it on the next version. But then again, I might stay with 8.2 'til the next hardware upgrade, probably in a another year or so. It depends on how bug-free new releases seem to be and if there's anything new I feel a real need for.