OSNews has a review of the Download edition -

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4878

They must be a member of the club, or knew the greek secret for a while! :wink:

Or else downloaded from a normal mirror and done a network install.

Funny, installed on a laptop but didn't specify whether acpi/apm and how ML did with acpi IF acpi :roll: ....I know users waiting for ML9.2 just for the newer acpi support. :roll:

You did that or the reviewer in OSnews did that? I mean.. there is a choice in enabling acpi in the boot section of the install.

As far as I am concerned, ACPI implementation in Mdk9.2 default kernel is broken imo.. Can't get toshiba satellite laptop to boot up (it hangs during bootup) with acpi turned on, which is no good for me since turning on acpi is the only way to get sound.

sorry....bad wording .....I don't have a laptop. I have a friend that has a toshiba satellite.....this is not god news for him. What about wireless net?

Wireless network work right out of the box, acpi on or off, so at least your friend can do some networking.

But there is an updated kernel up (hopefully with the fix) and there is a tip from Pierre Baco regarding the choices to pick when recompiling the kernel to enable ACPI safely in http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php...p?p=72386#72386

I'll try Pierre's method tomorrow to see whether it works.

Thanks! I sent a link to this thread to my friend as well.

Aside from their lack of mentioning ACPI support and whether it worked or not, The article is not exactly a ringing endorsement for 9.2. Mix this with the news on PCLO that there are 76 update packages for downloading just a week after release makes me start to wonder about this release.

Plus, I was one of those people waiting for 9.2 so that I could install it on my Dell Inspiron 1100 notebook and finally use ACPI. Guess I will be waiting for Red Hat 10.

PCLinuxOnline now has a review of an installation on an Athlon XP 1900+.

May a newbie chime in???
I was able to get the ISOs for 9.2rc2 and it is running fine on my Toshiba Tecra PII 366mhz, 128mb ram, a bit slow in graphical mode, but faster than RedHat 9.0

Anyway I read the review and this struck me..

" In KDE, gone is the 'most frequently used programs' list, 'what to do', 'quick browser', and 'run command'."

Well, I have those in my KDE menu, sooo... what is he talking about??

Well.. there are a lot of changes between rc2 and final

In drake 9.2 final default, those choices are disabled by default. You can reenable them from KDE control center and menudrake, no biggie.

That's what I figured.. just want to know what to expect...
No real problems with rc2 so far, hell, it's running smoother than the full release of RH9

I tried Red Hat 9 yesterday, just out of curiosity. That 1 hour of actually using it was enough to give me bad dreams the night after.

Installation wasn't that bad, but did install an extra partition for /boot (Mandrake didn't). It still took over 45 minutes though.

The system didn't mount my windows drives, leaving me clueless to find them. Performance was quite good; while listening to xmms and browsing folders, grip was ripping&encoding without significant troubles or slowdowns. The theme was also very nicely done, although I do think they're too much enforcing the use of Gnome, which didn't work so well for me.

Configuring the mouse did not give an option to test the buttons, so after confirming my mouse went berserk and clicking all over the desktop...

when that was solved, I looked around a bit. The menus were cluttered as hell. No easy way to import fonts or configure your system. Most of my favorite applications missing... well it felt very unpersonal ;'(

I'm sure it's stable and all, being meant for the server, but man, am I going to stay far away from it. :x

I installed Mandrake again, was up and running within 30 minutes with all packages I wanted. Configuring everything afterwards was dead easy: "click, click, enter password, copy, configure, ..."

Suffice to say I'm now much more appreciative of my Mandrake box... while 9.2 apparently did not bring improvements in terms of ease of use, support and automation, I hope version 10 will.

Made me remember Mandrake are actually doing a *really good* job (after my gripes about the Powerpack and advertising on their site).


Darkelve
P.S. anyone know what Mandrake does with the /boot partition created by Red Hat? (I've overwritten the Red Hat install)

I did not experience those issues with my RH 9 install .. it was not a bad process, but keep in mind that I had only experienced RH 7.0 previously so my judgement on painless installs is based on my limited experience with Linux as a whole...
It also took me over 45 minutes, but I expected as much with such a old, slow cd rom drive..
My only gripe with RH 9 can be attributed to the laptop it was installed on.. the minimum requirements were listed as PII 400mhz with 128 mb of ram, 192 for graphical mode,.. mine was a 366 mhz PII with 128 mb of ram. I would like a chance to try RH 9 again, but I am happy with MDK 9.2 and I will probably try SuSe next.

I have had some odd results with 9.2. When I ran rc2 and then used urpmi to update, I had a running system with some programs that did not run correctly. Since they were newer versions, I figured the programs were at fault. I then installed 9.2 with the cd's. I had a freeze occur, which I had to power off!! I found the huge list of updates (bearing in mind that the "public" has not even seen this distro yet), used urpmi to get the fixes, and got another hard freeze!!

So, my main daily partitions have 9.1, and I'm not going to go to 9.2. The first time since 7.0 that I have not "moved up". I'll still work with 9.2 on my experimental partitions, but I really wanted to do a different distro there.

I read that Mandrake will actually destroy LG CD-ROM drives on install...

I've also read that there are over 350MB of patches...

In short,...

Sounds like someone on the fence should either stay there or try another distro...

did i hear someone say 250MB of updates?

*runs off to start on his updates cd*

Yes, lots of updates including a new kernel! Maybe the download release to the public will have the fixes applied!!

so that's what you get for bein a Member?