Counterspy

Both sites are working now and it is past the deadline in the first post. Confusing! The new site also took a long time to load. Counterspy

I had written a piece on linuxiso called "Phony reviews in Linux publications" because so many were after-install single use on one machine and all were positive to keep those freebies coming. Yours is the first review I have read anywhere that tackles installation on a number of different systems and I congratulate you for both completeness and objectivity. I also appreciated your footnote on contributing to Linux through other means than buying commercial packages or joining the Club. There are many ways to contribute to the Linux community and to include that in your review was a pleasant addition. On the review side, I would say that it is time to bury urpmi and switch to apt-get as Texstar has done with PCLinuxOS. As to positives, this is the first Mandrake version that I have installed without issues going away back before their money troubles. I said that here with the Community Edition and it holds true for the Official Edition as well. It is easy to see the hands on the wheel of the new CEO. It took him some time but he has not only restored the company to profitability but also to quality-driven effort on the part of his empoyees. With this release, Mandrake has climbed back to first over Fedora in the one month summary at Distrowatch, testimony to the improvements that have been made. Counterspy

It never ceases to amaze me how far the minions of democracy will go to protect their turf without so much as a nod in the direction of elected representatives. To that end, I am proposing that ministerial responsibility (read protection of civil service incompetence) be ended and the true perpetrators of government screwups be sacked without notice or severance. I would like to see the looks on the faces of the incompetent jerks who run our governments when they are suddenly called to account in the dock of public opinion. Counterspy

You don't say whether you are installing the Pro or Personal edition. Off the top, I don't think you have enough memory to run a full graphic install of Suse Pro. I have never used the Personal version so i cannot say with any certainty that it is the same problem. The best way to proceed is to reinstall s+Suse and and at the summary screen, choose change and then partitions. You could also use the Mandrake 1st install cd to get to Diskdrake and use it or another partitioner from Mandrake since you can load Mandrake. Cfdisk would be my choice. Reinstall Suse from the start and limit your choice of KDE components and do not install Gnome if it is an option. Use similar discretion with the rest of the selection of software to what you need. Others will no doubt have additional suggestions. Counterspy

Suze is better in every way than Mandrake. They have not had to recover from a very bad history brought on by financial circumstances and now have the marketing and engineering expertise of Novell. Mandrakesoft's recent progress has been impressive but there are still holdovers from the dark days of the past from my reading of the cooker mailing list. Maybe by 11.2 they will be fully back in the game. Counterspy

It fooled me too and I've got 13 years on you. Just once though. So I guess the is hope for us old folks. Counterspy

As a persisent and vociferous critic of things Mandrakesoft, I have made the trip over here from my two posting homes now, linuxforum.com and linuxiso.org, to say that I successfully downloaded and installed Mandrake 10.1 CE. For the first time since I don't know when, a Mandrake release has worked right from the install. I have not yet put it through the paces I usually do, but the fact that it bettered Suse 9.1 made me feel that I should say here that this is real progress. There may yet be a few niggles to work out and there is still the silly descriptions like very nice etc. when you do individual package selection. For the first time since the dark days of the bankruptcy, I can see the hand of the new ceo taking charge. If this course is steadied, then there can be nothing but success in the Mandakesoft future and those who have been its dedicated supporters through thick and thin. If the final lives up to the test, it will occupy an equal place with Suse as my preferred distributions. Counterspy

Also try startx. Counterspy

The offer has ended. I got mine and they are all full editions and not crippled. The only restriction is that you can't transfer them. I have also heard that you can't use them in a production environment. Counterspy

There are some things you can do that may help: 1) Turn plug and play and antivirus in the bios both off. 2) Disconnect any exotic peripherals like cameras, zip disks, memory keys etc. 3) Try burning the iso's to cdrw's. They seem to be more fault tolerant as well as being easier on your wallet. Counterspy

There is a new Partitioning How-To at http://www.tldp.org . It settles a lot of discussion about swap file sizes and other minutae of partitioning. The installation manuals of Debian and Gentoo also have good recommendations depending on the use you intend for your machine. It makes you think more carefully about how you are going to use Linux. Counterspy

I want to make a few points here. First, the Maxblast utility will quickly establish whether the drive is gone. So let's get on with the issue and get that fixed. I do not see how an mbr error trashed a hard drive to the point of making it unusable. I can appreciate the level of anger at the thought that this was caused by Mandrake. Next, Partition Magic 8 can be used to pre-partition the disk with ext 3. I use it all the time for that purpose, but it still is the case that LBA (Linear Block Addressing) should be enabled in the bios to ensure proper drive performance with !0.0. Next there was a comment back on the first page that Maxtor drives are no good for system files. I use twin 30 Gb. Maxtor drives in my second machine for two years without a problem. The machine still has Mandrake 9.2 installed without problems and I regard that version as an abortion compared to 10.0 CE. Counterspy

Did you try the beta 2 installer for sarge? Counterspy

There was a comment somewhere that said that German sites were more reliable so I used one of those. The issue of two errant signatures crashing the whole update is not addressed by having updated keys. Doing the update in pieces established that out of all of the programs two had bad keys and both were Mandrakesoft programs. I have run into this key problem numerous times in updating my collection of distros. I run fairly tight security on each and have not had any adverse consequences. The point is well taken though, that programs with bad signatures should not be downloaded. The problem is that many sites do not have the method of updating as clear as what was posted above. This is an elaborate explanation and it applied to Mandrakesoft itself. Are these instructions on the site? Are they on other sites commonly used and are they updated in similar fashion? The update method is hardly one that is easy for new users to understand. There is a fundamental security issue left unaddressed in this discussion and that is that the sites, like Texstar for example, should have it displayed prominently that 1. You should use the keys and 2. This is how. Counterspy

You must use the Debian documentation to stay on track with any flavour of Debian. AFAIK, bvc is correct about dist-upgrade but I would take it one step further and state that it has been deprecated and should not be used at all. There is an apt-get how-to and several man pages which I doubt are included in the Knoppix install. It is also correct that you will hose your setup by changing to stable or testing. I always suggest that the Debian Reference Manual be downloaded as a PDF and kept for a ready reference. Counterspy

Last night I bit the bullet and decided to run Mandrake Update and checked off about 250 Mb. of programs. After downloading them all I found that the refused to install due to invalid signatures and the whole update was aborted. Needless to say, I was more than unhappy and was on the virge of screaming Mandrake failure when I decided to try downloading just a few at a time and lo and behold this worked with all but two, initscripts and menu. There may be others depending on what you have installed. I went to a cooker mirror and downloaded the two errant programs to my desktop and installed from there. So it seems that there is a bug in update that one bad signature will trash the whole update. So doing it in steps takes a little longer but it works. Counterspy

I am a subscriber to the Mandrakesoft Newsletter and as a major poster at http://www.linuxiso.org/forums/index.php dealing with a large number of distros, I have never been under the impression that this was anything but what could be called a release candidate or if you like a semi-final. When you look at the updates, unlike version 9.2, all but a few were KDE and other external programs like Mozilla. When anyone has asked I have told them exactly that and I suspect we have a larger viewing public mulling over which distro to download. In my personal opinion, and I have a reputation as a highly public and vociferous critic of Mandrakesoft and its products, I can say without reservation that the Community Release was the best out-of-the-box release since pre 8, the last one I bought. I am still a vociferous critic of the Mandrake Club. To me, this represented a new era obviously in the hands of the new CEO to get the wide hardware configuration feedback which has been and is a factor in the quality of Mandrakesoft products. Perhaps they finally succeeded in locking Gael Duval in a broom closet, but I saw this as new leadership creating the Community Edition as a really good idea for a resource-limited organization without the funds to have roomfuls of test machines that the big boys have. Since I am now only a casual visitor here, I will risk the ire of some posters by saying I have seldom seen such a puerile discussion over facts that had been clear to me from the beginning. I had to make the choice if I would download and use this distro and decided to go for it. I have been using it since as my main posting distro displacing the net install of Suse. I have no hestation in telling the undecided to try it out although we ususally suggest more than one distro based on the user's needs and experience. To guests trying to make up their minds about Mandrake and looking for answers here, this thread is a sad performance. I also notice the absence of moderators and users that I remember when I was a regular here that I know are still heavily involved in this board. Unfortunately sometimes, new people will base an opinion on this thread because of its justifiably prominent position at the top of the board. For those who somehow feel cheated and/or misled, I suggest that you examine your position and see what point you have made in your posts. All of us make decisions in haste and it could be said that it is what I did when I quit this board. For me it has been a liberating experience and an opportunity to contribute to the Linux community in a much better way. Hopefully that will happen here too as a consequence of your participation in this thread. Good will and good luck! Counterspy

I just disable privoxy befre coming here and re-enable it on leaving. Counterspy

Thank you for that very useful suggestion but I will need to find the driver file. I was waiting for Sarge to go gold but they keep putting it off with more bug fixing. So much for January release. Counterspy

Given that it is still under development it shows great promise. Even with a few glitches, it is what Mandrake should have produced in the first place. I will wait before rendering an opinion until the final edition is released as Texstar has asked OSNews to do and they have agreed. Counterspy

Two points strike me from this discussion. The first deals with the fate of the Windmodem. Check to see if there is an organization in your community that distributes used computer equipment to schools, non-profits or the economically disadvantaged. The second relates to choice of distro. You have tested out Mandrake Move and now you are leaning to Knoppix and a hard drive install resulting in Debian install of the unstable branch. (See the Debian site for the meaning of the branches). The main advantage of Debian is that once installed you will never again be concerned with a total install of a new version. Updating to the next version called Sarge (presently the testing branch) can be accomplished with the apt-get package management system. The downside is that changes are made at an almost glacial pace with the result that the upside, stability and with few bugs does not happen as fast as some us who use it and we wish it was faster. It is also the only distro that is and always will be totally free coupled with the most complete documentation you can find in the Linux world. A final factor with Knoppix is that it appears that Klaus Knopper is going to do it again with the first live cd with the 2.6.1 kernel in a few weeks. Were I in your shoes, I would next look at PCLinuxOS which is a live CD presently at pre5 that really shows Mandrake at its full potential. Texstar, the principal author has been a contributor to much original packaging for the Mandrake community as reflected in his mirror on the download section here at Mandrakeusers. PCLinuxOS is capable of hard drive install and includes development packages unlike Mandrake Move. It is miles ahead of Mandrake Move in its pre form and will include the new KDE 2.3 in its final form. Since you are not in a hurry to make a decision, I would review all of these alternatives and make a chart listing their differences, both positive and negative. By then you will have had a chance to decide on the hardware and what will work the best for you on it. Counterspy

It is the case that the Enterprise Kernel is chosen by default to handle 1 Gb.+ of main memory. This happened with both 9.1 and 9.2 for me. Counterspy

Think about this as walking into a store. Your impressions of the store start at the entrance. Then as you move through the store you look around. Do they have what you came for? Can't find it? Look for a "sales associate". Ask where to look. The associate says follow me. You get what you came for and the associate says "Come back soon". Contrast that with this store. Dirt on the floor at the entrance. And it's been a week since it snowed. Every aisle is numbered. There is a sign about what's in the aisle you can see only after you enter it. You look down six or seven aisles. No luck. Find an associate. None in site. Wander around. Two associates found. One on top of a loading platform, the other on the floor restocking the top shelf. You ask the associate on the floor. He doesn't know. He yells at the associate on the loading platform. He says section 13, aisle 58. You are in section 67, aisle 3. Decision time. Do you go way down there or do you take the exit at section 15, aisle 1. Which store is Mandrakesoft? Counterspy

I am not complaining about the search engine since it produced a solution for the command line. Since it appears that both Anna and I found out about this at about the same time, the real question is why isn't that fix documented on the Mandrakesoft site. Then maybe it is on the "Club" site. Oh well. Things change and things stay the same. Counterspy

And only the "Club" members get the new iso's for 9.2. Really smart to keep the 3-4 million others satisfied. I don't remember new iso's being needed for 9.1. Counterspy