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I'm fed up with Mandrake!!!


aspguru
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I know people will hate me for saying this. But it's just crazy and unreasonble for a person to spend so much time to play with their OS!!! Come on, it's just a operating system, we need to WORK on it instead of spending tons of hours to make it WORK. I am system admin for Windows network for three years and did C programming for a very long time. Beside, I am a OK unix user. I think that I can say I AM an intellegent person. But this whole mdk thing is driving me crazy!!!!!!!!!!

 

I downloaded mdk 10.1 last week, installed it. Everything is OK... till I found I don't have the devel installed... not even mention the stupid nvidia drivers... the missing X11 header files..X-devel not installed?.. Why mdk don't have it installed with the "standard installation"? and it's not even on their CD...

 

Don't say I am lazy I've done my homework. I almost read all the possible thread on install nvidia driver, including the thread here. Still cannot make it work. The KDE with mdk 10.1 is 3.2, do we also need to update to XFree 4.5, updating QT?... The stuff is overwhelming for a OS. Just my opinion... Say whatever you want... I never had this trouble when I had my fedora. I think I will switch back or try suse instead.

Edited by aspguru
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nah... we do not hate you for this. if it was frustrating, then you have my deepest sympathies. not everything works okay out of the box and the nvidia drivers are something that should work better BUT they cannot at this moment afaik as they are proprietary and the download isos are only giving you stuff that is NOT proprietary. yeah, blame mandrake for letting you pay for a club-membership in order to have them on the cd at install.

if this is too much trouble for you (which i can understand), then there are still hundreds of other distros that might be more satisfying for you. after all, it is all about choice, right? see my signature. i am not using mandrake alone because other systems do stuff better for me in certain areas where i apply them. right now, i cannot say that there is the "perfect" distro, but some are getting close. and mandrake is one of the better ones. (ever tried ark-linux? the installer will leave you really frustrated. :P)

 

and suse... well, i just read in a review that their support for media stuff is getting worse with 9.3. but read it yourself at distrowatch.

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well, I know it's unfair to put blames on FREE product. May it's just I am expecting too much from it. But the thing is you expect the linux could be smarter. Here is a typical loop hole I am in:

 

$urpmi xorg-x11-6.8.2-6mdk.src.rpm

Some package requested cannot be installed:

libpng3-devel-1.2.6-2.1.101mdk.i586 (due to unsatisfied devel(libz))

xorg-x11-6.8.2-6mdk.src (due to missing libpng3-devel-1.2.6-2.1.101mdk.i586)

Continue? (Y/n) n

 

ok let's download the libpng...

 

$ urpmi libpng3-devel-1.2.6-2.1.101mdk.i586.rpm

Some package requested cannot be installed:

libpng3-devel-1.2.6-2.1.101mdk.i586 (due to unsatisfied zlib-devel)

Continue? (Y/n) n

 

What should I do next? Even if I googled it on the internet, still cannot get a answer. My harddrive is now full of these useless rpms...

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welcome to rpm hell.

I've been a unix sys admin for 10 years, and I know I can say I am intelligent person :)

admin'ing unix is WAY different to admin'ing windows.

learn the unix way, and every thing will be fine in unix.

Learn the windows way, and everything will fine in windows.

 

What you are experiencing is NOT a linux issue, it's a distro issue ...

 

enough from me :) .. I don't have answer either coz I don't use MDK anymore because of the RPM hell that I kept experiencing

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This may not be the most helpful post I've ever made, but I've never had serious problems with RPM dependencies. There have occasioanly been a few things that didn't come off too well, thoughy I usualy found that they were solved by updates.

 

I've also not had any great problem with nvidia instalaion. you just make sure you ahve the kernel source installed that matches your kernel, which is on the CD's, so that's a no-brainer, you download the file from nvidia, and you run the file as root, from a console with no X running.

 

Personaly, while I agree that this isn't a 'stupid user' type of probloem, I don't think it's a distro problem either. If it was, then we'd all have these kinds of problems wouldn't we? I can install mandrake, nvidia drivers, and every piece of non-free software that I care about, configure my desktop, configure my rather complex home network, and check me email all in about 90 minutes, and i'm not alone.

 

I think what we have here is a problem of fit. One of the beautiful things about linux is that there are so many flavors. There is certainly one to fit most any person, all the way from windows clones like linspire, to those brave folks that bootstrap their own distro from scratch. One of these days, I think I'd like to give that a try, but not today. ;)

 

Clearly, aspguru, Mandrake is not the distro for you, and that's okay. Lycoris and Redhat weren't the right distro's for me. I just hope that you can redirect your current frustration with mandrake into a more fruitful attempt at another distro.

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welcome to rpm hell.

I've been a unix sys admin for 10 years, and I know I can say I am intelligent person :)

admin'ing unix is WAY different to admin'ing windows.

learn the unix way, and every thing will be fine in unix.

Learn the windows way, and everything will fine in windows.

 

What you are experiencing is NOT a linux issue, it's a distro issue ...

 

enough from me :) .. I don't have answer either coz I don't use MDK anymore because of the RPM hell that I kept experiencing

 

You might take a look at Xandros V3 (free) it's debian, so no rpm's. It is proibably the most mature debian distro for folks coming from windows. Avoid kubuntu like the plague for a year or so.

 

I like MDK because of MCC and easyurpmi. If you set up easyurpmi correctly, then getting files should be easy. In many cases. But in others, if the distro has not already done the hard work in preparing the particular package you want to install on your particular release, you are pretty much on your own, in any distro. Truly, everyone is re-inventing the stone. And a lot of people are holding onto DOS3.0 type thinking and claiming it is great!

 

packages will install if dependencies have been set up correctly - either by the author, or by the distro. But there are a ton of packages expecting YOU to do the work. BAH! btdt

Kristi

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well, I know it's unfair to put blames on FREE product. May it's just I am expecting too much from it. But the thing is you expect the linux could be smarter. Here is a typical loop hole I am in:

 

$urpmi xorg-x11-6.8.2-6mdk.src.rpm

Some package requested cannot be installed:

libpng3-devel-1.2.6-2.1.101mdk.i586 (due to unsatisfied devel(libz))

xorg-x11-6.8.2-6mdk.src (due to missing libpng3-devel-1.2.6-2.1.101mdk.i586)

Continue? (Y/n) n

 

ok let's download the libpng...

 

$ urpmi libpng3-devel-1.2.6-2.1.101mdk.i586.rpm

Some package requested cannot be installed:

libpng3-devel-1.2.6-2.1.101mdk.i586 (due to unsatisfied zlib-devel)

Continue? (Y/n) n

 

What should I do next? Even if I googled it on the internet, still cannot get a answer. My harddrive is now full of these useless rpms...

 

I see you're installing Xorg from Cooker. Have you made sure you have Cooker main and contrib repositories configured and updated? Cooker changes daily, so updating is important before you install anything.

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Thanks for all your kindly reply. I think I am using 10.1 official. Here is how I check my linux version:

 

$cat /etc/redhat-release

Mandrakelinux release 10.1 (Official) for i586

 

If anybody could give suggestion on how to install devel, I will say "thank you" for a million times. Here is what I encountered.

 

1) # urpmi XFree86-devel-4.2.1-6.11.C21mdk.i586.rpm

Some package requested cannot be installed:

XFree86-devel-4.2.1-6.11.C21mdk.i586 (due to unsatisfied XFree86-libs[== 4.2.1-6.11.C21mdk])

Continue? (Y/n) n

 

2) Ok, let's install the libs:

urpmi XFree86-4.2.1-6.11.C21mdk.src.rpm

unable to register rpm file

Everything already installed

 

please... where should I go from here?????????

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Well, thanks VeeDubb. I think most complains about a certion linux distribution are machine specific. And I agree most people like to use mdk and it fits them. Actually, I was using fedor2 for the past three or four month and suddenly decided to go with mdk, because somehow (I don't know why) I think Fedora is boring and its interface is ugly ...

 

Yes, I know installing nvidia driver is almost a standard procedure these days (download driver--init 3 -- sh driver-- modify conf-- init 5). I got it done with fedora 2 within a few minutes following the instructions. Don't know why this time it doesn't work for me.

 

The funny thing is, the more my machine bothers me, the more I want to fight through it. I am gonna make this machine and mdk work for me!!!

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From the initial commands you gave, I see you're trying to install some fairly mixed up packages. That xorg RPM is not from 10.1, and the libpng you're installing looks like some kind of backport for 10.1 from the name of the package (did you get it from Club?)

 

I'd suggest you wipe the heck out of all the packages you've downloaded and go back to basics. Remove all your urpmi media (urpmi.removemedia -a) , go to Easy URPMI, tell it you have 10.1 Official and want a main media and a contrib media, run the commands it gives you, and type 'urpmi libxorg-x11-devel' as root. Now 'urpmi kernel-source'. Now install the nvidia driver.

 

We don't install -devel packages by default because most users don't need them. This is why we split them up in the first place; the majority of MDK users never compile a program and thus never have any need for the stuff in the -devel packages, thus by splitting them out we can save a lot of space on their hard disks and our release CDs. (You're not getting anywhere _near_ all of MDK on 3 CDs, and you still can't quite squeeze the whole thing on one DVD, IIRC, so space is at something of a premium).

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From the initial commands you gave, I see you're trying to install some fairly mixed up packages. That xorg RPM is not from 10.1, and the libpng you're installing looks like some kind of backport for 10.1 from the name of the package (did you get it from Club?)

 

I'd suggest you wipe the heck out of all the packages you've downloaded and go back to basics. Remove all your urpmi media (urpmi.removemedia -a) , go to Easy URPMI, tell it you have 10.1 Official and want a main media and a contrib media, run the commands it gives you, and type 'urpmi libxorg-x11-devel' as root. Now 'urpmi kernel-source'. Now install the nvidia driver.

 

We don't install -devel packages by default because most users don't need them. This is why we split them up in the first place; the majority of MDK users never compile a program and thus never have any need for the stuff in the -devel packages, thus by splitting them out we can save a lot of space on their hard disks and our release CDs. (You're not getting anywhere _near_ all of MDK on 3 CDs, and you still can't quite squeeze the whole thing on one DVD, IIRC, so space is at something of a premium).

I agree. Hacked rpms are the worsed thing you can do to an rpm distro!

 

I disagree, most need the base devel at minimum for drivers. Nvidia etc...

aslo, then, looks like mandrake needs to go back to 4 cd's ;) and quit spimp'n on the average user in hopes to make a sale ;)

 

I also noticed, with your first terminal output, that you were installing an .src.rpm. Again, remove everything in the rpm cache and urpmi config, get a real mandrake mirror, and try again. There's nothing wrong with rpm distros or urpmi, once you learn the rules.

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Sounds like the complaints of any new user :). Like anything new you have to put in some effort to learn to work with Mandrake. It doesn't matter that you have experience with Unix (or Windows): Mandrake does some things differently. If you want to use it you will have to learn these things. (read the faq about urpmi :D )

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I downloaded mdk 10.1 last week, installed it. Everything is OK... till I found I don't have the devel installed...

devels aren't installed by default because the regular user does not need them. there was an option to install them during the install process, did you check it?

not even mention the stupid nvidia drivers...

mandrake does not include the nvidia drivers in the download edition because they want the download edition to be both monatarily and license-wise "free". fedora doesn't include these. most distro's that want to avoid legal entanglements will not include these drivers.

the missing X11 header files..X-devel not installed?.. Why mdk don't have it installed with the "standard installation"?

because most regular users won't need it.

 

Mandrake is not geared directly towards the power user. It is geared towards your regular user, someone who just wants the basic, everyday programs - not someone who is going to be developing things. The tools are there, but they aren't default because it would be a waste of hard drive space for your regular user. That's how the default install is setup. Understand the reasons before complaining, please.

Edited by tymark
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