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I installed Mandrake 9.2


Darkelve
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Hey,

 

I frantically downloaded the 3 ISO's friday night, then installed the whole thing. It took a little getting used to, but I was up and running in almost no time.

Probably the most 'visible' element, is the new 'style' (boot splash screens and desktop background). These are just awesome, look *very* professional. I think, at this stage, this *is* important for Mandrake, despite the contempt this usually gets from 3l3te people.

 

I read in a lot of reviews that people where disappointed with 9.2. If you ask me, it's because this release isn't such a giant leap from the previous one (I have the 9.0 Powerpack and the 9.1 download edition and 9.1 was a giant leap forward from its predecessor, almost felt like a major new release).

 

My experience, however is a bit different. Sure, there isn't a lot 'new', or 'ground-breaking' stuff (cutting edge), but what was in 9.1 has obviously been improved and polished. The level of user-friendliness in 9.2 is worthy of applause: working with menus and the desktop is much more simple. Of course, having to run update-menus by yourself is not; they could have find a better way to solve that.

 

Just a few facts from my own experience:

This version is just... fast. I do not know if that has something to do with my Athlon processor (better support/configuration?), the new kernel or the way Mdk balances its workload, but everything went smooth, even having several programs open while ripping an Audio CD (something I could not dream of doing comfortably in 9.1). The translation (Dutch) has improved in great ways. Most of the 'dumb' translations of last version have made place for real user-friendly, real-world language. Which is very nice.

 

Tuning and managing my system went without a hitch, probably also due to my previous experiences with the 2 older versions. I tried to get my Wireless USB device to work, just out of curiosity (since they said 9.2 added support for USB 2.0 and some wireless devices). No dice, but I *did* see that the feedback it gave me, and the way it tried to handle the chore, was far better than in 9.1

 

Just half an hour ago, a pleasant surprise: the 'Trust 710 LCD Powercam', which I was unable to get to work last time, proved to work! I'll leave you a screenshot below just to share my joy with you :) I suspect better USB 2.0 support did the trick.

 

The only drawback I had, is that I could not install the nvidia drivers for my Geforce4 (Generic 64MB) card. That is, when I booted X would not start. So I took the advice I read in an article on the web and edited the 'XF86Config-4'-file to change 'nv' into 'nvidia'. However, no dice. When I tried to change the driver back to a generic Nvidia Geforce4 driver (plus changed the string back to nv), I got the same kind of problem. So not knowing what to do, I reinstalled (yeah I know, I know. Blame Mandrake for making their install so easy and fast, 20 minutes, will you!)

 

So 9.2 means to me: a faster, better structured, more polished, more user-friendly and more functional Linux system. Of course, the growing application base (only just discovered acme, Gthumb, Digikam, Pingus, kmymoney2, ...) available in RPM is also a relief while installing.

 

All in all, a worthy version, I think.

 

 

Darkelve

post-21-1068936313.jpg

Edited by Darkelve
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I would agree that the interface is well refined and as you would expect in a final dot release, the number of bugs has seriously been reduced, but in a few areas 9.2 is a big disappointment.

 

My first experience with 9.2 were very similar when i installed it a while back. HOwever, I was not so impressed after a few days. I found the lack of kernel source to be offensively stupid. While I realize that more and more people have some sort of broadband connection, many of us still use dial-up, and to omit such a critically important package, that is also very large and hard to download on 56k, really makes it much harder to use linux.

 

I have found that many programs one would normally expect to be installer were not. Example, without installing extra software after install, it is not possible to connect to the internet via dial-up without opening up the mandrake control center. I can under stand not including this by default, but if you set up you internet connections as dial-up durning the install process, it should install kppp AND wvdial, right now it doesn't install either. Also, when you go through package selection, let's say you select "Gaming station" you know how many of the 50 or so games that come on the CD's are installed? 3, just 3.

 

Worst of all is that rpm is somehow broken. I have formatted my hard drive and re-installed 6 or 8 times (this is actually typical for me, I'm still learning linux and once I've borked my system it's sometimes easier to start over), anyway, in all those installs, you know how many times I was able to get the kernel source that I spent 2 hours downloading? Just once. That means that I can't compile C programs and I can't use the 3d acceleration abilities of my nVidia video card.

 

Don't get me wrong the problems are few, it's just that compared to an otherwise fantastic release, I can't image that nobody picked up on this stuff before release.

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Well my experience at first was not a good one. At first things looked so bad that I actually threw my install cd into the trash. I later retrieved it and after installing the upgrades and updating my menus to get back all the things that disappeared I find myself loving it. I just think that these problems may turn off alot of people who may be trying linux for the first time, so I wish they would have remade the isos with all the fixes, but oh well.

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Don't get me wrong the problems are few, it's just that compared to an otherwise fantastic release, I can't image that nobody picked up on this stuff before release.

Yeah, I can understand what you are saying. A lot of the fixes that no doubt will arrive through Mdk Update, should already have been fixed before the final release.

 

What I do not understand is that you say 'rpm is broken'. Urpmi worked wonderful on my system, had no trouble installing anything at all (except the Nvidia drivers). Then again, I get everything from my hard disk, so I do not know how easily you can get stuff directly from the web.

 

Basically, my experience was wonderful because everything I use for my daily tasks, worked without much need of tweaking. Of course you tend to forget that everyone's experience is different.

 

 

Darkelve

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Well, 9.2 us installed and running fine now. One of the first things I did was use the Mandrake Update manager to see what's been fixed or added. 117mb of stuff already, so I installed them all, and it hosed my menu. I deleated the ./kde, ran menudrake and rebooted and all was well after that.

 

I also had a hard lock up on the first boot of OO, I as yet do not have the 3d enabled as I don't have the nvidia drivers installed.

 

So far I've had more preliminary tweaking to do then with 9.1.

 

On the hardware detection side, it installed and set up my HP 1210 psc printer just fine, the first linux to do that out of the box. KUDO'S to the cooker gang and club members on that little gem. :headbang:

 

Still poking around to see what else I can break. :tux:

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how do you disable 3d acceleration? my X windows, from boot to log in take like 4 minutes :o it isnt the /etc/hosts . i already checked that.

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Well I had Mandrake 9.2(Final, RC2) on my computer for a while (read since 9.2 RC2 was released), but I found it lacking and buggy. Random lockups, couldnt play half of my games because they would either lock up or not sync with my moniter (I even manually edited my X configuration file and that didnt help either. Fedora so far I have only had a couple of minor bugs (they changed the yum update repository, and GAIM was hogging my sound server). Dunno. I really like Fedora.

Edited by greyfoxlsu
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I have 9.2 running now, but only after updating the kernel and of course installing the sources. For a while, I ran the rc2, and when I updated with urpmi from the tree, I encountered some odd problems. I finally just installed it as my primary, and found that only gnome didn't like some of my settings. I just expected the .2 release to be a little cleaner, but all in all it is now running fine.

 

Oh, I also have updated the bug fix packages. Pysol was crashing, but now it runs fine. I'll get quake3 and RTCW running and report later.

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I find that the fully updated 9.2 works nicely in my laptop. Even something really really bothersome like IRDA and suspend to swap works somewhat. I don't have the time to upgrade my desktop yet, especially since it has a nicely running 9.1 with texstar's and mandrakeclub enhancements.

 

BTW, to go a bit off topic, darkelve, is that Kimagure Orange Road wallpaper I find in your desktop? :)

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I'm wondering if anyone has tried doing an upgrade from 9.1 vs fresh install of 9.2. I've always done fresh installs, but hope that some day mandrake will get the upgrade functioning.  I've been using 9.2 on a separatre partition and like it so far, but haven't fully migrated.

same question :)

I'm ready to try a upgrade from 9.1 and make some fix but not too much. How the upgrade is ?

 

roland

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I find that the fully updated 9.2 works nicely in my laptop. Even something really really bothersome like IRDA and suspend to swap works somewhat. I

Nice to hear that suspend to swap works for you. Now that's what I'd really like to get working on my own laptop, but no luck so far. Otherwise, I'm really happy with 9.2 on both my desktop and laptop (where wireless networking is up and running flawlessly, as well). The install-to-productivity time has shortened dramatically for me -- partly because I'm just better at it than I was when I started with mdk 6, but also because Mandrake has kept on getting better. 9.2 was well worth the upgrade.

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Also, when you go through package selection, let's say you select "Gaming station" you know how many of the 50 or so games that come on the CD's are installed? 3, just 3.

 

???

 

I don't get it, I didn't install any game specifically, but I have the whole bunch of them, almost all.

From Armagetron to Tuxracer to FrozenBubble etcetc...

 

Are you sure there is nothing wrong with your iso's/cd-r discs???

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I'm wondering if anyone has tried doing an upgrade from 9.1 vs fresh install of 9.2. I've always done fresh installs, but hope that some day mandrake will get the upgrade functioning.  I've been using 9.2 on a separatre partition and like it so far, but haven't fully migrated.

Well, I did an UPGRADE from 9.1 to 9.2...

 

...and to be blunt, I didn't notice any problems at all. In fact, it was just generally faster, and prettier all the way around.

 

I *did* notice, however, that the shiny new boot screen that people were talking about didn't show up for me. My LILO screen was updated, but when it came to actually booting INTO Linux, it either used the old screens, or simply went all console.

 

No big deal - I just happened to notice it.

 

At any rate, I was VERY pleased with my UPGRADE path. I decided, however, that if I was really going to put 9.2 through its paces, I had better do an INSTALL, instead of just an upgrade.

 

WOW, what a DIFFERENCE!

 

Whereas before, I'd tried to use lightweight window managers because I thought that KDE was just too bloated to feel "snappy", I logged into KDE after the INSTALL - and boom, baby! MUCH faster.

 

I then applied the Texstar updated KDE 3.1.4 rpms, and it was even FASTER. I can actually USE KDE without noticing it. Just because I'm so used to running a light WM, I also configured IceWM... and that's pretty darn snappy, too.

 

My computer is ALMOST at the "perfect" stage... The programs launch ALMOST immediately after clicking on them.

 

Anyway, that's my experience in doing the UPGRADE and the INSTALL as well.

Edited by pastored
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