Chinasaur
04-04-2003, 12:44 AM
What can I say...this is a very nice Linux distro.
Installation is the best I've seen from Mandrake, and maybe the best mix of newbie friendliness and advanced functions around. It's obvious Mandrake put everything they had into this release. One thing struck me as the Mandrake 9.1 .iso booted. I only saw once CPU marker and I thought maybe I might have to re-compile the kernel later for SMP support. How wrong I was...after reboot I was presented with the usual Mandrake Grub interface (only nicer) complete with an SMP kernel choice. So for all those who have dual's...Mandrake is there for you ;)
From the boot interface to the available choices during install, this distro shouts "I have class!". Everything is done with a polish never seen on Mandrake's interface. Mandrake has given the entire install architecture an overhaul in look and use which shows as you breeze through the menu choices. Anyone who has installed Mandrake through more than version number will instantly recognize the improvements and think "yeah...this is how it should be..".
Install went off without a hitch. Mandrakes disk partitioning software still shines and is as user friendly as ever. I chose to go Expert mode and keep my existing partitions just to check on the Advanced feature set and nothing unusual or bad popped out. Almost the same choices that leave you with total control over your disks.
I selected everything on the "left" side (meaning no servers), and only all available window managers on the "right" side. As usual, Mandrake prompts you if inadvertantly select any servers and asks "do you really want to do this" so nothing new there...but it's nice they still check :)
Installing took longer than I've seen on a Mandrake distro but maybe that's due to simply more packages..don't know. At any rate, it installed fine. You instantly notice that the network screens are absent. "Hey..what happened to selecting all that?" Well Pilgrim..they do it for you now. The default is auto-detect card and choose DHCP and voila..your network works without the old screens we've grown accustomed to. In fact, the only configuration I had to do was X Server and then only choosing screen resolution and XFree86 version (4.3 and 3.8.6 are the choices).
After that it's reboot time and into the distro. Initial feel was snappy which was to be expected on a machine with two XP1800's and 512MB of PC2700.
KDE ver is 3.1 and it's been given the "Galaxy" look from Mandrake. Kind of a Crux ala KDE. I booted into IceWM and was shocked to find it pre-loaded with all the tastiest themes from the IceWM theme repository. Everyone of them was one I would have chosen which made for a nice initial user experience.
As this box is purely for DF I immediately downloaded and installed DF into sep directories and let it crunch. Here my install story goes awry as I lost cable the night I was to put in my wireless network...so things get a bit mixed up and the negatives start to pop up :(
Prior to getting cable back, I installed a new Linksys WMP11 Wi-Fi PCI card. And it didn't work :( Mandrake 9.1 comes with a LOT of wireless card drivers (Orinoco, WaveLan, Prism, BCM) but NONE of them worked on this card. After some digging I found that in the latest version of the WMP11 Linksys has gone to a Broadcom chip that none of the drivers recognize. This is NOT Mandrakes fault as I found out from some newsgroups that Broadcom is NOT playing with the OpenSource community and giving assistance to driver writers. So be warned. WMP11's from months ago will probably work but none of the new ones will.
After the cable came back up and I was dismantling the box I saw that the 89AA protein was running at ~186K per CPU! That's a fast structure count for that protein and I can't say for sure whether it's due to Mandrake 9.1's kernel or the PC2700 RAM. I plan on installing 9.1 on my other dual which currently runs SuSE 8.0 and I will do a comparison to find out.
After I got the Mandrake box back together and booted...the 2nd bad thing popped up and it was a doozie . I lost the install :(. During a Logout the screen went blank and never came back. I hard reset the machine and as it came back up I selected "force file system check". I always use ReiserFS and haven't had a problem EVER with it; but today it was a no go. It would boot to the KDE Display Manager, enter my password then boot to black. Then reset to reboot and I watched the distro collapse in front of my eyes. I haven't seen a dist go bad like that since RedHat 6.0 :( It got so bad that at the last I was being given the option to log in as /var, /etc, /bin, /mnt... you get the picture...the File System was toast :(
I bit the bullet and re-formatted an re-installed leaving my /home partition alone. It installed and did not touch my /home partition (always good to check :)) and it's now humming away on the new install.
All in all....this Mandrake kicks major ass :) From the install to the user interface to the mod's they've made to KDE (which yes is a user interface..shush), to the speed...everything makes this a major release for Mandrake. I've put my money where my mouth is and even though I bought two Mandrakes last year, I bought a low-end subscription to Mandrake to say Thank You for such a nice product. I'm hoping this can replace my stand-by SuSE 7.3 and 8.0 dist's as my weapon of choice for a quick and stable install or what I recommend to friends as their first distro.
SuSE is a major player in the stablity field but is always slower on DF than any other distro around...I don't know why. I've always gotten my best speeds out of Mandrake 8.0 and 8.1, and now it seems that tradition continues wtih Mandrake 9.1. It also beats my Libranet Debian compiled Athlon kernel by a wide margin.
Final Analysis: Even given the re-install I had to go through, not to mention "why"...I recommend this dist. It's as polished as any SuSE, faster than any other distro around and has all the proggies you might wish to play with. Since this was a DC oriented review I didn't go into what is included in the dist but since it's Mandrake...well hey..."Prego..it's out there!!!" :)
YMMV.
:cheers:
Installation is the best I've seen from Mandrake, and maybe the best mix of newbie friendliness and advanced functions around. It's obvious Mandrake put everything they had into this release. One thing struck me as the Mandrake 9.1 .iso booted. I only saw once CPU marker and I thought maybe I might have to re-compile the kernel later for SMP support. How wrong I was...after reboot I was presented with the usual Mandrake Grub interface (only nicer) complete with an SMP kernel choice. So for all those who have dual's...Mandrake is there for you ;)
From the boot interface to the available choices during install, this distro shouts "I have class!". Everything is done with a polish never seen on Mandrake's interface. Mandrake has given the entire install architecture an overhaul in look and use which shows as you breeze through the menu choices. Anyone who has installed Mandrake through more than version number will instantly recognize the improvements and think "yeah...this is how it should be..".
Install went off without a hitch. Mandrakes disk partitioning software still shines and is as user friendly as ever. I chose to go Expert mode and keep my existing partitions just to check on the Advanced feature set and nothing unusual or bad popped out. Almost the same choices that leave you with total control over your disks.
I selected everything on the "left" side (meaning no servers), and only all available window managers on the "right" side. As usual, Mandrake prompts you if inadvertantly select any servers and asks "do you really want to do this" so nothing new there...but it's nice they still check :)
Installing took longer than I've seen on a Mandrake distro but maybe that's due to simply more packages..don't know. At any rate, it installed fine. You instantly notice that the network screens are absent. "Hey..what happened to selecting all that?" Well Pilgrim..they do it for you now. The default is auto-detect card and choose DHCP and voila..your network works without the old screens we've grown accustomed to. In fact, the only configuration I had to do was X Server and then only choosing screen resolution and XFree86 version (4.3 and 3.8.6 are the choices).
After that it's reboot time and into the distro. Initial feel was snappy which was to be expected on a machine with two XP1800's and 512MB of PC2700.
KDE ver is 3.1 and it's been given the "Galaxy" look from Mandrake. Kind of a Crux ala KDE. I booted into IceWM and was shocked to find it pre-loaded with all the tastiest themes from the IceWM theme repository. Everyone of them was one I would have chosen which made for a nice initial user experience.
As this box is purely for DF I immediately downloaded and installed DF into sep directories and let it crunch. Here my install story goes awry as I lost cable the night I was to put in my wireless network...so things get a bit mixed up and the negatives start to pop up :(
Prior to getting cable back, I installed a new Linksys WMP11 Wi-Fi PCI card. And it didn't work :( Mandrake 9.1 comes with a LOT of wireless card drivers (Orinoco, WaveLan, Prism, BCM) but NONE of them worked on this card. After some digging I found that in the latest version of the WMP11 Linksys has gone to a Broadcom chip that none of the drivers recognize. This is NOT Mandrakes fault as I found out from some newsgroups that Broadcom is NOT playing with the OpenSource community and giving assistance to driver writers. So be warned. WMP11's from months ago will probably work but none of the new ones will.
After the cable came back up and I was dismantling the box I saw that the 89AA protein was running at ~186K per CPU! That's a fast structure count for that protein and I can't say for sure whether it's due to Mandrake 9.1's kernel or the PC2700 RAM. I plan on installing 9.1 on my other dual which currently runs SuSE 8.0 and I will do a comparison to find out.
After I got the Mandrake box back together and booted...the 2nd bad thing popped up and it was a doozie . I lost the install :(. During a Logout the screen went blank and never came back. I hard reset the machine and as it came back up I selected "force file system check". I always use ReiserFS and haven't had a problem EVER with it; but today it was a no go. It would boot to the KDE Display Manager, enter my password then boot to black. Then reset to reboot and I watched the distro collapse in front of my eyes. I haven't seen a dist go bad like that since RedHat 6.0 :( It got so bad that at the last I was being given the option to log in as /var, /etc, /bin, /mnt... you get the picture...the File System was toast :(
I bit the bullet and re-formatted an re-installed leaving my /home partition alone. It installed and did not touch my /home partition (always good to check :)) and it's now humming away on the new install.
All in all....this Mandrake kicks major ass :) From the install to the user interface to the mod's they've made to KDE (which yes is a user interface..shush), to the speed...everything makes this a major release for Mandrake. I've put my money where my mouth is and even though I bought two Mandrakes last year, I bought a low-end subscription to Mandrake to say Thank You for such a nice product. I'm hoping this can replace my stand-by SuSE 7.3 and 8.0 dist's as my weapon of choice for a quick and stable install or what I recommend to friends as their first distro.
SuSE is a major player in the stablity field but is always slower on DF than any other distro around...I don't know why. I've always gotten my best speeds out of Mandrake 8.0 and 8.1, and now it seems that tradition continues wtih Mandrake 9.1. It also beats my Libranet Debian compiled Athlon kernel by a wide margin.
Final Analysis: Even given the re-install I had to go through, not to mention "why"...I recommend this dist. It's as polished as any SuSE, faster than any other distro around and has all the proggies you might wish to play with. Since this was a DC oriented review I didn't go into what is included in the dist but since it's Mandrake...well hey..."Prego..it's out there!!!" :)
YMMV.
:cheers: