On Monday 27 Oct 2003 4:35 pm, abower@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
I have never been a fan of Mandrake since they shipped 6.1 with badly broken packages which made it completely useless (I also paid for a box set)
Yep, enough to put anyone off.
and I did try Mandrake 9.2 the other day but again silly bugs which seem to be a lack of simple testing have rather spoilt what could have been a fantastic distro.
Blimey, Adam, never thought I'd see the words 'mandrake' and 'fantastic distro' in the same sentence from you :-)
More seriously - checkout 9.1 if you want to see where mandrake has reached since v6, I can let you have a copy if interested.
The main thing which got me was they don't ship a package of kernel headers on CD for their kernel which meant I had to find and download the kernel source from their website
F*in' ridiculous isn't it. There have been many complaints and cries of total disbelief on the mandrake club forums about this. Then there are various other wierd gotchas such as menu items not appearing in KDE. There are simple workarounds and fixes but you have to question how it got out of the door in such a state. Apparently new bugs appeared even between the final release candidate RC2 and the shipped version. They changed various things at the last minute and thereby broke things that had previously been tested. Stupid.
Mandrake 9.1, with all updates installed and with packages from Penguin Liberation Front and Texstar for things like encrypted DVD playback, flash plugins etc, does work very well and is still regarded as the best version of Mandrake to use for a desktop.
Mandrake distro developers seem to do a good job, when allowed to get on with it, but mandrake management seems to be crap and to have very little idea of who their market is and how to grow it. Putting out very flaky distros is definitely not the way to do it.
Syd still using mdk9.1 but considering the options...