On Sunday 26 Oct 2003 8:54 pm, IanBell wrote:
On Sunday 26 Oct 2003 5:12 pm, Syd Hancock wrote:
This is a question I've been meaning to ask for a while. When I first got my T23 Think[ad a couple of months ago I tried a Suse 8.1 Live Evaluation disk in it and what happened when it went past the opening screen was really scary.
[...]
It doesn't, by any chance, have an LG CDRW drive does it?? I have heard of problems with this drive and distros which have packet writing enabled (like Suse 8.1 and Mandrake 9.2 but not Mandrake 9.1).
No I don't think it's the CDrom - it's an IBM drive (may be badged I suppose). The current problem with the LG drive and mdk9.2 is because the drive firmware uses a command which is intended to flush the buffers to flash the rom instead... hence dead CD drives while trying to instal mdk9.2 - nasty. LG's response is that their drives 'don't support linux'. Hmm.
These LG drives are used in the Dell Optiplex BTW if anyone out there needs to know.
I have a couple of them, they are a very nice machine, solidly made and an easy install (with mandrake 9.1 and knoppix at least) so I will not be using mdk 9.2 (which so far does not look as if it is going to be one of Mandrake's better distros unfortunately - many bugs have appeared within days of release. mdk9.1 is pretty solid though).
Syd
On Sun, Oct 26, 2003 at 09:46:11PM +0100, Syd Hancock wrote:
I have a couple of them, they are a very nice machine, solidly made and an easy install (with mandrake 9.1 and knoppix at least) so I will not be using mdk 9.2 (which so far does not look as if it is going to be one of Mandrake's better distros unfortunately - many bugs have appeared within days of release. mdk9.1 is pretty solid though).
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) 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. 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 which was a bit "ouch" at 40MB (well it wasn't ouch for me because I have adsl but that would take a couple of hours on modem) and they also tried to obfusciate the setting up of the network which seemed very keen to use rendevouz and DHCP with no clicky pointy button in the installer (in expert mode) to say "I want to tell you the ip address of DNS servers and router manually please".
If anyone wants a copy of Mandrake 9.2 download edition mail me offlist....
Adam
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...
On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 10:14, Syd Hancock wrote:
still using mdk9.1 but considering the options...
<jedi-mind-trick> ((D))((e))((b))((i))((a))((n)) </jedi-mind-trick>
D.
<jedi-mind-trick> ((D))((e))((b))((i))((a))((n)) </jedi-mind-trick>
Homer Simpson voice: "Mmmm, beeer... freee..." :-)
OK, I know it's free as in free speech really but yes, the idea has been recurring recently, especially after reading "Free As In Freedom" about Stallman (review coming up soon).
Syd
On 2003-10-29 12:58:31 +0000 Craig c@wizball.co.uk wrote:
Gentoo! *drinks beer*
There you go, kids. Source-compile distributions lead to alcoholism because you have to do something else while compiling mozilla with -j... ;-)
On Thursday, Oct 30, 2003, at 01:31 Europe/London, MJ Ray wrote:
On 2003-10-29 12:58:31 +0000 Craig c@wizball.co.uk wrote:
Gentoo! *drinks beer*
There you go, kids. Source-compile distributions lead to alcoholism because you have to do something else while compiling mozilla with -j... ;-)
Heard of multitasking? ;)
There's always firebird binaries! =D
C
--
- Craig - http://www.wizball.co.uk "Simplicity, the best way to approach life"
On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 10:14:04AM +0000, Syd Hancock wrote:
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.
To be honest, it still has the same old problems, the package management is poor, it tries to do things its own way and it isn't as "easy" as people make out. I have always had to do so much fiddling that I could just as well stick to debian. Having to setup X windows by hand is not much fun and this is on recent hardware which debian can configure after asking a few questions, using the Mandrake wizard thing it managed to give me a flickery screen that gave me a headache after using it for 5 minutes. I will admit that no distro can autoconfigure this hardware 100% correctly though due to Nvidia having broken DDC transfers so that the distro can't speak directly to the monitor to find out what it does. Although given when i tell the installer what the hardware is and its capabilities i would expect it to at least give me a setup that didn't flicker (and considering that this monitor will do at least 1920x1440@85Hz I wouldn't have thought Mandrake could have got it quite /that/ wrong).
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.
They really are not doing themselves any favours or the linux community by saying "look how great we are for newbies" then releasing broken distros and selling them :-/ It seems that 9.2 has had less testing than most of those other OS :( I am all for what they want to achieve and I do feel bad that they have had money problems recently but trying to charge for broken software does seem to not be a great business plan :(
Adam
On Wednesday 29 Oct 2003 12:56 pm, abower@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
To be honest, it still has the same old problems, the package management is poor, it tries to do things its own way and it isn't as "easy" as people make out. I have always had to do so much fiddling that I could just as well stick to debian
Anyone who has the skillset to install debian and get it fully working (including sound, networking, dvd playback etc) really doesn't need mandrake, no contest.
For people like myself - willing to learn, willing to do some config file editing etc but needing and wanting a useable machine as quickly and easily as possible - mandrake has served me well. But it certainly has its flaws and is not as stable as say debian appears to be.
On the other hand, on the linux-thinkpad list, I see discussions between people still trying to get things set up in debian that simply just work with mandrake - sound, suspend/resume, wireless networking, dvd playing to mention a few.
I think it is 'horses for courses' - what does the individual want to do. A few years ago in a different period of my life I would have had the time and space to discover how to fully install a fully working debian distro - I tried a couple of times but, for me at least, life is too short even though it would be fascinating.
I also think that, as in so many areas of life, perceived 'advantage' is really 'familiarity'. What we know and understand seems 'better' than the unfamiliar.
So, for example, I find mandrake package management using urpmi or the gui tools with its automatic dependancy-handling very simple. I've never had a problem with it (apart from need ing to refresh the list of mirrors from time to time). Apt may well be superior, I don't know. Redhat's rpm by contrast seems very laborious.
Although given when i tell the installer what the hardware is and its capabilities i would expect it to at least give me a setup that didn't flicker (and considering that this monitor will do at least 1920x1440@85Hz I wouldn't have thought Mandrake could have got it quite /that/ wrong).
Playing with a few options in the mandrake control panel might have helped, but maybe not. XFree seems a bit of a minefield to me - mandrake 9.1 did not have the correct driver for the Thinkpad T23 video card in Xfree 4.3 for example although Knoppix does.
They really are not doing themselves any favours or the linux community by saying "look how great we are for newbies" then releasing broken distros and selling them :-/
Totally agreed. Although AFAIK at the moment no-one is being *sold* mandrake 9.2 as only the download version is available (may have changed very recently). Also, uniquely amongst the major commercial distros, the entire mandrake distro is free/libre and available for free/beer download. No redistribution restrictions of any kind.
Unfortunately their poor business sense may give this approach a bad name - I don't think that their financial problems are caused by 'giving it away' but if they fail it will give amunition to the pro-proprietary software forces. But maybe if they were more ruthless at business they would not 'give it away' anyway so the plusses and minusses are simply two sides of the same coin.
Syd
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abower＠thebowery.co.uk -
Craig -
Daniel Silverstone -
MJ Ray -
Syd Hancock