Why Mandrake 9.1 gets an "A"

[TrakerJon 0]

I've installed a lot of different distributions over the years, some good and some quite frustrating. My favorites have been Mandrake, Debian, SuSe and Red Hat. The latest release of Mandrake though really does stand out from the pack. I'm totally impressed with the quality of the hardware recognition, how easy the utilities are to use, software installations come off without a hitch, the included applications are very current, online updates are readily available, the font conversion tools are awesome and in general when using the KDE desktop the OS is quick to respond and very fun to use. Good-bye Windows!!!

[blueworm 0]

I am happy that this enables you to dich windoze. But I cant share your enthusiastic grade of A for Mandrake 9.1.

I have used manfdrake since 7.2 in that time there have been good

releases and bad release. In my opinion the best so far has been 9.0

I found 9.1 very buggy and the marketing strategy to call the kernel 2.4.21 I found frankly insulting.

The kernel is 2.4.20 patched with various improvements.

the 2.4.21 kernel was released on friday the 13th of june mandrake released 9.1 months ago.

the marketing stategy is simple label the kernel aggresively to seem more up to date than Redhat .

This dissapointed me deeply and have since moved on to Gentoo.

[Squeak 0]

I have also moved to Gentoo but you are wrong about the kernel, it's not a marketing strategy. They never said they were using the actual final release of the 2.4.21 kernel, it clearly says 2.4.21pre, which is the alpha(pre-release) version of it. A Mandrake developer said in an interview that they needed the extra speed/features.

[TrakerJon 0]

Well blueworm, needless to say Gentoo is a good release but for the average newbie Mandrake is easier to install, the utilities need very little instruction (if any) and I have yet to find a system that it didn't like when it comes to hardware recognition (unlike Gentoo or SuSe). The 2.4.20 kernal that shipped with 9.1 works just fine for me, RPM's install without issue so far and I've yet to have a problem with the automated update. The more I use it the more I like it...I haven't used my Win 2000 box in weeks.

[Steve Scrimpshire 0]

I'm a MDK user and I started with 8.1. I had a hellacious time with installing 9.1 on a two HD system. It did not install Lilo properly any of the 3 times that I installed it and I had to 'rescue' and

 

lilo -M

 

each time. Also, I use phoneline network cards from Linksys (HPN200SK) and trying to load the module for them causes a kernel panic every time due to ifplugd, which is not a daemon, as the name suggests, but is called by coding in the initscripts. I had to go in the initscripts and hack them to disable it. Why they would include a piece of software that is < 1.0 release with a short list of supported hardware is beyond me.

 

The install is no longer as intuitive as 8.1 was and I never saw it give me the option for individula package selection (well, the third time, I saw it), nor did I see the option to start or to not start X at boot. Out of the box, 9.1 would not run X because of my NVidia GeForce card and luckily I had a copy of the drivers on hand. It did not install drakconf by default, even though I selected console tools, development, etc... It did not install Midnight Commander by default. The graphic depiction of diskdrake upon install looks nothing like 8.1 did and I was tricked into formatting my backup partition.

 

Also, they still have not fixed the problem with the 2.4.x-mdk kernels not booting with Kadoka AMD MoBos with AMI BIOS and with 9.1, there was no option to install 2.2.x kernels as there was in 8.1 with F1 > alt2....only to use a 2.2.x kernel to *install* from, but it does not install the kernel.

 

Now I'm not complaining about the cutting edge software and the potential for bugs in that...this is far more than that.

 

For installation ease, I give it D-.

For all-around badassity after install/hacking/tweaking, I give it an A+

[Admiral LSD 0]

I haven't tried 9.1 (after my experience with 9.0, I'm not sure I want to waste my time with it) but at least 3 seperate attempts to install 9.0 resulted in (apparently) neither GNOME nor KDE being installed properly and twm being used as the default X WM all because I removed something that looked fairly unimportant (KDE support for digital cameras IIRC) and dependencies resulted in both desktop environments being removed. I'd give 9.0 a C but only because when it works, it does give the n00bs more of a chance than a lot of distro's, even if it does lump them with the worst package management system around and teach a lot of bad habits in the process.