A month with Mandrake 8.2

by , 1 May, 2002

My opinion of Mandrake Linux has always been; it comes with more to play with than Red Hat Linux, and that Red Hat has niggling features but Mandrake has more. I mention Red Hat because it's the other most popular distribution, and the distribution I've used most.

I've been using Mandrake 8.2 constantly for a month now, and have chosen to keep with it and not reinstall Red Hat 7.2. It still has a number of things gone wrong with it, more than Red Hat 7.2, but the fact remains it has newer software, and more of it. (Red Hat 7.2 was released on the 22nd October 2001, and Mandrake 8.2 was released 147 days later, on the 18th March 2002.)

Saying that though, over the last week I've steadily been upgrading 8.2 with the Mandrake Cooker RPMs, even adding the ridiculously simple to install, and most impressive, KDE 3.0. Something I'll be covering in a future column.

The good and bad

My month using Mandrake 8.2 has not been the easiest one. I'm impressed with the work that's gone into this release, especially the complete overhaul of the Control Centre (DrakConf). And the hundreds of applications, utilities, and games available via the menu, is nothing short of breathtaking. Alas no AbiWord, which I prefer to the included KWord (as part of KOffice 1.1.1) and OpenOffice.org Writer (as part of OpenOffice.org 641), but a download and install soon fixed that. The graphical installation program was a pleasure to use, and Mandrake's best so far. Mandrake supports an amazing amount of file system types, beating Red Hat 7.2 hands-down in its sad, lack of ReiserFS.

So what went wrong? Well, a few things:

• No matter how many times I disable the nfs service it activates itself again, resulting in forced reboots about two-thirds of the time.
• If I attempt to resize or maximise Gnumeric, GEdit or Glimmer in KDE, they always promptly vanish.
• KDE decided after a fortnight, to no longer start, hanging on "starting services". After a few days it decided to work again, but now my dial-up details aren't present in Window Maker for KPPP. Very strange.
• In Window Maker, starting Nautilus overrides the menus with those of Sawfish, changes the background, and displays the icons that appear in GNOME. Closing Nautilus removes the icons and menu change, but not the background change. This may not be Mandrake's fault, it may be the GNOME or Nautilus'. Regardless, it's a Pretty Dumb Bug in anyone's department.

Note that aside from installing the Glimmer RPM (a text editor) these faults occurred before I commenced a week of upgrading, and I did nothing to mess-up the installation, by editing system configuration files, and the like.

As for Stewart (another Linuxdot staff member), he had trouble getting pppd to give him a dial-up connection even though it worked fine for him in 8.1, and he was also bugged by the fact he couldn't boot into a graphical login screen. For Peter he was irritated by the nVIDIA drivers refusing to work, even though they worked fine in 8.1.

The main thing I like about Mandrake 8.2 is the inclusion of Evolution 1.0.2. I've been wanting to try Evolution for some time now, and Mandrake 8.2 gave me the opportunity. Along with WindowMaker 0.80, and Galeon 1.0.3, they make for an impressive combination.

Evolution 1.0.2 I've since upgraded to the latest 1.0.3, and use for the news feed feature, still being hooked on KMail as my email client of choice. Galeon I upgraded all the way up to the latest 1.2.1, which since it uses Mozilla's rendering engine, gecko, requires you also upgrade from Mozilla 0.9.8 to the latest Mozilla 1.0 RC1.

Faults aside, Mandrake 8.2 has much to offer and is worth installing, if simply for its relative ease of use and sheer volume of great software.

About us
Latest stable kernel: 2.4.19 | Latest development kernel: 2.5.42 Copyright © 1998-2002 Linuxdot.org. Linux ® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.