Home
| Calendar
| Mail Lists
| List Archives
| Desktop SIG
| Hardware Hacking SIG
Wiki | Flickr | PicasaWeb | Video | Maps & Directions | Installfests | Keysignings Linux Cafe | Meeting Notes | Linux Links | Bling | About BLU |
> Any try Mandrake 7.2 yet? We had it on a machine here and there seemed to be > nothing but problems with the new installation tools, and fancy system > wrappers. I have Mandrake 7.2 running on 4-5 machines now (one's not mine), from light server environments to desktops, and haven't run into the slightest problem that I couldn't easily fix myself. I think the only thing I'd hold against them is that /etc/skel/.bashrc was setting the Xauthority variable on login and thus killing SSH X-forwarding, but that was easily commented out. I've been recommending it to anyone from a newbie up to a seasoned veteran with confidence. > The installation utility allowed me to delete items to be installed, but > didn't handle dependencies correctly (left stuff in that required stuff I > decided not to install). I don't think I've run into this problem, and all the installations I've done since the first beta have run very smoothly. The graphical installation is very nice (choose expert mode to get real control), I've had all the dependencies installed automagically that were needed, and the package selection is a very quick, yet informative process (much easier to navigate through than RedHat's graphical package selection). > The latest edition of 'rpmdrake' required considerable fiddling to get to > work correctly, and often seg faulted, leaving the RPM database out of kilter > (rebuild required). Hmm, I don't use that one myself. I've always just used rpm, but I'm very impressed with MandrakeUpdate, which likens itself to a graphical version of what Debian users have been bragging about for a long time with apt-get, and it runs very nicely. > More annoying, and what finally made me back off and use 7.1 for production > systems, was the 'Aurora' startup/shutdown GUI - it seemed that most of the 'rpm -e Aurora', though I usually unselect it in the installation. I never liked it, I'm not sure why it was included as a default. > time I shut down or rebooted the system, the file systems weren't cleanly > unmounted, and the system "fsck'd" more often than not, printing out lots > of scary error messages. Hmm, I really haven't seen any of those at all. I'm running ReiserFS on all my partitions except a 10MB /boot partition, and I certainly won't be going back to anything else anytime soon, though I'm tempted to play with XFS and JFS as they mature further. Are you sure you aren't running into a hardware issue somewhere in there? I really have only had the best of luck with this distribution, and have recently switched all of my past RedHat machines to it without further hesitation. > The background graphics have gotten silly instead of elegant, but all that's a > matter of taste. > > KDE 2.0 looks good, and the device detection during install continues to be > improved. I'm a WindowMaker person myself, so I'll trust you on this one. > So it looks more like a beta release. There are also many more update packages > on the web site than usual. It reminds me of the 6.x RedHat releases... A lot of the update packages on the site include packages that were upgraded from the first beta to the final release. Besides, I really don't think you can blame a distribution if there's a new root exploit in wu-ftp (yes, many other servers are offered), or any other package for that matter. Perhaps if they were including a lot of obscure software that no one had ever heard of, but all the updates I've seen have just been security updates on tried-and-true packages that were necessary (insert another wu-ftp crack here). Brian J. Conway dogbert at clue4all.net Geek for hire: http://clue4all.net/resume Men may control the free world, but women control the boobs. (http://www.pvponline.com/archive.php3?archive=20001024) - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups | |
We also thank MIT for the use of their facilities. |