[ale] Mandrake 9.0 installation review

[John Wells]

apt-rpm rules!  All the benefits of rpm with the ease of apt.  If you're
going with binaries, apt-rpm is the way.

John

Michael Hirsch said:
> I've been meaning to write this down for ALE for a while now, and I
> finally have the time, so here goes.
>
> I've been using Mandrake for a year or two now, and just upgraded to the
> 9.0 release.  My general impression is quite favorable, but as always,
> there are rough spots.
>
> My first installation was an upgrade from Mandrake 8.2.  As I explain
> below, that was not completely successful, so I went on to reinstall
> from scratch.  That was more successful.
>
> As always, I love the Mandrake installer.  It has the ideal
> combination of user friendliness and exposure of details.  Like the
> RedHat installer, you can get a good installation just by hitting next
> at almost every screen, but there is more visibility as to what is going
> on.
>
> The installation screens are more or less the same as RedHat's in
> content, but, unlike RedHat, or any other distribution I've seen,
> there is a complete list on installation steps down the left side of the
> screen.  If at any time you decide to, say, change your mouse
> setup, all you need to do it click on the mouse setup button and you
> move back in the installation.  Then you can continue from that point
> on, or click again to get back to where you were.  The steps cleverly
> change color as they are completed, so it is easy to see where you are
> in the installation.
>
> I suppose having all that information on the screen, however handy yet
> unobstrusive, might be intimidating to beginners, but I love it.  It is
> just so damn useful.  It is not at all like the information
> overload you can get in a Debian install.  If you've done an install or
> two before you will have no trouble.
>
> For some reason, the upgrade took forever.  I guess it had to think a
> lot between RPMs or something.  It took way longer to upgrade that any
> installation has taken me since the last time I installed from
> floppies.  But when I was done, I had a nice Mandrake setup.  There were
> really no surprises.  All the usual apps are there.  KDE 3.0.3, Gnome
> 2.0, OpenOffice 1.0.1.  Strangely, abiword is missing.  I didn't see any
> great changes since 8.2, but that's okay.  I liked 8.2.
>
> Unfortunately, there were a couple of things not quite right.  First, I
> couldn't get supermount to work.  Second, some of my
> misconfigurations were still bad.  For instance, running depmod at boot
> always caused a seg fault.  Weird--but it's been that way for 6 months
> at least.  So I reinstalled.
>
> Reinstalling took far less time than installing.  Fortunately, I've had
> my home directory on a separate partition for years, so I didn't lose
> any important data.  After installation, everything worked.  I have two
> main impressions.
>
> First, supermount rocks!  You stick in a cd and run "ls /mnt/cdrom" and
> the listing appears.  Eject the CD with the front button, stick in a new
> disk, and ls it again.  You can even cd to /dev/cdrom and then eject the
> cd.  The worst that will happen is you can get an I/O error if you try
> to ls /dev/cdrom without a disk in the drive.  All this works for
> floppies, too.  This is how removable media should work. I'm happy to
> see this back--may it never go away.
>
> Second, the Mandrake rpm tool is a lot worse.  There used to be one
> tool--rpmdrake--for installs, removals, and upgrades.  Now there
> appears to be 3 separate programs.  Just what I need, more windows
> cluttering up my screen.  It still works well, even better in some ways,
> but I find it much more annoying.  Time to check out apt-rpm for
> Mandrake.  It's awesome under RedHat, but I've always been happy with
> rpmdrake, before.  Time to see if apt-rpm and Synaptic work on
> Mandrake.
>
> --Michael
>
>
> ---
> This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list. See
> http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be
>  sent to listmaster at ale dot org.




---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.