Mandrake 9.2...

pickarooney

is out, for mandrake club members, and, I suppose anyone else who knows a good mirror site.

Puck

Going to wait for the next issue of LXF; it's coming free with that.

parasite

great ! 9.1 on lxf had all contrib packages too, great for dialup users

nadir

i used mandrake for 2 years; rpm drove me to despair, and it wasted my machine about 3 weeks ago, explaining my absence from boards. Ive since compiled gentoo and it pwns so much. Mandrake was fun for a while, but i found it just way too restrictive and all this mandrake club stuff , it's going so commercial.I dont want to start a Distrowars here but Gentoo is just like another league, I never thought distros could be so different.

pickarooney

Nadir,

In what way did it ruin your machine?
I'm in two minds about whether to try 9.2 or change distro entirely, as my machine is seriously under-performing with 9.1, and I reckon a compiled installation might be a better option, although I've always had major problems installing any kind of tarballed package.

niallb

The big issue with 9.2 is probably
"How much hassle is it going to be to upgrade a 9.1 system?"

Mandrake doesn't have a good track record on distro upgrades.
I'm a long term linux user and more familiar with Mandrake than most.
The only reason I use mandrake over any other distro is the urpmi command.
It's great on dependencies, and very easy to make your own repository.
Another feature is the pentium optimisation instead of the 386 optimisation
you got with RedHat, but Gentoo will give you that too.

I use OpenBSD & a little FreeBSD for other machines,
and urpmi came closest at the time to what I was used to
with the BSD ports system.
If gentoo's portage is functional, I'll be using that.

I could use apt, but for machines that I need to keep up to date, with Debian stable sources,
I'd be way behind on critical software unless I just installed from source anyway.
Debian however, is the only distro that upgrades fairly cleanly. Anyone found otherwise?

P. I wouldn't be too worried about getting your hands dirty with Gentoo.
You got to grips with command line system updates on Mandrake and while the commands will be different,
portage is probably as well thought out if it's based on the ports concept.
You've also got the bandwidth for a source distro.
Do try it on a seperate parition for a week or so if possible until you're sure you're actually seeing any benefit.

The other thing to bear in mind is that a distro is mostly just a way of getting the software onto your system.
You're running linux and can turn off or on anything you want.
Your performance issues may well be common to all distros that use X or alsa ....
Compilation optimisations will help, but your biggest boost will be the upcoming 2.6 kernel.

NiallB

nadir

Ok erm what happened to me was something like this, niallb helped me setup urpmi and that was cool, worked very well for about a month, then I came across a problem with dependancies or something when i was trying to uninstall a package. anyways it ended up that i uninstalled glibc, soo afterwhich rpm stoped working, just gave segmentation fault. In my attempt to fix rpm I did something wrong and the console stopped working, cant remember exactly what it was that screwed up my machine, but it died a slow death. Then to top it all of I ended up fuX0ring my partition table and loosing all my media. Anyways Gentoo OWNS , so I dont care any more


oh yeah niallb, emerge is awsome , if u liked urpmi u got to check it out.

niallb

Originally posted by nadir
... anyways it ended up that i uninstalled glibc, soon afterwhich rpm stoped working, just gave segmentation fault.

As soon as you rebooted! You were running from copies in memory.
That's hardly Mandrake hosing your system now is it :-)
The windows equivalent of removing glibc is something like:
cd c:\windows\system32
del *.*
If you want to find out what libraries something needs,
use the ldd binary-name command.
It'll list down and tell you if anything's missing.
You won't find ANY that don't need some of glibc. (except sash)

oh yeah niallb, emerge is awsome , if u liked urpmi u got to check it out.

Thanks for the vote. I've been looking for a ports equivalent on linux for ages. I got Gentoo 1.4 archives a few days ago, so when I get a chance...

NiallB

pickarooney

My friend asked him to find a decent OS for his laptop, so I ahve to play around with, installing various linuces for a week or two.
I have RH, Mandrake, Slackware, Knoppix, FreeBSD, but not SuSe, Debian or Gentoo.

Anyone got a ftp/bittorrent link to some Gentoo isos?

eggshapedfred

last months Linux Format had Gentoo on the coverdisc.
last months Linux Magazine had SuSE 8.2 Pro on the dvd.

this probably doesnt help much, but maybe back issues of said magazines....

zAbbo

I download all my unix from ftp.heanet.ie, lovely and fast

tomk

Originally posted by pickarooney
Anyone got a ftp/bittorrent link to some Gentoo isos?

I've got the Gentoo LXF cover disc, as mentioned by eggshaped. It's yours if you want it - strictly Debian for me.

Lukin Black

If any of you are going to install Mandrake 9.2, careful if you have an LG Drive:

From the Mandrake site:
A problem has been discovered with certain LG-based CD-ROM drives and Mandrake Linux 9.2. The kernel that comes shipped with Mandrake Linux 9.2 and early updates would send a FLUSH_CACHE command to the drive which would make drive inoperable by overwriting its firmware. Unfortunately, many Dell computers (possibly others) come with these CD-ROM drives. Currently, it is not believed to affect DVD-ROM/R/RW drives and some CD-RW drives; but this all depends entirely upon the firmware on the device.

Delboy79

9.2 My First Hassle Free Installation of Mandrake.
I had to abandon Mandrake 8 and Mandrake 9 as i could never configure my LG Monitor.. Unlike RH9 (my last linux O/S) I can easily locate my FAT32 Windows Partitions and theres MP3 Support. Simple to use but a bit limited in certain areas. Perfect beginner Linux O/S

qBot

Hey lads,

I was always a redhat person. but after trying out the new Fedora release i have found it to be very buggy, network card problems etc.

The only things stopping me from installing mandrake are. rpms, (where do i get them) and bluecurve (I love the look of redhat).

So where is the best place to get rpms for mandrake or even using apt-get or something similar, and is it possible to install the bluecurve them for gnome 2 on mandrake.

zAbbo

In Mandrake you can use urpmi.

You just select your sources : http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/index.php

and type this as root

urpmi.addmedia plf http://mandrakeusers.com/PLF/mandrake/9.1 with hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia main ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/sunsite.uio.no/pub/unix/Linux/Mandrake/Mandrake/9.1/i586/Mandrake/RPMS with ../base/hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia contrib ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandrake/9.1/contrib/RPMS with ../../i586/Mandrake/base/hdlist2.cz
urpmi.addmedia jpackage.free ftp://ftp.pbone.net/pub/jpackage/1.5/mandrake-9.1/free with hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia --update updates ftp://ftp.chello.se/pub/Linux/Mandrake/updates/9.1/RPMS/ with ../base/hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia texstar ftp://ftp.bahcesehir.edu.tr/pub/texstar/mandrake/9.1/rpms with hdlist.cz

then you can either use the Graphical RPM tool in Mandrake or goto console and
urmpi xmms

or whatever

Its class tbh