My two bits on Mandrake's upgrades

[cage47]

First my fellow 'Drake friends, I am for Mandrake completely. I started with 7 and have a rock solid 8.0 running now. Now I cut my teeth on Debian 2.5 years ago and though I consider that a rock solid also, (and I keep Deb 2.2.3 installed on another partition for emergency crash recovery) it doesn't ahve the polish of Mandrake. I personally like the tinkering with Debian it takes to customize it, but for my wife, who was a winbloze zombie until I converted her, trying to explaining mounting (not a word! :p )or other technical details is not worth it. So she also likes Mandrake.
But I read about the problems people have with the latest Mandrake 8.1 and I get deja vous from when I was trying 7.2. My 7.0 was rock solid and I got the 7.2 cd's and worked for a month but couldn't get it as stable. (Cups didn't work, partly because the network wasn't working right ie: the loopback, menu problems) And I was skeptical about 8.0 seeing all the problems that 7.2 (and from what I read 7.1) had. But I remembered. 7.1 and 7.2 are only incrimental releases. Yeah, for a full release they should have been more polished, but they weren't major releases, like 8.0. Now 8.1 is out and Supermount is buggy (a must for anyone trying to convert from winbloze imho) and other probs. Just remember, this is an incremental release. By 9.0 they will more than likely be resolved. Personally I would have liked to see a little more time taken to try to resolve the supermount problem. Maybe another rc before full release would have been nice to fix such a basic function.

[kapwfm]

Stay with Mandrake 8.0 for now...at least until they can get the bugs worked out. I'm using 8.1 now, and the only way I got it to work the way I wanted it to was to upgrade from 8.0 to 8.1 and use the 2.4.3 kernel. Seems to work better for me...and so does Supermount, and CUPS, I think...but I haven't tried anything with my printer lately either.

[subnet_rx]

well, traditionally, the X.0's are buggy, and X.1 and X.2's are more stable. Because in a new release they come out with newer and not as tested software. Mandrake seems to be the opposite though, they test on the non-incremental releases.

*wonders off patiently awaiting Red Hat 7.2*

[bdg1983]

Here's an interesting fact for those that never consider Caldera. Something I've known for quite a while.

On the main page for Open Linux 3.1 Workstation on the Caldera
Web site is a hyperlink to an interesting document entitled
the_difference_between_caldera_and_redhat_linux.pd f.

One paragraph in particular caught my attention:

[quote begins]
Caldera uses professional release procedures that assure that when any of the programs are recompiled that the source code (the ``binaries") are compatible with the libraries and the compiler that are supplied. This process is known as ``self-hosting". It is the
extra care used by professional software developers that means so much to developers using Linux. Red Hat ``self-hosts" about 30 packages -- of the hundreds that they include in their ``distribution".
Selfhosting is a feature to be of interest to more than developers, however. Smart Reseller (now Smart Partner) magazine ran benchmarks of Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, and Windows NT (See Jan 25, 1999 issue). Those benchmarks found that Caldera ran
250% faster than NT in the file I/O tests. When measuring these operating systems as Web servers, it found that Caldera ran 50% faster than any other system, including Red Hat. Here is how they
explained the performance differences between Linuxes:
``Those results also point out the vast differences that compilation can have in performance. The source code may be the same, but the quality of the binary code, the executable, varies significantly, depending upon how well the source code was compiled." That
points directly to Caldera's ``self-hosting" as the reason for its performance. *
[quote ends]

Nice to have Mandrake rush out all the latest and greatest, but it doesn't do you much good when things don't work. Slap everything together, release it and hope it all works together.

[Malakin]

If you're happy with 8.0 stick with it. I was using 8.0, I upgraded to kde 2.2 and koffice 1.1 which gave me most of the benefit of 8.1 anyways. But I still installed 8.1, which I regret.

[lilrabbit129]

I instaleld 8.1, mainly in a last ditch hope that it would magically fix my eth0 problems...


and the thing is.. IT DID!

YAY!

[Icculus]

thye changed a few things i was unhappy about atfirst but i have ot say , its really not that bad ... i think im going to stick with it , i really havent found a problem i couldnt handle with it "so far"

[dvdnut]

the only problem i have is the problem with fstab and mandrakeupdate
i have 2 cdroms
a burner on /dev/scd0 mounted on /mnt/cdrom
a dvdrom on /dev/hdd (i think) mounted on /mnt/cdrom2

when mandrakeupdate requests a cd it opens the dvd not the burner so i have to eject using console to get things installed
thats the only gripe i have with 8.1