Mandrake 7.2 release

[dpipper]

The latest Mandrake has been let loose. What are thoughts on moving to another release? Would you do it? Why not?

P.S. is it difficult to upgrade to the next version of Mandrake?

Thanks

dpipper

[Cruiserman]

I downloaded 7.2 last week and ended up going back to 7.1 last night. 1) it recognized my sound card (sound blaster live) and the onboard chip (yamaha ?). It loads the modules but no sound. 2) Can't get Helix Gnome to work out of the box. It initially works but when I reboot for whatever reason, the xsession with gnome is missing and no obvious way to get it back up. 3) the file organization is changed so much that finding provious conf are time consumming to locate.
The only reason I wanted to reinstall was of the php 4.03 anyway to get phpix 1.0.2 to work and I'm still can't get it to work. I know these are most likely user problems, but I don't have them with 7.1.

[Zeram]

Well other than the fact that I can't get it to stop defaulting to XFree86 3.3.6 it's pretty good! It recognized all my hardware and set everything up perfectly (even my Live card). Aurora is a nice touch, and the config utils are even easier to use than before. I'm thinking about picking up a Radeon card tommorow though so wish me luck!

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"I wrote 'it's raining men' or so the christmass babies tell me" --Dr. Evil

[aaron]

Radeon card in Linux --- wow that sounds painful.

I have a Radeon in my Windows box, and THAT is painful... can't imagine Linux. ATI is notorious for its horrible drivers support.

If you want a 3D accellerator for Linux I recommend doing the Voodoo5.

Aaron

[utter_macabre]

No, no, no, no, no! If you want an awesome Video Accelerator, use the nVidia GeforceII GTS. nVidia put out their own drivers for their cards under linux, and in my opinion, they work better than their Windohz drivers. 3Dfx is too lazy and too concerned with their Windohz users that they don't make any effort at all for the linux community. nVidia is the way to go my friends. =)

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[cward]

Originally posted by Cruiserman:
I downloaded 7.2 last week and ended up going back to 7.1 last night. 1) it recognized my sound card (sound blaster live) and the onboard chip (yamaha ?). It loads the modules but no sound.

Yeah what the hell is up with that.. I have an AWE32 that does the same thing.. This is my first shot at Linux so I figured I would go with the most current version.. It appears to load fine.. It sees it fine in harddrake.. but No damned sound.. I would love to hear if anyone got this fixed.. Then I could start enjoying learing a new OS..

[bobarian]

Originally posted by dpipper:
The latest Mandrake has been let loose. What are thoughts on moving to another release? Would you do it? Why not?

P.S. is it difficult to upgrade to the next version of Mandrake?

Thanks

dpipper

I downloaded and installed it fine. (ATI Rage 128 Pro, Yamaha DS-XG both autodected and worked). However, i tried to download and compile modules for my ethernet card. When I try to compile it, i get tons of errors. I did gcc -V and it said it was 2.95.3 and a prerelease. Very strange.

[bobarian]

Originally posted by cward:
Yeah what the hell is up with that.. I have an AWE32 that does the same thing.. This is my first shot at Linux so I figured I would go with the most current version.. It appears to load fine.. It sees it fine in harddrake.. but No damned sound.. I would love to hear if anyone got this fixed.. Then I could start enjoying learing a new OS..



It comes with the Alsa sound system, which I'm pretty sure comes with support for that card. It might have been able to autodetect it but didn't have a driver for it (like my ethernet card.) Do some research online (deja.com). ;)

[Shad]

Originally posted by aaron:
Radeon card in Linux --- wow that sounds painful.

I have a Radeon in my Windows box, and THAT is painful... can't imagine Linux. ATI is notorious for its horrible drivers support.

If you want a 3D accellerator for Linux I recommend doing the Voodoo5.

Aaron



There is limited 2d support with the current CVS release of Xfree86. 3d should be available sometime soon. I have a ATI Rage Fury which has been pretty decent for me. Drivers were never an issue (other than lack of in Linux to begin with), rather it has been bios settings.

Besides ATI has always had the best Image quality. That is were things look the prettiest, even if they don't have the highest fps.

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Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life

[MkIII_Supra]

So far I am 3 days into the new install and I am really impressed! I now can have more than one sound event occur simulteneously! In the older versions, if I was doing something, say listening to an MP3 and I activated some system sounds, the system sounds would not play until after the MP3 was finished and then I would get a whole bunch of them. Also if I go through and sample sounds, .wav's as an example, then it will only open the sound player once instead of opening a new one every time a new sound is tested! Way nice.
I also am now able to play .mpeg and .mov files! Konqueror opens and plays them! Old `Drake, it was 50/50 if they would work.

Overall I am very pleased with my new 7.2 on the AMD K6-2 500, even StarOffice seems to open faster. I noticed this as well as my friends and my wife. Overall the system is performing very well. My video resolution is better. Overall it's better.... now to get the Compaq to load it.....

My gripes though, are that Netscape is now not very reliable. It will lock up on certain web pages intermittently and I have to kill -9 PID. The last time I have that problem was back in `Drake 6.0 a year ago. 6.5, 7.0 and 7.1 Netscape was 98% reliable with only the occassional lock up.
I still can't find the theme manager, although the auto changing background is pretty cool.
Screen savers are very limited and I am not sure how to install more, yet. Let alone where to get them.
Koffice is not what I expected. It is a very sharp suite but it is lacking in a lot of area's one of which is the ability to save .doc, .xls and .ppt formats. It can read them but the rendering is way off. Still has a lot of maturing to do.
I can't locate KNewMail, it's a simple program that I used to check my pop account at a [redetermined interval and have it notify me of new mail. I can do it with Gkrellm but not near as easy as I could with KNewMail. So I have to go look for it. It's supposed to be part of the kNetworks / kMail set-up. Can't complain about boot up time because I never shut the 500 down, but the one reboot I did was pretty fsking fast! Much faster than with the 7.1 version, even with Aurora running.
Again my buddy noticed this and was way impressed.

Overall on a scale of 10 I rate the Mandrake 7.2 distro as a 7.5

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Not much to say? Then shut the hell up!
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[Zeram]

The themes thing threw me too, if you go into the control panel, under Look-N-Feel the Style option is what now controls the theme. It kinda sucks though because they don't include much and I haven't figured out how to install new themes.

Getting back to the video card thing, well I'm going Radeon because #1 in Hi-Res 32Bit color (1024 X 768 and espically above) the Radeon smokes the GeForce 2 GTS(check out this link for a comparison http://www.gamecenter.com/Hardware/3dcards/Radeon/ss02.html) plus it has a built in DVD decoder and I'm getting a sweet deal on it. All in all I think I'll be every happy! Espically given that ATI has always had the best 2D quality.

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"I wrote 'it's raining men' or so the christmass babies tell me" --Dr. Evil

[PdD]

was the "Sound Server" enabled?

-newbie

[elinor]

I really like Mandrake 7.2. Mandrake has been the easiest distro for me to use consistently for all the things I need to do each day, and 7.2 is even easier than 7.1. I must add, though, that I have never installed Mandrake when I did not have to go in and configure the sound card through the console. It would SEE the card, but it sure wouldn't act as though it did! I miss the themes, but I would rather have my mouse wheel, which I do now. http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/biggrin.gif

[Luke-Skywalker]

Mandrake should learn to cut down on un-needed crap now. 7.2 was bloated ugly and just darn slow.

[conman]

I've been using Linux Mandrake (LM) 7.2 for a while (from beta stage). It's very impressive and quite a different feel (if you use kde2) to the previous ones. There are two major problems
1. KDE2 was released the same day as the GPL version of Mandrake was released so it is truly a 2.0.0.0.0 release (if you get my drift) so still is a little flaky.
2. (and this is related to 1) the arts sound server used by kde2 is really flaky so sounds that are supposed to work through kde work a little then fail or don't work at all.

Choices (in order of severity)
1. Don't use the arts sound server (most other Xapps work fine when this is disabled)
2. Don't use kde
3. Don't use sound
4. Don't use LM 7.2

I chose 1. (but then again I feel being on the bleeding edge helps development of LM and linux in general) but you can obviously do whatever you like http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif