Re: Mandrake

[Jean Francois Martinez <jfm2@club-internet.fr>]

On Friday  4 May 2001 18:21, Darin Lang wrote:
> I installed the Mandrake intsallation as you suggested, Jean. It was easy
> and it worked much better than Slackware. It had a graphical drive
> farmatter instead of a prompt which made it much clearer what was going on.
> It easily configured my printer, my keyboard(Dvorak), X windows and it
> works excellent for the first time. It installed the dual boot LILO, mysql,

Grub is far better than LILO, and last time I checked it was the default.

> apache, php, perl all right off the bat. I found it to be a smooth clear
> and simple interface, except that there were alot of unneccessary things
> included I am sure. But I whittled it down as best as I could to just what

Disk space is cheap so unnecesary things are not a problem as long as they 
don't introduce security holes or confuse the user.   What is bad is inferior 
programs who give a bad impression of Linux. 

> i needed. All the things above and below took me weeks, full time, to
> figure out and configure mostly manually, when I originally installed
> Slackware linux last November. With Mandrake it was a piece of cake.
>
>     It did not configure the network properly, I have two NIC cards and it
> hasn't been able to configure either one and I can no longer connect to the
> internet or intranet. 

Did you try to use the network configurator (it is one of the choices in 
DrakConf): it happens quite often that things who cannot be configured at 
install time can be configured at use time since production kernels have more 
features than kernels used for installation.

> Also I feel the distro should have included but
> didn't Apple Talk (netatalk) since it included NFS and Samba, 

Perhaps they comiled Samba with netatalk support, it is possible in Samba 
2.2.  I don't know if that is true in the Samba 2.0 shipped in Mandrake


Alos did you look in the second CD?

> so now I have
> to find that somewhere and intsall it. And IP Alias so I can configure
> Apache to respond to multiple IP requests, as well and then recompile
> Apache with PHP, MySQL and Perl and IP Alias. That is if I ever get my
> network running...
>
>     I still do not have sound either, and I can't figure out how to
> configure that either.
>

DrakConf.  Just sitting in the middle of root's desktop.

>     Mandrake is very nice and straightforward. I think it is a good choice
> to start with as a base. I wonder what it lacks though that Indy needs to
> remedy. 

Mandrake is very, very good but:
-They are not making money in selling boxes so they are reorienting towards
the server.  There were people telling in LinuxToday teh Mandrake guys had 
lost their touch on desktop matters.

-There are quite a few things in Mandrake who are inspired by marketing and 
not by user's best interest: one of them is volume of software: there is too 
much redundant software in it (some of it not the best of category), but when 
I discussed with one the top three in Mandrake he told me that without it 
sales would be lower.     Another marketing driven feature was the "optimized 
for pentium" in previous Mandrakes: Pentiums are dead and compiling for 
Pentium is the worst thing to do on non Pentiums: even 386 code runs faster 
on PIIs, PIIIs, K6s or Atlons than code compiled for Pentium.  
Also in a comercial distro forget about those features who benefit the user 
but are not seen by him, like tolerancy to user mistakes.

-Third: If we look at the SMB part (Linux computer in a Windows network) Indy 
user gets a _working_ tool for exploring the network neighborhood and 
mounting shares, Mandrake people don't.   Indy user receives the messages 
sent by coworkers and by the printer server telling the job is finished  
while the Mandrake user walks 20 meters and finds printer  is busy with the 
200 pages memo of someone else.  Why Indy has those refinements?  Because I 
have used Linux as a client in Windows-dominated companies and because my 
printer was at twenty  meters from my office.  You can also look at the 
'help' icon at the bottom of the installer (french people don't know that 
word),  at the printer config tool who asks you to enter an adress instead of 
a name (for SMB printers).   There are many, many things a user-made 
distribution could improve over Mandrake.  Of course we could just report 
them to Mandrake people but the two fundamental issues in the commercial 
model (server reorientation and demagogics) would remain. 


> You know more about that than I, I haven't a clue really, but it
> seems INdy could be offered as a choice right at initial install. When you
> first install it, it asks if you want to do the Easy or Expert install. It
> would seem it could split there to "Easy, Expert or INDY".
>

But what would be the Indy specifics over easy or expert?


				JFM