M 10 - the opposition

[oldgeezer]

Any objective (rather than prejudicial!) views on Mandrake 10? I hit their scroll mouse issue and a colour resolution issue on initial install attempts, otherwise kernel 2.6 and KDE 3.2 seem fine. The DVD is on the cover of the May issue of Linux Magazine. Still an rpm system, though, although I think Mandrake may retain their - heavily oversubscribed - online update system.
OG.

[oldgeezer]

OK! Now I understand the deafening silence. Another abject failure from Mandrake! I prefer watching paint dry. A global 'find file' was still running after an hour. Pure treacle - waste of space. Don't do it! Will have to await K3.4 along with the other 120,000 or so.
OG.

[RandomGoon]

Now's not the time to find this out :( . I spent a goodly amount of time yesterday pulling the .iso files down for M10...please tell me I've not wasted my time doing this :shock: ; I was going to dual boot for a while now I'm not so sure I want to after hearing OG's disparaging remarks.

[eco2geek]

I was going to dual boot for a while now I'm not so sure I want to after hearing OG's disparaging remarks.

While I can't speak to version 10 (and kernel 2.6), I recently had the opportunity to install version 9 on an old computer. The install went flawlessly. No video issues, no wheelmouse issues, no sound issues, no network issues. It worked perfectly out of the box. In other words, it was absolutely terrible, and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. :roll:

Seriously, although v10 is so new the bugs may not have been worked out of it yet, don't let anyone scare you off from trying it yourself. Since you have different hardware, your mileage will vary.

The best thing about Mandrake (and RedHat, for that matter) is that if you're new to Linux, their graphical installers make the entire installation process completely painless.

The Debian package management system is, however, much better in the long run than working with an rpm-based system like Mandrake (and RedHat). But Debian-based systems are a bit more difficult to install.

[RandomGoon]

I figgured that differences in hardware would change things somewhat but I guess I just skipped over the fact v10 is new :? Oh well, I have the .iso's so what the hey, I'll give it a bash (pun intended :lol: )and see what happens. The reason I went to get Mandrake in the first place is it was recommended for noobs such as myself. I am after all trying to wean myself off of Billy's-Bugs...aka Windows :twisted:

'Goon

[oldgeezer]

eco is kind of right in saying you should try things yourself, Randie. BUT! I used a decent XP2600+ with no issues. M10 was a pig to install; it took six attempts. Do NOT, on this occasion, accept the mouse and graphics card defaults, although attempting to change the latter during install can crash the whole caboodle, even before you reach the selection list. Slow would be an understatement. The rpm system is NOT for neophytes - the dependencies will slay you. I also updated an earlier version, which can be done from the DVD - it took over 4.5hrs. The truncated menu system is a pale parody of Knoppix. M9.0 was OK, before and since is rubbish - lost the plot again. They've had plenty of practice, no excuses about newness! Would like to hear other opinions, experiences. Be sure to try it on a spare machine/HD first, though.
OG.

[RandomGoon]

Got two spare machines, one's just a bit better than a boat anchor (Pentium 133!), the other's not too far off (Pent. II-333). I SERIOUSLY doubt the 133 will handle it; the 333 should do okay. On a side note, I pulled down DamnSmallLinux for the 133 and have been mucking about with it a bit. It seems to work fairly well but I've not delved too deeply into it yet. Eh, I'll just press on with M10 and see what I get. The only reason I went after it was it was recommended for noobs such as I by Michael Gagne' in his book that recently came out.

'Goon

P.S. RANDIE?!?! :shock:

[oldgeezer]

If DSL works for you, you'll love Flonix, Goon. A 333 isn't going to help much with M10; infinity would arrive sooner. Marcel Gange seems a nice guy but his recommendation for Mandrake may be a little based on his obvious heritage (I jest)?! No doubt Tom P would tell you to try SuSE and Knoppix!
OG.

[RandomGoon]

Yeah, I took a brief look at Flonix and just sort of glazed over it...guess I didn't look far enough from the French (I can understand some of it) on the main page. Besides, once I get some of those cute little business card CD-R disks I'll be just too cool in my circle of friends :lol:

I'll check out Flonix once I've licked the goodie off of DSL 8)

'Goon

[eco2geek]

If those are the CPU speeds you're dealing with, forget Mandrake - it's got too much "eye candy" for slow machines. (So does Knoppix, for that matter.) Debian Woody (http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/) sounds like it's a better fit (if you can live with KDE 2), especially for the 133.

You can get an idea of what the (text-based) install process looks like here (http://www.thiesen.org/d-i/index.html), although it's a bit different for Woody than Sarge. Of course, there's a comprehensive installation manual (http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/install) available.

Again, the biggest thing that Mandrake has going for it is its easy GUI-based installation program. Debian assumes you can figure out how to use cfdisk to partition your hard drive; it assumes you know what hardware you've got, so you can choose which kernel modules to install; it assumes you can use dpkg to select which packages you wish to install. All of this is done via a text-based interface which might be intimidating to first-time Linux users.

So maybe your real best bet is to grab an older version of Mandrake, install it, use it until you get comfortable, then wipe it and start over with Debian.

[RandomGoon]

I thought "wipe, reinstall" was for Windows fixes :?

J/K :lol: thanks for the input, I'll save your links in my bookmarks!

'Goon

[eco2geek]

I thought "wipe, reinstall" was for Windows fixes

Anyone who tells you to reformat and reinstall to fix a Windows problem, except in the most extreme cases, doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.

Anyway, even if they're both "Linux," Debian and Mandrake are apples and oranges. You can't "upgrade" Debian to Mandrake; you can't "upgrade" Mandrake to Debian. Same with the other Linux distros. They usually use their own modified packages and their own modified kernels.

(Note that Knoppix is Debian.)

So if you wanted to use a distro with a really user-friendly installer, like Mandrake, then you wanted to switch to Debian, you would have to start by wiping. (Although I've seen a Web page about a script that purports to change your current distribution, whatever it is, to Debian....)

[RandomGoon]

Grr, I was kidding, eco2geek...can't a guy have a little fun? I know that wipe, reinstall is a last resort. I, in most cases, can fix what's been borked without being that drastic.

As for the differing flavors of Linux, I'm getting used to what's what. I guess the best analogy is comparing apples to apples: some are red delicious, some are golden delicious, and yet others are granny smiths. In the end they're all apples. That about sum it up?

'Goon

[Stephen]

As for the differing flavors of Linux, I'm getting used to what's what. I guess the best analogy is comparing apples to apples: some are red delicious, some are golden delicious, and yet others are granny smiths. In the end they're all apples. That about sum it up?

'Goon

No you can usually do the same thing with different types of apples. It would be more like the models/make of a car the internals are similar but the parts and how you work with them are different sometimes.

[desire]

RandomGoon... As a suggestion for that tired old P133 BTW how much memory is in it? A good guess would tell me 32MB? Anyway maybe you'd want to consider Slackware or if you already have Windoze on it then get Zipslack which will run off a FAT file system and for a GUI run Fluxbox or Blackbox or IceWM. Just read a post at LinuxQuestions.org where someone saw a P100 system running Vector Linux with IceWM using the Opera web browser and apparently it ran pretty quick.
As for Mandrake I ran an install of 10 Beta2 version on a Celeron 2.4G system with 384MB and had it running for a few days and seemed to run fine just doing the basic stuff web browsing, wordprocessing ..that kind of stuff, ran Knoppix on it too and Gnoppix and finally Slackware and they all ran just fine except for Gnoppix which ran fine but seemed to be a bit of a memory glutton.
My main system is running Mandrake 9.1 (Duron 1200, 256MB RAM) and it's run flawlessly.
My uptime is 24 days 21:38 without a reboot.

[RandomGoon]

The P133 has 48MB RAM but I'm trying to scam some more off of my brother (he's got a dead P200 collecting dust). As for using other distros, I'm still working with DSL, Knoppix and M10; I've not installed M10 yet but I'll get around to it soon I think.

'Goon

[oldgeezer]

Cfdisk isn't that difficult to use - it's just better than fdisk; even I worked it out without using a book. The Mandrake install isn't easy to use when things don't go according to plan, either; and M10 is certainly in that category. Their auto partitioning isn't to everyone's liking - the allocation to the primary partition is too small on marginal sized discs. The easiest way to install Debian is via Knoppix - once one gains experience with it, then it may be possible to migrate to Woody-direct ( I am several years away from that!). This forum is full of excellent advice to cover most Debian-related problems and has a 'search' function. But the advice to try M9.0/9.1 on an old system seems a good idea. Flonix's latest version is extremely good, even has Firebird - they also have a new website on flonix.com. If you don't live in France, try putting a few comma pauses in the dial-up string after the third digit (may have a problem related to the unique French telephone system??).
OG.

[eco2geek]

Sorry, RandomGoon, didn't mean to overreact re wiping & reinstalling, that's just a pet peeve of mine - "Nothing happened when you double-clicked the AOL icon, so you reinstalled Windows?!" :shock:

If you can stand a few more opinions: ZipSlack is definitely not recommended. From personal experience, it was unstable as hell (nothing to do with Linux or Slackware, just that ZipSlack uses the UMSDOS file system). Some apps didn't work, and when it crashed, as it did often, it caused lots of lost cluster problems for MS Scandisk to fix. And fix. And fix...

Flonix, and Damn Small Linux (http://damnsmalllinux.org), upon which Flonix is based, would be good choices because they use lightweight GUIs named IceWM (http://www.icewm.org) and Fluxbox (http://www.fluxbox.org/), which ought to run pretty well on your old P133.

If you've got spare hard drive space on a computer running Win2K or XP, with an NTFS partition, check out TopologiLinux (http://www.topologilinux.com), which will install itself into two large files (one for swap, the other for the file tree) on your hard drive (without repartitioning). You can install it on a FAT32 partition too, but the maximum file size on FAT32 is around 2 GB, which means you can't do a full install (which takes around 2.5 GB). It even comes with a Windows-based version of GRUB that works with Windows' NT loader.

[RandomGoon]

Sorry, RandomGoon, didn't mean to overreact re wiping & reinstalling, that's just a pet peeve of mine - "Nothing happened when you double-clicked the AOL icon, so you reinstalled Windows?!" :shock:

Heh, nice to know we've got something in common. I only ever suggested format/reload on Win. boxes if there was no other solution. 'Course, AOL imho is just shy of a virus - I LOATHE AOL. I suppose they serve their purpose for complete net newbies and those looking for new shiny coasters :twisted: Hell, I even saw a way to make a tripple-bladed boomerang from an AOL CD...more useful than it's inteneded use if you ask me.


Flonix, and Damn Small Linux, upon which Flonix is based, would be good choices because they use lightweight GUIs named IceWM and Fluxbox, which ought to run pretty well on your old P133.

I've already had DSL working on the 133 box; I've liked what I've seen thusfar. I'll have to take a look at Flonix though. DSL worked just fine on it too. Although, I couldn't get my sound card to run, I guess it's just too old but I'll see what I can do about it. Maybe there's a driver I can load manually...that'll be interesting :)

Space on my XP box right now is an issue; I've got too many files I need to keep around. Although, I'm getting around to picking up a new HDD. I'll save that link you left for TopologiLinux.

Man, there's just a plethora of choices! I'm almost overwhelmed...almost :)

Thanks for the opining, everyone!

'Goon