Hello!
this is the report on my 4th (successful) attempt at installing
Oxygen on my dual celeron.
I finally realized after installing RH6.1, Mandrake6.1, Stormix and
Oxygen (twice) that the new BIOS (bp6_pw.bin) from Abit left the board
incompatible with Linux! This manifested itself by seemingly random
errors at boot. Once I reverted to bp6_nj.bin, everything went well.
BTW, the Mandrake team would do well to take a look at the Stormix
install: its clean, professionnal, the background graphic is nice,
there's progress bar all over and its very user friendly. Too bad the
input is not quick enough for my taste and there's some rough edges.
What's funny is that they use 2.2.13-mdk (yes, from Mandrake) on top of
Debian.
Back to my install attempt: I used expert, customized, development
install.
For the keyb, I chose US. I was left wondering if US international
meant US + deadkeys? If that is not the case, a flag on that dialog to
put deadkeys would be nice.
Partionning went ok, I already had split my HD. Would it be possible to
autodetect the mount point if there's already a Linux installed?
More choices in the mount point drop down list would be nice too.
The whole "Choose packages", cryptic dialog and selection tree should
all be in an unified clean single dialog IMO.
While it was installing, I was wondering if Mandrake wasn't pushing
quantity instead of quality in terms of bundled software. I mean,
there seems to be a lots of redundancy or stuff that should be
installed afterwards. A sort of "minimal handpick software" would be
nice. How about having the possibility of filling a questionnaire for
new users and use that to select the packages? (Do you want to publish
web pages? Do you want to edit documents for the office? Do you want to
play games?)
I also had some questions in my head such as "Why do I get enlighment
and x others window managers?" Why do I get the "mandrake-doc-de?"
I also found two disquieting error messages on the consoles:
console 1:
error opening security policy file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/SecurityPolicy
[date]: GDK-Warning **: shmget failed! at
/usr/bin/perl-install/install_steps_gtk.pm lin 772.
At the boot, I got "Binding to the NIS domain" with [FAILED] in red.
A simple warning would suffice I think.
The only resolution that I could get was 800x600. At that
resolution, KDE kfm title bar is hidden under the task bar. I wasted
15 mn trying to get it at higher resolution using Xconfigurator... I
was luckier with Lothar which configuration tool which is in all ways
the same to Xconfigurator except for the "Show all" in the resolution
selection. Now, where do I change the refresh rate?
The nice color penguin logo in the console at login is cut in two
because one of the description line is too long ("Two 368mhz Intel
Celeron (Mendocino) Processors, 128M RAM"). Putting the 128M RAM text
on another line would make everything fit.
I then configured the sound card using sndconfig (Lothar doesn't
seems to have anything for this). Why are the mp3 coming out mono on
my speakers?
KDEsu utility at startup has a minor typo when started as a regular
user, priviliges should be privileges.
No icons appear for the DOS partitions.
Goddamn Netscape keybindings...
I will now try to configure VMWARE, Apache/PHP and MySQL...
Food for thoughts: it would be nice if someone
funded a setup somewhere in the world to do REAL QA and usability
studies for all Linux distributions where inexperienced users could
try their hand at installing and using Linux...
Thanks,
=====
Ricky Ng-Adam Capitaine du projet S.O.N.I.A.
Montréal (Québec) [École de Technologie Supérieure]
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