Tim, I know you review a lot, and probably don't have time to follow cooker, so I will just bring you up to date with some of the issues you have brought up ...
Note that I haven't tried a recent beta, I run cooker on one desktop, and 9.0 at home and on my laptop. I haven't recently created a new account on cooker, since it's in a corporate network which I don't want to mess with now (we're migrating a few servers around, including our primary ldap server ..). Timothy R. Butler wrote: > Hi everyone, > Mandrake Linux 9.0 is SO CLOSE to what most people need to switch from > Windows that with a few more improvements, I think I could get a lot of > people to switch. I've been considering these ideas since I got 9.0, and I > have them below. If you can't tell, I've been thinking about these > suggestions for quite awhile -- I hope no one minds the overload of ideas in > one e-mail... I just wanted to get them all out before the beta process gets > too far along. > > [Keywords to perk people's interest: Geramik, Printing, Everaldo, Boot > Splash, Sound Fonts, Fonts...] > > 1.) Geramik: Most of you probably know what Geramik is... its a GTK/GTK2 > theme that looks like KDE's Keramik. I know people from both the KDE and > GNOME worlds that love how nicely Geramik implements this great interface > style. Best of all, KDE users will find Geramik automatically mimicks KDE's > colors, so GTK and KDE apps "fit" together. Here is what I propose: if some > GTK hacker could just create a little app to modify Geramik's (KDE's, > actually) color file, Geramik would be as fully featured for GTK users as for > KDE users. Thus KDE users could set their colors and enjoy a matching > desktop, and so could GNOME users. IMHO, there should be similar themes for both desktops where possible, and both sets of tools should offer to set the other desktops theme to the corresponding theme. Anyway, there has been a lot of discussion of Geramik. It is in contrib, but has been changed to not take over the GTK theme by default (much to D Walsers irritation ...). > > If Mandrake set this as the default GTK theme, it could "one-up" Red Hat, > whose BlueCurve theme only works so long as you don't change the KDE colors. > Once you do, everything looks mismatched. Worse, the GTK theme can't change > colors so far as I could tell. In other words, if Mandrake did this, it would > truly be the first time there was a unified look for most apps no matter what > desktop one uses. This could be really really big, IMO. > > 2.) It seems to me that Bootsplash would be nicer if the text messages were > moved to a smaller full width box on the bottom of the screen and the top > part was devoted to a nice logo. If someone could point me to a large > Mandrake logo image I could download, I could create a proof of concept so > you could see what I mean. I think less emphasis on the "scary" GNU/Linux > startup messages would make the desktop seem more polished and friendlier to > boot. I think a few bootsplash themes would be nice. draksplash is cool, but how can I make a LILO splash screen???? I would agree the default one theme should have maybe 5-10 lines of text right at the bottom. > > 3.) I also think making the KDE and GNOME splashscreens match the style of > the 9.1 bootsplash would help make everything feel connected. Red Hat has > done a very nice job with the KDE/Gnome splashscreens, and Lycoris and > Xandros both did nice jobs with the KDE ones. According to the recent > interview I did with KDE's Tackat and Everaldo, I understand Everaldo is > doing some work for MDK (see > http://www.ofb.biz/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=190), if so, why > not get him to do this? > > 4.) Beings that I'm not a fan of Red Hat (you'll find that in the review I > do of it next week), I hate to keep using them as an example, but oh well. > Red Hat 8's installer has a really nice way of selecting packages. It has top > level groups like MDK, but rather than having a little "Individual selection" > checkbox, it has "More details" buttons next to each major package group. If > you click those, you can adjust the packages in that group. Redhat package selection isn't nearly detailed enough, so they can get away with this. Mandrake's 'flat' option in the individual selection has no equivalent AFAIK, and is useful if you know which packages you want, and don't want to look all over for them. > > 5.) It would be nice if Mandrake could also mention something about ATI's > proprietary drivers during the install, just like it use to do for Aureal > sound card drivers. Better yet, perhaps a document explaining a bit about > them could come up on the first GUI boot. Of course, I'd recommend the same > for nVidia too. I don't like proprietary software, but still, it'd be nice to > give the interested user some tips. It could also tell you that the drivers are in the commercial version. And more commercial drivers (one example is the LTModem which I need for my laptop) should be included on the commercial CDs. > > 6.) Speaking of drivers, what about building a tool like FontDrake's font > import tool, only it searches the windows drive (when detected) for > SoundFonts and then sets them up on AWE/SB Live/SB Audigy cards? Better yet, > integrate both FontDrake's import and "SoundFontDrake's" import tools > seemlessly into the install so the user is never aware of anything other than > that all of his/her fonts are there and the sound card's wavetable works. If > this were built into the install, it wouldn't even need a GUI, it could just > happen in the background. > Same thing occurs with firmware for scanners. Would be nice if the user were prompted for their driver CD to copy the firmware/fonts etc to disk, and configure them too. Speaking of scanners, someone needs to look at making saned (a killer application, sharing a scanner under windows is impossible, but can be done under linux with some effort at present) easier to setup. [...] > > 8.) Ranger packages a nifty little "klegacyconfig" tool. Why not include > that so that Mandrake config modules would integrated directly into > KControlCenter? That would be really convenient! (I am ranger ...). klegacyconfig is in cooker contribs, would be great to see someone from Mandrakesoft take over maintenance of it. I can't figure out why diskdrake's dialogs don't come up when it's embedded in KDECC in cooker, it works on 9.0 ... > Finally, I'd like to bring up some of the suggestions my Associate Editor > made in his recent Mandrake 9.0 review at OfB.biz > (http://www.ofb.biz/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=189)" > > A.) It'd be nice if diskdrake's size selection granularity was a bit better > of if there could be a text entry box next to the slider for partition size. Text entry would be great. After installing 9.0 on a machine with 136GB of RAID disk, you will find that the mouse moves in increments of approx 1GB, and the arrows take a long time to cover 500MB, and aren't that clear. Also, MB/GB/(TB??) options in a drop-down box would be nice. > Finally, and I'm sure everyone already is planning for this, but I suspect > it goes without saying that the success of Mandrake 9.1 is critical to > Mandrake's future (or at least, I'd imagine it is, I don't have insider > information)... so can I suggest an even tighter watch in the Q&A department? > I know many people that didn't have any trouble installing 8.2 (Eduardo > Sanchez is one of them) that had little or no success with 9.0. One almost > switched to Red Hat, but has decided to hold out for 9.1, since Red Hat just > isn't as nice. However, I'd imagine people like him might be more prone to > leaving if another release doesn't install. > One of those aspects is also testing the Mandrake Wizards. I have found a few issues (DNS Client wizard doesn't work in 9.0 due to invalid paths in the client.wiz file), but people really need to pound on these and report when they break. The DNS server one wrote a bad config for me, since it got my domain name as "" for some reason. Not that I can't fix it, but there's no point in the wizards if one has to edit the config files they have stuffed up. I will be filing some bugs soon hopefully. Buchan -- |--------------Another happy Mandrake Club member--------------| Buchan Milne Mechanical Engineer, Network Manager Cellphone * Work +27 82 472 2231 * +27 21 8828820x121 Stellenbosch Automotive Engineering http://www.cae.co.za GPG Key http://ranger.dnsalias.com/bgmilne.asc 1024D/60D204A7 2919 E232 5610 A038 87B1 72D6 AC92 BA50 60D2 04A7
