Hi Buchan, > 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 ...
Thanks! Indeed, I haven't had the pleasure of following cooker for about two or three months. I just resubscribed so that I could hopefully report problems as I encounter them in 9.1 betas. > 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 ...). Hmm... maybe they could make a MandrakeClub vote on whether Geramik should be the default GTK theme. :-) If not, another good solution would be that if one chooses KDE in Mandrake FirstStart, that one's gtk settings are set to Geramik (since I presume Mandrake will use Keramik in KDE). Eazel Blue looks really ugly when pared with a light Keramik theme... > 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. Yeah, it would be nice to have some choices. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing the return of Aurora as the default boot system, but I doubt that's going to happen so 5-10 lines at the bottom would be best. If there was a nice Mandrake logo on the upper part of the bootsplash (above the 5-10 lines) it would still look very nice... As I hinted at, I've been toying with the idea of implementing this, but I need a nice, big Mandrake logo to do so (preferably an XCF or PSD)... any ideas who I might contact to get one? On a similar note, if anyone here has installed SuSE, you may have noticed SuSE's version of bootsplash has some nifty animation during bootup as well. The SuSE theme is GPL'ed, so it might be good if Mandrake could "borrow" this nice touch. (The animations are in MNG format.) > > 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. Hmm... maybe the Red Hat style could be used on the group selection page, with the individual package selection page rebadged "Advanced Package Selection" or some such. This would be a big UI improvement, IMO. > > 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. That would be nice, and probably would encourage more people to fork out the dough for the commercial packs. The said document could also have a convenient way (a wizard, maybe?) for people to join MandrakeClub if they want the drivers *fast*. > 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. This would really put Mandrake a step above the rest. It wouldn't be that hard to do either. Hey DrakeX developers, are you reading this? :-) > 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. That would be nice. > (I am ranger ...). I thought so, but I wasn't sure. :-) Thanks for the packages, btw. > 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 ... Hmm... odd. Whatever the case, the simple inclusion of this package would be really great, I think. Especially since most of the other distributions already have this type of integration... > 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. Good idea. If they want to keep it "friendly" (although is "expert partitioning" suppose to be friendly?), they could always hide the boxes in a "Details >" folding part of the window. Anyway, thanks for the information. Hopefully MandrakeSoft will consider some of these ideas... -Tim -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy R. 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