Howdy; Sorry to waste the bandwidth for anyone not quick enough to filter out my posts.
Relevant hardware: Pentium III 500 MHz (Katmai) 768 MB SDRAM Maxtor 60 GB HDD Creative TNT 16 MB Graphics Blaster (NVidia) Sound Blaster Live Value Digital (4.1) A-Bit BX6 Rev2 Liteon 40x CD-ROM Mitsumi CR-4804 TE 4x4x24 CD-RW 10/100 KingMax ethernet card (RealTek chipset) Smasung SyncMaster 750s (17") Mandrake 9.0 Dolphin on hda (various and sundry "stuff" on other drives). Partitions (hda) /boot, /, swap,/usr, /var, /home, /tmp; hdb is also recognized and listed in fstab, divided in two partitions. Boot is ext2, / is ext3, anything else touched by Mandrake was XFS. hdb was all XFS, hdc and hdd formatted for other things and not used with Mandrake. No FAT or NTFS anywhere. Beta installation on first half of hdb which I had cleared for the purpose. Beta1 can't use XFS so the second half of that disk is unusable which is a shame, since that's where all of my images, some music files, assorted "personalization" components have been resident since Mandrake 8.0 was released. Kernel panic. No worries, I don't mind rearranging things to make life easier and *really* want to test the beta. OK. Install it ext3, then you can reboot to 9.0 (or something) after install and swap things around without losing any data. Well no; the ext3 used by the beta seems unrecognizable to Dolphin and vice versa. More kernel panics, reinstall with separate ext2 (Linux native) /boot partition. Hmmmm, this still isn't working and I have no choice but to let LILO write to to hda? I don't get an option to make a boot disk? No worries, I'll do it after the first boot. No X configuration? mkbootdisk file not found. MCC, boot disk option does diddly. Software manager, add software.... CD-1 not enabled. B******T it is too! urpmi at the command line CD-1 not enabled. Add sources, command line and MCC, errors (didn't save them) see Ya! File formats, glibc, gcc, kernel, etc ad nauseum are changed enough and so much seems broken in 9.1beta1 that I punted it and reclaimed the disk space. Scrolling drags, the CPU is maxed, and all the memory and swap space is as well. I may install cooker later this week, or next, or maybe soon. Depends what I see on the lists. In my opinion the beta was a wasted download. Sure it's 'purty' and all but not being able to read the cd to add software, not being able to add media sources, being forced to set up a "LAN connection" when this machine is connected to a cable modem and *nothing else* were a bit too much. I retratc the offer to burn a disk and mail it (from newbie list). I wouldn't wish this on anyone else. I've been a Mandrake advocate since 7.2; trying to help other people (friends and family) install and set up their machines, talking it up at every opportunity, convincing people that buying direct from the Mandrake Store would be a better way than buying box sets retail etc.. That last partly because there weren't any 9.0 box sets available in Edmonton anyway. I don't know if there are yet, I haven't checked for a while. 9.1 will be the last try for me. I loved Dolphin up to the first release candidate, then the "add 'features' until ya break core apps" gremlins started appearing. Super mount was working transparently for me from beta2 until then. It hasn't worked at all since. When it's disabled and I try to mount say a back-up CD-R to restore some files it still interferes. Some of the "requires" and dependencies I find laughable. You have to install a _fax application_ to have kde utilities? Or was it kde multimedia? Something like that anyway. Other strange relationships abound. Then there's the "this is not a support site" attitude when a person tries to ask a "why does this happen" question during beta and RC testing on the cooker list; then some joker pops up on the expert list and complains that beta1 posts are inappropriate there? Yeah..... It's starting to seem that Mandrakesoft wants money, developers, and businesses, but not home users. I started saving my buttons for a club membership after the last but one "crisis" but since there's no easy way to participate for someone that won't/can't do credit cards or "PayPal" type entities it hasn't happened. With my income it would be too much of a stretch to try to follow my old 'box set every second release' pattern and still do the membership in any event. Not in Euros or US dollars anyway. Probably not in Canadian dollars. Per month in advance payments maybe, otherwise not. I hope to stay loyal to the distribution that got me weaned away from Windows. The people that 'inhabit' these fine mailing lists have been one of the major reasons for that; the distribution itself was the other. However if I do give up on Mandrake I'll stop subscribing to be fair. Use none of the Mandrake resources offered in other words. As the subject said; "Miscellaneous ramblings." The one thing I've always been semi-adept at. Disappearing back into the woodwork. Warm regards to all; -- Charlie Edmonton,AB,Canada Registered user 244963 at http://counter.li.org So, is the glass half empty, half full, or just twice as large as it needs to be?
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