Just wanted to report a success story for anyone new thinking of installing via ftp :) Since cooker's gone 'production' I decided to try it out.
I used the cooker mirrors to install today since I'm too impatient to wait for the ISO's (LOL) and it all went VERY smoothly. The new installer is quite nice and even with the bandwidth limitation it only took 3 hours to install and be up and running completely. (I selected a LOT of packages.) The process of an ftp install was pretty easy. I grabbed the network.img file from the cooker mirror (ftp://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake-devel/cooker/i586/images/network.img) and put it on a floppy (dd if=network.img of=/dev/fd0). Rebooted from the floppy and followed through to boot to the expert install (press F1 and at boot: put expert). dhcp for my network worked off the bat when it loaded the driver for my ethernet card and all i had to put in was the ftp address of where i was installing from (ftp://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake-devel/cooker/cooker/) and associated info to run the installer. The installer's been slimmed down a bit as far as the steps you take but it's all still accessable once you get to the summary if you need to change configuration on your video card etc. I was pretty impressed by the way they've made it a little more simple to do. Hardware detection worked much better than it did when I installed 9.0. The package selection is pretty much the same which I'm not really fond of (same packages showing up in different categories) but no big deal. I _did_ have one configuration issue (which was EASY to fix) and that was it only configured my cable connection and not the card that goes to my LAN but I fixed it in the Mandrake Control Center when I rebooted and it was probably an option I could have configured durring install which I may have overlooked. As far as internet connection sharing goes I'm still using iptables for it so I can't report on how the wizard in mcc works but if you use the rc.firewall from the iptables HOWTO it works great (though iptables is NOT installed by default, you need to select it durring install). Anyone a little too impatient to wait for ISO's with a few hours to spare, I'd suggest the ftp install. I'm not the best at this and still it was pretty painless as long as you know which driver your ethernet card needs. As far as how 9.1 will be, I can say that what I've seen I'm quite impressed with. Mozilla 1.3 is a lot faster than 1.1 was, KDE 3.1 is absolutely gorgeous (though I don't usually use it). Gnome I couldn't tell you about since I didn't install it (bleah... Gnome lost it after 1.4 IMHO... what's left of Gnome anyway, just bonobo and a panel? If they switch to mono then the only real Gnome componant left will the the panel :P ). I haven't had quite the problems with apps that I had with 9.0. The versions of apps included seem to have all had improvements at least on my machine. Anyway if you're eagerly awaiting the 9.1 ISO's I think everyone will like it. (Well, unless you're from the old rpmdrake camp... that hasn't changed.) I was getting disillusioned with Mandrake with 9.0 but I'm a believer again with 9.1. 8.2 was the 'megadistro' IMO before, but 9.1's got me re-thinking so far. This distro's going to put Mandrake back on the map as a leading contender for a desktop distro I'm sure. Jerry -- "The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat." -Albert Einstein
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