Thanks to the wonders of a cable modem, I installed Mandrake 7.2 early Sunday
morning.
So far it seems quite a bit like 7.1, the only major differences being a nice
graphical bootup, and a nicer Kmail and Quanta (HTML editor for KDE). Now 7.2
does include KDE2, but I"m a Gnome person and Gnome hasn't changed much
between versions. I also haven't seen too much of a difference between
running X 4.0.1 and X 3.3.6. The printing is a lot better though with CUPS. A
month or so ago I had sent an email asking why printing looked really light
on the paper. But now it looks just like normal with 7.2. Also you now have
the option of directly booting into a desktop as a user, similar to the way
Windows does. So if you are the only one that uses your computer, then you
don't have to go login anymore when you boot up. Plus there are numerous
extra programs and configuration tools to play around with.
I did have a couple of problems installing it. The first time through the
instllation program hanged when I asked it to check for bad blocks on my
harddrive when it formatted. So the second time through I just formatted it
regularly and it worked. Then it told me my lpr, XFree86, and some other
package was corrupted and wouldn't install. So I went back to the package
select screen, reselected all the packages I wanted, tried it again, and it
worked. Where is that bug report thing for Mandrake at?
The other major problem I had when I finally booted it up, was that all the
Kmail messages I'd been deleting for the past 3 months suddenly appeared. So
I had over 10,000 emails sitting in the various folders in kmail. So I had to
get rid of most all the Newbie emails I'd saved over the last 3 months
because I didn't feel like going through 8,000 emails to find the 100 I
wanted. Reading through the help file on that problem, I discovered you have
to "Compact" the folder or something for it to "really" delete the emails off
your harddrive.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend spending hours downloading this, as it's not
that much of an improvement over 7.1. If you have a high-speed connection,
then maybe do it or use Cheapbytes, but I wouldn't pay the $30 or whatever
for the full upgrade at retail.
--
Anthony
http://binaryfusion.net
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