Hello everyone,
I have been a long time RedHat and SuSE user, but after I got frustrated
with these two and MDK 8.1 having Kernel Panics on my new laptop, I tried
MDK 8.2 b2, since it was the latest Linux release. And I must say I have
been sold. MDK is the only distribution so far that has the necessary
user-friendly and graphical elements that make Linux compete with Windows.
My favorite feature is the 1024x768 16bit framebuffer boot screen. Very nice!
However, I also found some buglets, which are all not crashing the system,
but they are bugs:
1. I have an internal as well as a wireless network card (PCMCIA). The
installer gets confused about that and gives me also the wireless options
for the regular network card, which in return causes wlan.c not to be found
for the regular card. In fact, it is so bad, that I cannot even proceed
with the install. If I start the install without the PCMCIA card inserted,
everything comes up fine.
2. My wireless network card (Linksys WPC11) cannot be activated. It also
shows me something at the start saying that some license does not exist for
the Kernel module or so. RedHat recognized and initialized this card
without any problems from the boot diskette.
3. It seems that the Aurora files are missing for 8.2 b2. After I installed
the 8.1 version of the packages, everything works just great.
4. The antialiasing support does not seem to work correctly. I know that it
worked just great on my old VAIO F390 and RedHat, but on this one it just
does not do the antialiasing effect correctly. Is there a laptop option
that I have to set somewhere?
5. The USB driver does not seem to work correctly with my Plextor
PlexWriter 24/10/40U CD-RW. It recognizes the drive but can never mount.
The DrakeConf also decided that this drive would be the standard drive to
load further components from the CD-ROM. Since I could not specify which
drive it should use, I had to create a symlink to the other device to make
it work. DrakeConf really should use /dev/cdrom and not /dev/scd1.
I have not even attempted to get my USB network card running.
6. I would like to see a nice touchpad driver, where I can define
scrolling, back-and-forth in the browser and so on, since I think that
makes the touchpad so attractive. To have this gone under Linux is a bit of
a pain.
7. Even though there are some problems with the NTFS driver for Linux, I
would still like to get to my Windows files from Linux, even though they
might be read-only.
8. When probing for SCSI during installation, my printer receives a signal
and prints three characters on a page.
Other than that I am very happy and once my beta testing version of VMWare
arrives (and with some cool 512 MB RAM there will be no problem), I might
switch to Linux all the way. The high-quality Drake* tools are definitely
better than SuSE's YaST 2.
Mandrake 8.2 is very suitable for the VAIO PCG-FXA49. It immediately
detected the right graphics card, soundblaster, printer (that never worked
before with my HP OfficeJet 720 - I used the 710 driver) and all other
gadgets.
Regards,
Stephan
--
Stephan Richter
CBU - Physics and Chemistry Student
Web2k - Web Design/Development Technical Project Management
