Hello,
sorry I don't know if this is the right place to send my mail to, so
please excuse me if it was the wrong place.
I just recently installed Mandrake 9.1 RC2 on two of my machines and the
overall impression is really fantastic ! (I know what Terry
Pratchett says about multiple exclamation marks and sanity ;-))
One Machine is a HP Omnibook 6100 with P III M @ 1133 MHz, 256 MB RAM,
30 GB HDD, DVD, Ati Radeon Mobility M6 w/ 16 MB; this was some
cutting-edge hardware back in the time when I bought it, now its only
old, but still running incredibly fast (punches its way through an
average seti-package in about 6 to 7 hours). This Machine was upgraded
to recent Cooker yesterday (urpmi is great !!! :-)).
The other Machine is a fairly typical box, nailed together from pieces
lying around by my ugly self, consisting of a mobo with via appollo
chipset, ati rage 128 w/ 16 MB, PIII 550 (Katmai), 384 MB RAM, DVD, 4,3
GB HDD (system) on the onboard-IDE and 80 GB HDD (data) connected
through a Promise 100 TX PCI-IDE-Controller, and a Soundblaster 64
ISA-Soundcard.
I have used Mandrake since 8.1 and so far 9.1 is the best
Mandrake-Release I have seen so far.
But now to the good and (some) not so good things about 9.1 RC2:
Omnibook 6100:
ACPI: seems to work, although there is no /proc/acpi my Battery-Applets
work right, they show me if the Machine is plugged in or not, how uch
capacity is left and so on (APM is disabled !; btw this machine is pure
ACPI, no APM anymore which was really ugly with 8.2 and 9.0); the
CPU-FAN rarely spins up, only when im unpacking my GB-big
wallpaper-archive or my reprogrammed seti-client is searching for
intelligent life in Texas ;-) (you won't overhear this fan, seems it is
a small brother of the big air vent at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
maybe the tech who constructed this crazy heat-pipe cooling mechanism on
the OB 6100 went to nvidia and designed some part of the FX ??? :-)),
the machine itself doesn't get very hot, only on the underside, but this
is where the graphic-core lies. Suspend-mode works great, I can put the
OB to sleep by hitting the blue suspend-button above the keyboard, and
wake it back up.
Hardware 3D-Acceleration works only up to 1152 x 864 resolution (my OB
6100 has 1400 x 1050), but this seems to be a general XFree-prob,
because I experienced this under Red Hat 8.0, too.
The screen-resolution cannot be changed in the Mandrake control-center,
on RC2 I could change it at least by using XFDrake, but in cooker it
won't do anything, normally I don't change resolution on my OB, because
lower resolution on a 1400 x 1050 Flat-Panel look really ugly, but I
would like to change my resolution sometimes for playing TuxRacer, which
needs Hardware-3D, but that does only work up to 1152 x 864 as mentioned
earlier, on 9.0 resolution-changing worked fine.
I have some problems with Galeon/Mozilla, after I started Galeon as root
(I know I shouldn't work as root) Mozilla is broken (Menus don't work
anymore), after reinstalling Mozilla everything is fine. I have this
problem with Galeon/Mozilla since I upgraded to Moz 1.1 on Mdk 8.2, but
since I never wrote a bug-report about it, I cannot blame anyone for it;
btw this is not a big problem, because I rarely work as root, it is more
of a minor nuisance, for the normal user Galeon and Mozilla work fine,
even if used in parallel.
One big complain: the NFS-Server-Wizard is missing in the Control Center
in the actual cooker version, please bring it back, not that I could
live without it, but i am a lazy guy and this is a comfortable little
helper, maybe you could design it like the NFS-wizard in RH 8.0 or in
Netconf, which allows to administer more than one shares at the same
time, on the other hand there is something positive to mention, the
NFS-mount utility in MCC works now, on 9.1 RC2 it bailed out with an
error message.
RP PPPOE works good, although the PPPOE is somewhat unstable at times,
on some occasions I lose my connection and have to restart the network
service to get back online again.
Installation of 9.1 RC2 went smooth, the new installer looks very good,
although I miss a feature of the older versions: the ability to jump
back to an earlier point, please bring that back, because otherwise the
new installer is nearly perfect.
Firewire seems to work on my OB, I plug in my PCMCIA-Firewire-card and
the modules get loaded, but since I don,t have a Firewire-Harddisk
anymore I cannot verify this. Back in 8.2 (didn't really test it under
9.0) I had massive probs with firewire on my OB 6100, although on my
older XE3 it worked perfectly, but as the modules are loading now (they
didn't load under 8.2 on the OB 6100 because of some IRQ-prob), so I
think there is no problem anymore. Maybe there could be a possibility
for TCP/IP over Firewire on Linux (works great under WinXP, but as I
want to get rid of Microsoft, I would apreciate this working under
Linux) ?? If I've overseen it and TCP/IP over Firewire works under
