Ok, I tried Mandrake for the first time recently, and ran into a number of issues that I thought might be of interest to the Mandrake developers in the hopes that they will help improve future disttributions of Mandrake. BACKGROUND: ============= I've been using Unix since 1982, and Linux since 1995 or so (when I finally gave up on the Amiga). I started with Slackware, then left the Linux fold for a bit to use FreeBSD, then came back to RedHat 4.2, 5.0, and 5.2, then Caldera OpenLinux 2.2, then RedHat 6.1, and now Mandrake 7.0. The reason I wanted to try Mandrake 7.0 in the first place was that I have a Dell Inspiron 7500 with a Rage Mobility PRO and a 1280x1024 display; X 3.3.6 is the first version to support this graphics card directly. (I was previously using the framebuffer driver.) I upgrading over my RedHat 6.1, but then Netscape started crashing left and right and I was hoping that a "complete" distribution would be my ticket. Since I also wanted to re-partition anyway (to give more HD room to the Evil Empire, which is very greedy that way), I just backed up my personal and modified files and did a from-scratch install, not an upgrade. I picked the "expert" option; I thought I was pretty well-qualified. I have a "highly partitioned" arrangement, a result of being badly burnt by a severe file-system corruption in the past. I use partitions for /, /var, /tmp, /usr, /usr/bin, and /home (plus a couple others). PRAISE: ======= First, a few things I really liked since most of this will be a long list of complaints. - I like the fact that it is optimized for the Pentium. - I like the wide variety of included packages; many packages that I've been getting off the net hither & yon were included in the distribution CD. (Eg, flash, maestro sound card, jpegoptim, xanim (with full codec support), and xv (which RedHat has recently dropped, believe it or not). - The printer just came up and worked: this is the first time since Redhat 4.2, I believe, that this has happened. (They seem to have dropped support for the LaserJet Series II / LaserJet Plus when it got to be a full decade old.) - The video *and* sound just came up and worked. This is totally unprecedented for me. (I have a bad habit of having overly-new hardware and use laptops exclusively; neither makes it easier to use Linux.) Actually it's not all that easy to get them working on *Windows*; it was easier under Linux! THE ISSUES: =========== On the other hand, there were a number of things that didn't work so well. Please forgive me for those which are known issues; the web site says to check to what cooker has already fixed but I couldn't actually figure out where to do so. If nothing else they'll tell you what I ran into. These range from the rather serious to the truly trivial, and are in no particular order. 1. The cdrom setup is clever, but flawed. I have a CD-RW drive, and the installation process very cleverly added an append="hdc=ide-scsi" line to the lilo.conf, but it *didn't* alter the mapping of /dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdc. The result was that I could not read any CD-ROMs (which after all contained all my backups) after I installed Mandrake. This is a definite problem; it took me rather a long time to figure it out (with some help from the expert list before I totally worked it out though I had a semi-acceptable workaround by then), and a novice . . . well, a novice would just give up and re-install Windows, I'd imagine. 2. The included version of cdrecord and/or mkisofs is apparently broken. I was having lots of trouble (once I solved problem #1) with producing CDs that had corrupt *data* on them. I was thinking kernel corruption or something. I finally tried the versions of cdrecord and mkisofs that came with scdbackup (downloaded previously off the net) and voila! it works just fine, no corruption. 3. The /etc/magic file had no entry for jpg files. I'd never actually mucked with this file before, but luckily it turned out to be trivial to fix, but again . . . you are selling as the distribution for newbies, and hand-editing the /etc/magic file isn't a "novice" sort of activity. 4. I did not have a really good experience with the Mandrake 7.0 installation process; this is really a number of related items: a) The disk partitioner was very pretty, but it was perfectly happy to allow me to create *overlapping* partitions; in particular, I had two large partitions (/usr and /home) at the end of the disk and then I changed my mind and decided I wanted to split /usr/local off from /usr, so I delete /usr and made two separate partitions there. By going "out of order" like this I seemed to defeat its intelligence about reasonable partition sizes, and I accidentally created partitions which, as I noticed later, overlapped. I went back and played with it, I could get them to overlap by dozens of cylinders; it just doesn't seem to check for this at all. b) I wanted to get a lot of the nifty Enlightenment packages even though I'm a very definite KDE man, so I asked for both systems; I was quite surprised when I finished installing to wind up with Enlightenment as my default xdm rather than kdm. This was unfortunate on two counts: (i) the manual--admittedly not aimed at experts--shows KDE for all examples, and (ii) while kdm lets you easily and visibly choose your logon environment, Enlightment isn't quite so, um, enlightened. I wound up re-installing (first attempt to fix CD-ROM problems noted in item #1) and this time picked KDE only, with better results. c) I did a KDE install and it didn't pick the kmail package!! I really couldn't believe that; I consider kmail one of the major arguments in favor of KDE. d) Installing packages post-install is really rather difficult; I'd like an interface like the expert interface in the install. kpackage is nice for managing installed packages but is incredibly awkward for installing; if any dependencies are missing, it just notifies you and you have to find the #@$! things yourself. I found "rpmdrake" more to my liking (why does the doc favor kpackage anyway?) but it can only do one at a time. Of course, I could install the packages directly with rpm, but that brings me to the *biggest* problem I had with the install--the reason I was trying to install dozens of packages at once in broad categories: e) The idea of having a size to which the distribution should fill, and prioritizing the packages so that the disk is filled up to that high water mark is a very nice ones for newbies, BUT it really messed *me* up. Why? Because it sets a maximum high-water mark of half the space. The user can adjust that mark down, but never upwards, even in expert mode. This is a really problem for me because I had a 1.3 G /usr partition, and it was supposed to be filled almost to capacity with the distribution installation. Even my /usr/local was on a separate partition, so I wanted to max out that puppy, but I could only fill it half-full at installation time! And expert mode was ignored, too. Ideally, this limit would be ignored or seriously modified if /usr is on its own partition (and even more so if /usr/local is on yet another partition); at the very least, somebody in Expert mode ought to bloody well be able to over-ride it. Of course, being in expert mode meant that I could add packages back in my hand, but that is very tiresome, and especially since problem #1 caused me to install twice, I wasn't as thorough as I might have been. 5. Mandrake didn't prompt me for a node name. It's not the end of the world, but I always find it a lot easier to do this at install time. 6. As installed (and this might be a consequence of #4(e), ghostview didn't work. This turned out to be because, even though I was doing an installation with X, and even though "gv," "ghostview", and "kghostview" were all installed, nonetheless, the printer-only version of ghostscript was installed rather than the printer-and-display version. I was *really* befuddled about that one until somebody on the "expert" list explained it. 7. I don't have an "HOWTO" docs installed! I can't even find them on my install CD! As a Linux "old timer," these are the first place I turn when I get stuck, but I can't. These are really fundamental to Linux and I can't believe you omitted them (indeed, the manual refers to them at one point), but if they are there the name sure is obtuse; I've tried *how* and *HOW* in the RPMS directory, as well as *doc*. Nothing obvious. 8. [Might not be Mandrake-specific, but what the hey . . .] Something's odd about /tmp and the font-server. I have /tmp on a separate partition with the specific idea that I can mess with it with impunity. But recently /tmp got massively corrupted (as a result of playing with Beta-version vmware I believe); it was claimed to be 95% full when a du showed it but 4% full. So I just rebooted under single and mkfs'ed the partition from scratch, but when I rebooted gain, X wouldn't come up becuase it couldn't find the font server. I wound up re-installing X and the font server, and all was well., but I don't see how that could be unless the install process actually writes permanent files to /tmp, and that would of course be wrong. -- I am "Brian, the man from babble-on" (Brian T. Schellenberger). I can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] . I support http://www.eff.org & http://www.programming-freedom.org . I boycott amazon.com. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazon.html .