I am amazed. I bought a new Athlon in spring. Mandrake 8.2 installed faultlessly and the only piece of hardware ever needing my attention was Lite-on CDRW that needed some configuration to start roasting CDs. Ah yes, in order to get 3d acceleration for my Geforce2 DDR I downloaded Nvidia proprietary drivers that installed in minutes. Install of 9.0 changed my life. It has caused more trouble than RH6.1, my first ever Linux install, and I am not through it yet. 1) It would not recognise my PS2 Safeway wheelmouse. Worse, it would not work with any generic drivers at all. I found my mouse usable with some Genius drivers except it would sometimes disappear and reappear mysteriously. 2) VIA8233 soundcard would work only partially, leaving most of the games without sound or with very choppy sound. Proposed cure of installing newest alsa drivers was a waste of bandwidth and time. Cause of this problem has been explained to me in and out of this list. I could somehow live with it. 3) Installation of Nvidia drivers fails invariably, so I had no 3d acceleration despite experimenting with different versions of X. Finally I succeeded trashing X completely doing it. 4) It would miss my fav WM - Fluxbox and compilation of a package from FB homepage fails for reasons I have had no time to find out. As you noticed I have been rather busy lately. The good news is, it recognized and set up my CDRW OK ;-)
After trashing X with nvidia I turned back to clean-install my old 8.2 and lo! it would know nothing anymore of my soundcard and nvidia drivers would not install anymore. Fortunately I am not without a system entirely. I have Knoppix 3.1 CD that, when inserted, recognizes and configures every piece of hardware (except CDRW which it occupies anyway) without a single mouseclick or use of keyboard. Comparing those two distros I can only ask - what the f...k those guys in the Mandrake are doing? As I said, I am completely amazed. Wahur, with Mandrake since 8.0
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