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 .
