Hi all,
first, let me congratulate the Mandrake team. You guys have done a beautiful
job with the latest version, I've been using Mandrake since the first release
but was still surprised by how much things had improved on this one. Keep up
the good work!
After the praise, let me list a few problems I encountered, using the beta1.
Ignore accordingly if they've been fixed in beta2.
System used: desktop pIII-450, 128MB RAM, 12GB Western-Digital disk (IDE
master 1), SBLive Value sound card, creative PC-DVD Encore 5x drive (IDE
Master 2), ATI Xpert@play 98 video card, generic 17in monitor (reflex
fx7000).
I selected the "expert" install with manually selected packages, with
"developer" as the starting package preselection (and lots of manual
tweaking).
Problems:
1) The 2nd cd (extensions) wasn't recognized. I would put it in when asked
for, but the tray would open again and again. I finally just told it to
ignore it and later went in by hand and added all the rpm's I wanted from it.
I'd suggest moving the kpackage rpm to the first cd, just in case this
happens to someone for any reason (or they don't have the 2nd cd), since I
think kpackage is such a basic system maintenance tool. For people not used
to the rpm command line you'll make life a lot easier this way.
2) The install froze after testing X. I told it to try to use Xfree 4.0, it
gave me the test screen which worked ok, but when I pressed Yes on the little
"Is this ok?" box, the system froze hard. I had to give it a hard reset,
wait for the ensuing fsck and finish things by hand. Fortunately at that
point most things were working other than runlevel was still at 3 by default,
so I changed it to 5. Everything else seemed ok. The system ended up actually
using X 3.3.6, as I discovered later.
3) Something seems wrong with a kde core library somewhere, because kvt (the
light terminal emulator) coredumps on me. I tried copying a working binary
from a Mandrake 6.1 box, no difference. Also kasteroids isn't working well
(starts but doesn't recognize keyboard input). So I suspect the culprit is a
KDE library somewhere, sorry I can't pinpoint it further.
4) The linux8x16 font, needed by konsole for some modes, is missing. I'd
imagine this should be a standard part of the konsole install, as it
complains *a lot* for not finding it.
5) APM seems not to work to well on my desktop. I don't know if this is under
your control or if it's an inherent apmd limitation, but standby/suspend
don't work at all: the system tries to go down (so some signal is being sent
to the motherboard) but wakes up immediately. Only power down works properly.
6) GRUB/LILO: I'd never used grub before and now I think it's great, but
there's some potential confusion here, I think. I don't quite understand why
install offers to put *both* grub and lilo on the system. Wouldn't it make
more sense to suggest one default (grub?) and let whoever wants the other to
activate it but not putting both on? I now have grub as my bootloader but all
the graphical boot config tools are trying to deal wiht lilo, and I'm afraid
to use them b/c I'm not sure what kind of a mess they're going to make. For
most users I think this potentially confusing/dangerous situation could be
avoided by having one bootloader present only, and depending on which one is
chosen, only installing the configuration tools that refer to it. Cleaner and
safer, I think.
7) In the packages descriptions during manual selection, the priority field
seems rather random/confusing: terms like "garbage", "must have", etc. are
used, and it wasn't clear to me at all that they were relevant. First, I
don't think an author would appreciate his program called garbage regardless
of its importance, but I also think that a numeric relevance scale would be a
lot more useful: having a 0-5 range with 0 being unnecessary and 5 must
haves, plus a "necessary for system operation" value, for packages which
can't be unselected (kernel, basic commands, etc.). Just a thought.
8) Kudos for putting lyx on! One less thing I have to manually hunt around
for everytime I set up a machine. I would suggest dumping klyx altogether.
Although it was a nice port, its base code is so outdated with respect to the
main lyx code tree that by now it's pretty much useless, and only prone to
confusing people who don't know the lyx/klyx development process.
9) One suggestion for your menu structure: kedit is listed under "text tools"
but not under "editors", even though it's just an editor. Isn't this a little
confusing? How about having editors be a submenu of text tools, or at least
putting *all* the editors together in one place? I couldn't find a clear
logic for the way the text tools/editors menus were organized.
10) The xemacs icon is only provided in "mini" size, so when you add it to
your panel you get a microscopic looking icon if you're running in normal
size. There's a normal sized xemacs icon in your older distros, why not use
it?
Ok guys, that's it. I tried to make it precise and detailed enough to be
useful before the final 7.1 release is out. Ask me for specifics on any topic
you need, otherwise congratulations for having the hands down best linux
distro in existence!
Cheers,
Fernando.
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Fernando Perez
Graduate Student, High Energy Physics Group
Physics Department
Campus Box 390
University of Colorado at Boulder
Boulder, CO 80309
Ph: (303) 492-4789
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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