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 Linux, could someone please tell me ? I have one big problem with 9.1 RC2 on my other box, it does not want to work with my 3Com 3c905 NIC, the Card is correctly identified, the module is loaded, but the card is not initialized. The card itself is ok, because it works under Libranet and Knoppix, and it worked fine under Mdk 9.0, I am not sure but I think the problem arose after I configured the soundcard, I had no time to investigate this further, but maybe someone else had a similar prob, maybe I am only to silly, who knows :-) ? Somelast comments: The new MCC-Icons look good, they blend very well in the Crystal Icon-theme, maybe designing a pure Mandrake icon-theme for both KDE and Gnome (what about calling it Galaxy-icons) would not be bad, if I would be better at painting I would have tried to do it, but I am not really a great artist. MDK-Galaxy theme is great, all those guys complaining about it seem never have heard anything of something called Corporate Identity, I really like the Idea of a universal theme such as Bluecurve or Galaxy, which are really superb themes, although I like Keramik and High Performance Liquid, Bluecurve or Galaxy are better suited for corporate needs I think, because they are not so deep into eye-candy, but more into ease of use, maybe redesigning the Mandrake-homepage using Galaxy would be a great idea ?, at least keep Galaxy alive, it is by now the best theme, even a tick better than Bluecurve (Galaxy supports transparent menus; a bit eye-candy should be ;-)). MDKKDM is not bad at all, but as KDM has more features and a Galaxy-theme, too, there is no real need for MDKKDM, but as you can change your Preferences in the MCC, this is no big issue, MDKKDM does not really hurt and its name is a nice "play upon letters". Hopefully Mandrake 9.1 gets a success, it has really the potential and I would really like to see a Mandrake 9.2 and so on ... Keep the good work up, now it is part of the users to go and buy Mandrake 9.1, I will buy it Hope I could help you a bit with my weird comments and even more weird ideas. Good luck for the future Thorsten (Lavaeolus)
