Sorry I haven't been contributing to much during the last beta testing
but here goes.
I have a newer gateway with rage 128 and soundblaster sound. promise
ata-66, ibm hard drive, and a nic card.
I'm not normally posting things like this Because I really like mandrake
allot and I really like the distro. I've tried almost all of them
turbolinux, slack, redhat, caldera, corel, suse, trustix, peanut, that
even includes the newest ones of these distro's accept for suse. Even
though mandrake is the best of them I never once had the problems with
them that I've had with this last release of mandrake 7.1.
here are the problems with the mandrake 7.1 iso's just freshly
downloaded.
1) To many to count but about 1/4 of the rpms on the install cd are bad
or the hdlist is bad (just guessing here) but the installer was able to
detect that they were bad and even asked me if I wanted to continue.
Some of these I didn't care to much like afterstep. I've been trying to
figure out how to keep it from installing for a long time (I almost
always use expert mode and select packages by hand but some of the
packages I unselect always end up installed anyway) but at the end of
the install I was informed that the xfree 3.3.6 packages would not
install and was asked if i wanted to use xfree4.0. When I said yes I
just ended up looping back to the begining of the install xserver
routines and informed me again that that the xfree 3.3.6 package was
bad.
2) The only way I could get out of the install after the looping xserver
install was to manually select exit install. This didn't cleanly unmount
my partitions. Which in turn needed fsck to run at the first boot.
3) This wasn't to horrible I still have a fairly good running console
based system but this isn't something that I can sell to customers.
Considering most them are people that want to dual boot systems to
check linux out first. For the server systems It won't matter to much I
guess.
I'm not sure what has been going on at mandake HQ lately but I sure hope
that the ipo pressures aren't causing you guys to do something like
linuxcare. Its nice to make money with a good product but sometimes A
little more care need's to be taken to make sure the product will meet
expectations.
One last note I'm not exactly addressing this to the developers but more
to whoever is making the choices for the direction that mandrakesoft is
headed as a company. The developers have done a good job of trying to
produce a product for the public. It just gets rushed to publication
before they have a chance to get done with it.
