Hi

I just wanted to tell you guys at Mandrake and all the contributors that
you produced a very nice release indeed!
I upgraded to a silver membership from my standard one on the day the
ISOs were made available to the club members to be able to get the
Powerpack Edition and I do not regret it one bit!

In less than 24h I had both the Download Edition and the Powerpack
Edition downloaded and ~4Gb were uploaded from my BitTorrent (so I'm
about even here).

My hardware is:
  2 x P3 733MHz (Supermicro mobo)
  512Mb Ram
  3 x HD (2 are connected to a Promise Ultra100TX2) ~150Gb total
  SB Live! 1024
  PCI card with 3 x USB2 ports and 2 x Firewire 400 ports
  Internal CD-RW (SCSI using an Adaptec 29140N)
  Internal Pioneer DVD-R106 (IDE)
  Internal Tape drive
  
  External USB Storage (6Gb HD)
  External Firewire enclosure (1 x 120Gb HD + 1 x 20Gb HD)
  iPod 30Gb
  Sony Digital Camera DSC-F505


Minor ennoyances (using Powerpack Edition):
  - during the installation, the windows for the individual package
    selection were unusually small (I had to use the right-left
    scrolling to see anything)
    This was not happening in RC2.
  - during the summary, same pbm.
    This was not happening in RC2.
  - during the services activation/deactivation, same pbm
    This was not happening in RC2.

  - during the disk partitioning (custom partitioning) the external
    USB storage was recognized as sda1, the firewire drives were
    recognized as sdb1, sdb2 and sdc1
    Trying to assign mount points like /mnt/multimedia, the installer
    tried to mount /mnt/mnt/multimedia
    I reported the pbm in bugzilla for beta2 I believe.
    sdb1 was indicated as being FAT32 when it's EXT3...
    After changing the mount point to something the installer would
    accept the rest of the installation was pretty straight forward
    (except for the small windows pbm).

  - upon reboot the external devices caused some troubles as they
    could not be mounted and I was presented with the fsck option or
    Ctrl-D (kind of going circles here).
    This may be due to the fact that during the boot up sequence the
    firewire modules seem to be activated after the mounting sequence.
    The only solution was to somehow find a way to edit the fstab to
    remove the definitions for these drives...
    (I used another Linux installation to mount / and edit /etc/fstab)

  - Once in KDE I changed the fstab to include all my drives (hardcoded)
    without using the hotplug stuff (although I need to re-visit this
    area as it's still a mistery to me how it really works).

  - I've noticed that if my external USB storage is switched on during
    the boot up sequence, it sometimes appears on the SCSI bus before
    my hdc (with SCSI). It's kind of odd that an external device ends
    up registered before an internal device... and it causes pbm with
    the way the fstab is setup.

  - I had the menu disappearing pbm  when doing software installation.
    This was repaired everytime by doing update-menus as root.


The good:
  - well, thanks to urpmi, contrib and plf pretty much everything is
    setup and working well, audio, mp3, dvd playing, opengl (nvidia
    drivers), games (CivCTP, quake3, RTCW, Neverwinter Nights ** those
    are not available through urpmi, go buy them!), VMWare,
    iPod, VPN access to my company (with Cisco modules), etc...

  - Encoding CDs to MP3 while at the same time using VMWare, uploading
    MP3s to my iPod and transfering files from internal HD to external
    firewire HD did not cause any troubles at all.
    (I cannot say it was really fast, they're only old fashioned P3
    after all but it was moving along rather nicely).

It's too early to say it will stay stable in all conditions (plus I
haven't tried everything yet) but I had a lot of pbms (crashes once a
day at least) with LM9.1 and more recently Gentoo doing these things so
right now I'm a very happy silver member.

Thanks Mandrake (and contributors of course).

-- 
____________________________________________________________________
 Frederic P. Soulier           [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 OpenPGP key available on http://www.keyserver.net
 1024D/BA6700ED   49A6 8E8E 4230 8D41 1ADE  B649 3203 1DD2 BA67 00ED
_____________________________________________________________________

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