[Cooker] RC1 issues & thoughts

[Serge Pl�ss]

Hi

just installed RC1 on a Dell Dimension 4550.

Configuring printers during installation doesn't show/discover the jetdirect printers on the local network. Have to install and configure them manually. 9.0 discovered them correctly.

Choosing reboot from KDE causes a drop to the console login prompt instead of rebooting.
Login in at that moment and typing reboot shuts the pc down instead of rebooting. Both of these behavior are new since RC1. Didn't happen with Beta 2/1

Clicking on Printer Configuration in the Mandrake control center just causes the icon to flash, but printerdrake is not being started. Starting it from command line works. This has been since beta2 at least.

Samba Configuration under Configuration-Network has blank buttons (for example for Save, Reset, etc) that you need to guess what they are under all/most configuration screens

OpenOffice doesn't have the Help files installed. Shouldn't that be part of a default OpenOffice installation instead of having to go install it manually later?

Konsole's default font looks pretty bad on this default 1280x1024 resolution as it takes almost the full width of the screen. Courier 10 Pitch looks already better. Not sure what it used to be on 9.0 and 8.2 but those looked better.

This is a dedicated test machine without any other OS installed on it and the default fonts look awful on this machine. I will start to modify/install other fonts but out of the box the system looks just bad., especially the fonts on the desktop and in the konqueror filemanager and startmenu which are the first things a new user is likely to see.

Konqueror LAN Browser just list lan://localhost/ if I type in lan://mydomain/ I get an error message saying The lisa daemon does not appear to be running but it shows up with a ps ax:

1696 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/lisa -c /etc/lisarc

I had already changed samba to the same workgroup name as the windows network and was able to use Linneighborhood to browse the domain
Gnomba also immediately browsed the local domain/workgroup correctly.

I watched my co-worker trying to get browsing to work in the konqueror file manager give up after spending half a day. He installed a couple of other distros and some of them are capable of browsing the local subnet or local full network out of the box without reconfiguring anything, just launch the konqueror file manager, click on LAN Browsing and it showed all the hosts on the local network.
Wonder what it would take for Mandrake Linux to get that going as well out of the box.

Three people I showed the default desktop to, asked where the icon for the webbrowser is. I show them the shortcut down on the panel, but they all said they want it on the desktop. They said that that icon on the desktop should launch the default webbrowser if that is possible (so either Mozilla / Konqueror / Netscape / or which other browser was selected as the 'default' browser).
They mentioned similar thoughts for the Default E-Mail program as it seem those are the main apps together with wordprocessing and playing mp3s that they would be using most of the time.

Mandrake-Galaxy has 'only' text entries and next to them the text "image". Those users I mentioned above also said that the four icons for "MandrakeClub" / "Discover custom services" / " Buy new software" / "Get Support" would be enough if they would be in the Galaxy screen and in the menu system but not as an icon on the desktop.

Thank you for a great distro

Serge