Hi
I have just converted several RH X.Y machines to Mandrake 6.1. It was/is
an interesting expirience...
First the "good news": i like the Mandrake, will probably stay with it for
a while. It is very similar to redhat, and i have not expirienced any
compatibility problems yet. Actually findina all the installed packages
in the menue is a completely new expirience for me, and it saves me a
lot of unnececarry work. ,-)
And now to the "bad stuff": Below is a summary of the problems I have
encountered on "upgrade". I hope it may be of some use for other would-be
RH->Mandrake converts.
- "Upgrading" from RH X.Y to Mandrake could have been easier. I would
suggest using the rpm -U --oldpackage for the packages which are nessesary
for a system. As it is, I have ended up with semi-unusable system, because
some of the redhat-packages werent updated. It took me some time before I
realised that "rpm -Fh --oldpackages *" solves the problem. ( by the way,
rpm has something against the "vim" package)
- lpr-package was completely useless. The update seams to work, though.
(I still have problems with one machine. This is a particular case, and
i suppose that the problem i have is caused by the differences in
printer-port handling between the 2.2 and 2.0 kernels: I have 3
paralell-ports on this machine, two printers and a paralell-port zip.
With "old" kernels, I used to put a line in lilo-config, indicating
which ports should be used by ppa, and which by lp. It does not work
properly anymore - i cannot access one of the printers. Any sugestions
here? )
- nfs-export did not work, because of the "nsswitch.conf": Per default,
"netgroup" is only searched-for in "nisplus". Is there any particular
reason against using the "nis"-based netgroups (or even "files")?
By the way, can I use netgroups in tcp-wrappers now? Last time I tried,
it did not work... And, does anyone know if "kdm" is wrappers-aware? xdm
isn't, gdm is, but gdm does not work correctly with XDCPM yet...
- samba & vmware = trouble. I have absolutely no idea what is wrong: samba
gets started on "boot", and one can access it with "smbclient". However,
vmware machine cannot "see" the samba-machine on the virtual net. If I
restart samba and run the vmware-machine again, everything is OK. Any
sugestions?
- one of the reasons I have switched to Mandrake was that i have hoped for
a better PGP and ssh integration. I have seen that some things have been
done on this field, but I have expected more.
For instance, One thing I would welcome would be a slight change in a
Xsession- check if the "ssh-agent" exists on the system - if it exists,
one should use it:
##############################
...
case $1 in
kde)
exec ssh-agent startkde
;;
gnome)
exec ssh-agent gnome-session
;;
etc.
###############################
- As a last remark: what is the Mandrake updates-policy? I do hope, you
intend to keep the security updates on-pair with the Redhat (or better).
What surprises me is that Redhat-updates allready contains:
lpr-0.46
pam-0.68
while Mandrake-versions are:
lpr-0.43
pam-0.66 (no upgrades)
As far as I know, RedHat only posts security-related updates (although...
6.0-updates dir is full of kde and gnome stuff), so this
worries me a bit. I do hope there is a good explanation though.
Hapy Mandraking!
Denis
UNIX is friendly! It's only picky about who it's friends are...
