Hello, Maybe this should go to the cooker list, but I'm not a developer and anyway the release date of Mandrake 7.1 seems to be close. I recently installed Mandrake 7.1 beta3 choosing Hungarian as installation language and an "expert" installation type. Mostly everything worked well, the reworked installer is great. What a pity that most rpm files on the second disk were broken. I reaaly liked: ReiserFS - fast, rock solid and welcome if you ever need to use the reset button (or in case of power failure). The new lilo (no more 1024 cylinder problems at install time). DrakFont - just a mouseclick and you have your truetype fonts working (no more font copying and ttmkfdir). The new menu system. Helix Gnome is really beautiful (even with the wrong icons). Congratulations to the Mandrake team. Now the problems: 1. When choosing individual packages, the sizes are not shown correctly (they are overestimated by 3 orders of magnitude), e.g. a 10 kB sized package is shown to be 10 MB. This error is not present in the English language installation (I tried it at home). 2. Probing for an S3 Trio3D (86C365 chipset) AGP card freezes the system and only the reset button helps. This card which worked well with the XF86_SVGA server in versions 3.3.4 and 3.3.5 of X is not working in v. 3.3.6, it just suspends the monitor (no matter what modelines I use), no error messages (this problem was also present in Mandrake 7.0 and I had to use FBDev ). Good news with XFree86-4.0, by manually adjusting the XF86Config-4 file and making the correct symlink to the XFree86 server I was able to configure it. But why XFdrake --xf4 (for configuring XFree-4.0) fails to make this symlink (I tried it again, and it even changes the correct /etc/X11/X -> /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 symlink to the wrong XF86_SVGA (which is for XFree86-3.3.6)? Another configuration issue with XFDrake --xf4: I have a PS/2 wheel mouse (actually a "7 button" dual wheel, but it does not matter - the second wheel for horizontal scrolling is not supported, please correct me if I am wrong) and configured it as Intellimouse with IMPS/2 protocol. Now XFdrake --xf4 fails to add the following line to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4: Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" while it correctly adds it to the XF86Config file (of course with the old ZAXisMapping "4 5" syntax) when the command is invoked without the --xf4 option?. These are small bugs in my opinion but a newby will not be able figure out why things are not working and will likely not read the documentation of XFree-4.0. So please fix this before release. 3. Now what is really bad at least for Hungarians (but problems with the spanish locale have also been reported in the cooker list): when the entries in /etc/sysconfig/i18n have the "hu" language variable (this happens if you choose hungarian as installation language) konsole won't start, it just coredumps with the following error message: QFont:: load: internal error After setting everything to "en" (or "en_US") in /etc/sysconfig/i18n and rebooting, konsole works again. I have not seen other programs affected by this bug. Question: is there any front-end to changing the language variables in /etc/sysconfig/i18n, like Yast in SuSE or the only way is to edit it manually. How can I avoid to reboot so that changes take effect? 4. The icons on the gnome desktop are bad (generic ones for unknown file types), and they cannot be changed. The same with the desktop background, although in this case you can change it but if you log out the settings are forgotten even if you check this option on the gnome logout window. I checked the permissions and ownership of all gnome related files and directories in my home dir but all seem to be OK, so I have no idea why changes have no effect. You can, however, change the themes, the window manager, and everything on the panel, these settings are not lost. 5. The Gnome control center is very unstable. 6. It is the first time that Mandrake failed to configure my soundcard (a Yamaha OPL3-SAx ISA PnP card) either with sounddrake or with sndconfig. Actually I could hear the test sound for a fraction of second (just "Hello", but not the whole message of Linus) but then the card was silent, and I could see ugly red error messages on shutdown and reboot (/dev/mixer busy or something like that). So I had to configure it with isapnpdump and editing /etc/conf.modules like in the old RedHat 5.2 days. Again not a "newby" method. 7. Problems with kfontmanager Drakfont installed an immense number (more than 300) of truetype fonts, and they are all automatically available, but only for root. Ordinary users have bad luck here, they have to add them one by one from the list of available X11 fonts which is a lot of time (and to remove them manually if they are uninstalled). I hoped that this has been fixed (was also present in Mdk 7.0). 8. Problems with font encodings in kde: In Mdk 7.0 you can set not only the font type and size but also the encoding (e.g. ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-2, ...) for most kde applocations as well as for the desktop, menus, panel, and so on. Just strange: this is not working in Mdk 7.1 beta3. You have the encoding for your language parameter in /etc/sysconfig/i18n. If you set it to "en" you cannot choose ISO-8859-2 fonts (you have and "any"). If it is set to "hu" (or I believe whatever central european language) your fonts will be automatically ISO-8859-2 (which is welcome in the case of truetype fonts usually available for all known encodings) but you don't have the ISO-8859-1 ones (though thay are claimed to be ISO-8859-1 fonts). Just an idea: can this explain why konsole crashes with the hungarian locale? Konsole is perhaps the only kde application for which there is no way to set the font type and encoding (only the size) and it was automatically latin1. I just wonder why kvt, which does not lack this feature, was dropped by Mandrake. Sorry for the verbose listing but this was my first mail on the list. I hope my remarks are useful for people involved in the debugging of Mandrake 7.1. -- Elem�r Vass E�tv�s Lor�nd University Dept. of Organic Chemistry Budapest, Hungary
