Yesterday, I installed Redhat 8.0 on my friends laptop which is pretty close in configuration to mine (AMD K6-II 550 Mhz, 192 Mb RAM, 12 Gb HDD) The most noticeable differences were....
1. The fonts were by default awesome as against in a default Mandrake installation in which I had to tweak here and there for the nice fonts
2. Mozilla browser started in flat 6 seconds on his laptop and on mine it takes 12-14 seconds minimum. Also, The browser had a smooth scrolling effect when scrolling heavy hog pages like http://www.msn.com, http://home.netscape.com.
3. Their Install/Uninstall packages was kind of good for a complete newbie. Altough, rpm file listing was not present in that either (Wonder when Mandrake guys get it back, I really dig that feature)
Apart from these, I found their...
1. GNOME terminal very sluggish and slow in just showing a listing of files (simple ll command)
2. MP3 support to completely missing. I had to externally install mpg123 and XMMS plugins
3. I had to separately install DVD rpms
4. No builtin NTFS support for the Windows 2000 partition. I had to install the NTFS module from http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/
5. Altough, My friends iPod (Windows version) was shown as recognized at /dev/sda2 (in /var/log/messages) we had to manually mount it on a new mount point (mkdir /mnt/ipod && mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/ipod) and add the entry in /etc/fstab . I beleive in Mandrake it would be automagically available on the desktop, maybe !
6. There was no default Samba browser OR Network neighbourhood application like gnomba or Linneighborhood already installed. But, I remembered that Nautilus too was mentioned to do the job. So, Nautilus did finally let me browse the network but, passwords for a machine once entered could not be entered again. Atleast it worked, but, in mandrake Nautilus just hangs forever to display the username, password dialog.
Hope this helps anyone and hope we can have a faster, better Mozilla for Mandrake too !
Regards,
Sandeep
--
Sandeep Khanna
Graduate Student in Computer Science, Villanova University
Contact Number: (Home) 1-610-964-1320 (Office) 1-877-946-4622 Ext (106) (Cell) 1-267-253-6808
Quote of the day:
Failure is the foundation of truth. It teaches us what isn't true, and that is a great beginning. To fear failure is to fear the possibility of truth.
--Joan Chittister
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
