Onto my third day using the new 9.1 edition. In case anyone's interested, I thought I'd followup on a few items:
1) Sound works beautifully now. It's crisp, doesn't clip, and has not had any dropouts or pauses even while moving windows around. Did Mandrake patch anything that would cause this welcome improvement? I'm using the i810 drivers now. It was being picked up (correctly) as a VIA 82Cxxx but this wasn't working. Overriding draksound allowed sound to play. There were a couple remnants of the old driver left in modules.conf that I had to clear out to get it to load properly on boot. 2) USB is still not working. USB Keyboard/Mouse work fine but so far no cameras or scanners are detected. It's probably the fault of this crappy Biostar board. 3) CDROM is working perfectly now. Not sure what did it, but I had tried jumpering the drive as master and swapped it to different interfaces. It's back on the original master drive on secondary IDE controller but is now working where before it was not. The one glitch I noticed was when I put in a blank CDR into the drive and used Konqueror to browse to /mnt. The application froze for about two minutes trying to mount the unmountable disk. 4) urpmi is awesome. MandrakeUpdate rocks. I've been a big Debian fan for a long time because updates have always been so easy. Mandrake definitely wins this time, though. Also, not having to search through CDs for a package is a big time saver. I'm giving a presentation in a couple weeks on RPM usage and will use urpmi as a response to those who mention RPM dependency hell. 5) xine does not have all the proper codecs for some AVI files. Still looking for packages to fix this. DVD playback is somewhat important too since this will be a demo machine. MP3s worked out of the box, unlike the RedHat installation. Still no television... 6) Nitpicks: It would have been nice to have my scroll mouse automatically detected and configured for web scrolling. The green on blue bootup text is difficult to read on some monitors because of the contrast (or lack thereof). 7) Major stuff: Everything seems faster. I'm guessing this is because of the new GCC. KDE is certainly more responsive than before. Everything seems well integrated and yup, very professional. I've been using the common desktop apps (Evolution, Konqueror, XMMS, OpenOffice) for the past couple days and like what I see. I was going to suggest that the menu system adopt a more purpose friendly naming convention (Audio Player vs XMMS, Email vs Evolution) but the "What to Do" entry works a lot better. This may be my imagination, but the box also seems to run cooler. Is there anything in the kernel that could possibly have done this? -- Kwan Lowe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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