I downloaded two days ago the ISOs and yesterday I installed them in the following PC:
Mobo PCChips 748lmrt, 128+64+32 ram, chipset sis620 (with onboard audio cmi8738, lan davicom 901a, video sis 620 agp shared memory, modem pctel AMR), celeron 400, video card 3dfx Banshee 16 mb PCI. hda IBM 60GXP 40 GB (hda1 ReiserFS 5 GB, swap 400 MB and /home about 32 GB, ReiserFS).
I noticed the install process was noticeably slower than mdk 9.0 one, a trend started with mdk 8.1 (as far as I can remember). For example, in mdk 9.0 I click a button and I get the next page, this time when I click the "Next" button I have to wait from 3 to ***30*** seconds (gaussian distribution of delays: mostly 13-18 second). I also noticed that packages installation slowed only a bit, but it was much faster (same PC, obviously) with mdk 8.X or 9.0.
Suggestion: you cleaned up the list with the install steps (on the left), but I think this time is too small :-(
One or two more steps are welcome in the first part, before packages installation.
Very good the idea of removing the "Expert" install, I always thought it was confusing.
I had a "problem" during X configuration: I saw "Voodoo Banshee generic" as video card set automatically, so I simply changed the resolution: from 1024 to 800. I then tested the configuration and ... EVERYTHING freezed. Control-Alt-Fx did not work and I had to reinstall everything from the beginning (I didn't know the x configuration was the LAST step! :-\. Hard reboot and installation from the beginning. After about one hour and half, at the same point of the previous freeze, I simply ignored the test button and I accepted the configuration.
When I rebooted (with much expectations, honestly) I found linux booting without graphics (I was really suprised: I have seen the graphic boot for at least 3 MDKs!) and **really slow**, especially in the "Finding modules dependencies" (or similar, I'm writing from another pc because the pctel modem is not recognized, as expected: not only it's a softmodem, it's also AMR).
Unfortunately, when the login manager should have appeared, everything locked up again. I could hear the HD reading something, but I wasn't able to kill xfree because I could not access the terminals. Hard reboot AGAIN.
I booted into runlevel 3 and executed XFdrake, this time trying to use a different driver for the video card. I didn't find one, but I discovered I could select xfree 4.3 wirthout 3d support or even xfree 3.3.6. I don't know why but the problem was 3D support: the Banshee card has 3d support with xfree, but who knows...
Once disabled 3d support I changed runlevel to 5 and found the Mandrake login manager in english even if I selected italian as primary language (not a problem for me, but I'm not the only user of the pc).
I selected kde in the First time wizard and... I had to wait more than a minute to have the desktop ready (MDK 9.0, same box: max 40 seconds) to have the desktop ready. Not only the startup sequence, but even the overall responsiveness got worse. Kde 3.0 was slower than 2.X, but still acceptable. Kde 3.1 is completely useless with my pc. Is it normal? If yes, it's useless to have a pretty interface if you have to buy a faster (about 2x) computer to achieve the same responsiveness.
I found Gnome 2.2 slower than 2.0 (I always refer to MDK 9.0) but not so much: even menu navigation is unacceptable! (1 sec delays, just to let you know). The strange thing is that this time gnome it's a bit faster than kde.
Another strange thing: not only kde and gnome are slower than mdk 9.0, but even the whole system: for example, window maker or a simple "./configure" executed in a separate shell outside xfree (runlevel 5). Could it depends on the kernel? I don't know, but I find this situation very strange and unacceptable (I mean: I will come back to mdk 9.0 and I'll try to upgrade manually as much as I can).
A question: why did you choose a -pre kernel? was it really necessary?
Comments about my report and suggestions about how to speed up things are welcome, I need them!
Good luck (this time it's really necessary... ;-)
Olaf Marzocchi
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