Hi everyone,
I'm new to the list, and also new to Mandrake. I just upgraded a RedHat 6.0
laptop and so far things seem good, but I have a few comments. Since I've
realized that the developers keep an eye on this list, hopefully these
comments will be useful in improving the distribution.
The upgrade went in general quite well, but I did run into a few glitches
which I'm sure could be easily addressed.
1) True Type. Even though I think I checked every TType-related package during
installation, and xfs has the correct TType directory in its load path, the
fonts still don't show up anywhere. This kind of bummed me, since "out of the
box" TType support was one of the big things touted in the Mandrake homepage.
I've tried to fix it but I'm not too sure even where to start. Any
suggestions appreciated.
2) KDE Themes. Even though I selected KDE to be installed/configured during
installation, the theme manager was nowhere to be found at boot time. I put it
in by hand from the CD, but this should have been in from the beginning. (If
Mandrake is really to appeal to the newbie, as they claim, these things should
be automatically done).
3) Power management for laptops. Another "out of box" goodie that didn't work,
and which I was looking forward to. Mandrake's website touts "- Power-saving
management control under KDE - laptop control under KDE", so I figured these
would be no brainers. I later found the two necessary packages and put them in
by hand, but same comment as in (3) applies.
4) XEmacs. I already had version 21.0 installed so I didn't need it, but I
couldn't find it listed in the packages available during installation. I've
always thought that not having XEmacs is a glaring omission of RedHat, so it's
great that Mandrake has it (*it is* on the CD). But not listing it during
intallation will probably make most users miss it. If it was there and I just
didn't see it, disregard this comment. Also, it would be nice to update to the
new version (21.x) which is a little more modular.
5) Klyx. Same as above. I use regular lyx which seems to be in more active
development, but klyx is definitely nice, usable and (obviously) integrates
better with KDE. Again, it might have been listed somewhere and I just failed
to see it.
Overall I'm very happy with the system, and Mandrake seems a total winner. But
for this very reason I'd like to see them polish it a little, so it really
rocks out of the box for the newbie who isn't yet up to speed on even simple
things like looking around the RPMS directory for missing stuff.
It's possible that some of these problems were due to my upgrading a RH6.0
machine instead of doing a clean install, but still I think they shouldn't
have appeared to begin with. Mandrake can definitely take away RedHat
market, but to do so the cross/upgrade process must be as smooth as
possible, making sure that things come up as well for the cross/upgrader
as they do for the first time installer.
And again, if someone can tell me how to fix the True Type fonts, thanks.
At any rate, congratulations to the developers, and I hope they find these
comments of some use (suggestion: how about including the DDD debugger, the
other great application besides Lyx and Xemacs missing from RedHat? Then
Mandrake would be *really* complete :-)
Keep up the good work. Cheers,
Fernando P�rez.
