[ale] Mandrake 'bugs?'

[Chris Ricker]

On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, Wandered Inn wrote:

> I'm still looking for specifics regarding various comments on Mandrake. 
> Anyone care to elaborate on the following posted comments:
> 

Sorry, I went out of town for a few days.  I know one of the Mandrake
developers, and here's part of the email I sent him about problems with 6.0
when I tried it:

>>>>>

> So, have you gotten to try that 6.0 disc I sent yet?

It looks pretty impressive!  First, the problems I noticed:

* you don't support machines with multiple cd-rom drives gracefully.  Of
course, neither does RH, so that's not unexpected.  But on the other hand,
even OpenBSD supports that, and it's got hands-down the least friendly Unix
install I've seen this decade ;-).

* Speaking of OpenBSD, your install eats my OpenBSD partition (type
A6--standard OpenBSD bag o' slices).  I installed in expert mode, of course.  
If I used fdisk to make my partitions, it silently wiped the partition table
on my OpenBSD disk before starting fdisk. If I used disk druid, it popped up
a warning that the "partition table is corrupt" (it wasn't) on my OpenBSD
drive, wiped it, and then started up disk druid.  RH doesn't have this
problem.

* You've revved sh up to bash-2.  That broke some scripts.

* I have a Thinking Mouse serial mouse.  The mouse configuration stuff has
Thinking Mouse PS/2 support, but not serial.  RH has this problem as well,
and I filed a bug report w/ them during the 5.9 beta, so it should
eventually get fixed by them if you just want to wait and snarf it.

* The back button on some screens during the install didn't work.  RH
doesn't have this problem.

* That ascii penguin login screen is pretty damn ugly.  You should make it
optional ;-).

* I was disappointed that you didn't really have any security fixes over RH
6, even for obvious "gimme" fixes like, say, not running named as root.

* Several fonts under Gimp were broken.

* Please include sudo, ssh, etc.

* The auto-upgrade stuff under KDE is pretty cool.  I assume that's just a
front end for Kirk Bauer's autorpm stuff?  At any rate, I like the idea, but
it just plain didn't work.  It would always die after downloading the list
of what rpms to upgrade.  Maybe I just was unlucky about the mirrors I
tried, but I don't think so....

* It tries to startup both postfix and sendmail by default.  Obviously,
that's not a good idea.  Also, you might want to read the license for
postfix.  The newest experimental release has one you can live with, but
the one you're shipping doesn't.

<<<<<

There were miscellaneous other quirks that I noticed later, after actually
running it for a bit, but I can't find that email right now.  IMHO,
mandrake's kinda pointless.  They don't really add anything I care about (I
don't like KDE, so the new release means nothing to me; I'm not especially
dying for pentium-optimized binaries; etc.) and they didn't fix the issues
in RH I do care about (mainly security stuff.  In Mandrake's defense, they
did fix vi-mode in bash, which I suppose is reason enough for some people to
switch ;-).  I was seriously cheesed by the incompatibility with OpenBSD
though....

later,
chris

-- 
Chris Ricker                                               kaboom at gatech.edu
                                              chris.ricker at genetics.utah.edu