[ale] Mandrake 9.0 installation review

[Michael Hirsch]

I've been meaning to write this down for ALE for a while now, and I
finally have the time, so here goes.

I've been using Mandrake for a year or two now, and just upgraded to
the 9.0 release.  My general impression is quite favorable, but as
always, there are rough spots.

My first installation was an upgrade from Mandrake 8.2.  As I explain
below, that was not completely successful, so I went on to reinstall
from scratch.  That was more successful.

As always, I love the Mandrake installer.  It has the ideal
combination of user friendliness and exposure of details.  Like the
RedHat installer, you can get a good installation just by hitting next
at almost every screen, but there is more visibility as to what is
going on.

The installation screens are more or less the same as RedHat's in
content, but, unlike RedHat, or any other distribution I've seen,
there is a complete list on installation steps down the left side of
the screen.  If at any time you decide to, say, change your mouse
setup, all you need to do it click on the mouse setup button and you
move back in the installation.  Then you can continue from that point
on, or click again to get back to where you were.  The steps cleverly
change color as they are completed, so it is easy to see where you are
in the installation.

I suppose having all that information on the screen, however handy yet
unobstrusive, might be intimidating to beginners, but I love it.  It
is just so damn useful.  It is not at all like the information
overload you can get in a Debian install.  If you've done an install
or two before you will have no trouble.

For some reason, the upgrade took forever.  I guess it had to think a
lot between RPMs or something.  It took way longer to upgrade that any
installation has taken me since the last time I installed from
floppies.  But when I was done, I had a nice Mandrake setup.  There
were really no surprises.  All the usual apps are there.  KDE 3.0.3,
Gnome 2.0, OpenOffice 1.0.1.  Strangely, abiword is missing.  I didn't
see any great changes since 8.2, but that's okay.  I liked 8.2.

Unfortunately, there were a couple of things not quite right.  First,
I couldn't get supermount to work.  Second, some of my
misconfigurations were still bad.  For instance, running depmod at
boot always caused a seg fault.  Weird--but it's been that way for 6
months at least.  So I reinstalled.

Reinstalling took far less time than installing.  Fortunately, I've had
my home directory on a separate partition for years, so I didn't lose
any important data.  After installation, everything worked.  I have two
main impressions.

First, supermount rocks!  You stick in a cd and run "ls /mnt/cdrom"
and the listing appears.  Eject the CD with the front button, stick in
a new disk, and ls it again.  You can even cd to /dev/cdrom and then
eject the cd.  The worst that will happen is you can get an I/O error
if you try to ls /dev/cdrom without a disk in the drive.  All this
works for floppies, too.  This is how removable media should work.
I'm happy to see this back--may it never go away.

Second, the Mandrake rpm tool is a lot worse.  There used to be one
tool--rpmdrake--for installs, removals, and upgrades.  Now there
appears to be 3 separate programs.  Just what I need, more windows
cluttering up my screen.  It still works well, even better in some
ways, but I find it much more annoying.  Time to check out apt-rpm for
Mandrake.  It's awesome under RedHat, but I've always been happy with
rpmdrake, before.  Time to see if apt-rpm and Synaptic work on
Mandrake.

--Michael


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