The Mandrake Experience [Archive]

AliOop

18th September 2004, 04:42 PM

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I'm a true blue Fedora man. In my earlier Linux years I went from distro to distro. I've kind of settled down now. Fedora and now Slackware are the distros I'm working with. Slackware brand spanking new, just a few weeks on a test box. I think I'll stick to just those two. But I still have fond memories of my first one. Don't we all have fond memories the 'first one'? She was 18 and I was 17...Wait, wrong first one. That would be Mandrake. It was a good experience. Things worked. Been awhile since I've look at Mannie. I know this is mainly a Fedora forum but can any one give us a thumbnail sketch of your Mandrake system? I'd like to know what they are up to and how it's performing. Thanks.

GreyGeek

18th September 2004, 05:59 PM

...snip...
I know this is mainly a Fedora forum but can any one give us a thumbnail sketch of your Mandrake system? I'd like to know what they are up to and how it's performing. Thanks.

I started out using RH 5.0 in the spring of 1997, after crashing countless times and reinstalling Win95 FIVE TIMES is four months! That Sony VAIO never crashed running RH 5.0, so the problem was Win95! In the fall of 1997 I switched to SUSE 5.3 because RH 5.1 was a dog. I stayed with SUSE for several years but noticed that each upgrade was getting worse in terms of configuring the hardware. So, I tried Mandrake 7.2, about 1 1/2 years ago. That release gave a perfect hardware install. But, alas, as Mandrake progress through 8.x and 9.x I found myself having to do more and more manual configuring of hardware just to get things to run right. So, I went back to SUSE 9.0 because it was better than the last Mandrake 9.x in configuring my hardware. When Mandrake 10.0 DVD came out I bought it and installed it. The hardware recognition and configuration were even worse than I remember for MDK 9.x, so within 2 hours I returned to SUSE 9.0. Meanwhile, I decided to try Fedora Core 2 on my wife's box. It was a perfect install!

My box is custom built. It has
Soyo SY-KT600 Dragon Plus V1.0 Socket A ATX Mobo, DDR400, AGP8X, SATA & Lan, USB2.0, 6ch audio
AMD Athlon XP 2600+ 1.91 GHz 333MHz FSB
Kingston 512MB DDR266 PC2100 184-pin Computer System memory module, Non-ECC
Two 40 GB SATA Harddisk drives.
Sony CRX230E 52X32X52X CD-RW
PleXtor DVD+R/RW model PX-504A-SW
Mitsumi 1.44 MB 3.5" floppy drive D359M3D
Chaintech A-G482 nVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8X 64MB DDR Video Card, AGP8X, DVI & TV-Out
3COM 3C90CX-TXM PCI network card w./Lan Wakeup 1-/100BT
Mitsuma PC PS2 keyboard
Microsoft wheel mouse
KDS 17" CRT
ALTEC Lansing ATP3 30 Watts RMS, two 6Wats Satellite speakers and an 18 Watt subwolfer.
(I love classical music at high volume!)
Samsung ML-1200 laser printer
ncr53c810 scsi card to which is attached a Musteck MCS-600CX color scanner.
ATI TV Wonder card

What give Mandrake, and SUSE, so much trouble is the TV card and the scsi card. Without manually configuration both allow SANE to see the TV card as a scanner. Having frames from the cable TV appearing in the Preview mode is interesting. I used to have an SBLIVE 512! audio card, with the VIA sound chip disiabled, but both MDK and SUSE would ignore the disabling. Trying to get them to select the SBLIVE was an art in itself. I finally got fed up and pulled the SBLIVE. The sound isn't as good as it used to be, but neither is my hearing, so what I can't hear any more doesn't matter. :)

When FC includes as default a kernel higher than 2.6.8 and a stable KDE 3.3 I will install it on my box here at home. With Mandrake moving to SUSE's model of releasing limited versions of its distro for community download and saving the best stuff for the retail channel, I like the fact that everything is in the four FC isos and they are free for the download. Then, there is always KNOPPIX or Debian. It choice a wonderful thing? :p