RedHat 7.3 & Mandrake 8.2

[voidmain]

RedHat 7.3 is out. Haven't seen any real reviews other than RedHat mentioned KDE 3.0 ahead of Gnome which is unusual for RedHat in that they have always used Gnome as the default desktop. Glad they finally woke up on this one.

http://newsvac.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/05/06/1320237&mode=thread&tid=52

The only review I saw on Mandrake 8.2 was not a good one and they suggest sticking with 8.1.

http://www.theregus.com/content/4/24861.html

[hoojchoons]

I was surprised as well to see that RedHat mentioned KDE 3.0 ahead of GNOME! I think that Miguel (Ikaza) has to do a lot of work to catch up with Mathias Ettrich's absolutely stunning KDE 3.0 and Trolltech's excellent Qt libraries.

As for Mandrake's Linux 8.2, what I've read in the review was really disappointing, keeping in mind the company's recent financial difficulties.

[voidmain]

I personally have never had much luck with Mandrake period. But I've always kept my mouth shut because a lot of people on this site like it.  I've tried out several versions of Mandrake since their inception and have always gone back to RedHat shortly after because of the many quirks (not to say RedHat doesn't have any but I find RedHat's are usually far easier to overcome).

[ May 06, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[jtpenrod]

This is the first hint I've ever seen that suggested that all was not well with Mandrake 8.2. I sure hope that this is atypical. It seems that the new SuSE is rather awful as well. Now I've never had much luck with SuSE - that distro seems to me to be the Windows ME of *NIXdom. MandrakeSoft doesn't need a misfire like this now that they are on the verge of profitability. Linux, in general, certainly doesn't need this now that it has a real shot at going over the top. If what the article in the Register says is true, that makes two major distros at the same time that are problematic. That's not going to convince folks out there to ditch M$.

Furthermore, Linux doesn't need to get on this upggrade treadmill. Mandrake 8.1 came out just six months ago! Why in the HELL is there even a Mandrake 8.2 now? This is no better than the Win 98 -> Win 98SE -> Win ME -> Win 2000 -> Win XP upgrade nightmare. Linux doesn't need this! If we wanted constant upgrades, we'd stick with M$ for Chrissake. This makes no sense at all.

Since installing 'Drake 8.1, I've had no regrets. I've had it on two systems: an old Dell OptiPlex GSa (P-II 232Mhz, 32MB RAM, 2.0GB HD) and it ran just great despite the claim that it needed at least 64MB of RAM. I've got it on the new system, a Micron Millenia Extreme and it runs just great there too.
   

quote: I personally have never had much luck with Mandrake period. But I've always kept my mouth shut because a lot of people on this site like it. I've tried out several versions of Mandrake since their inception and have always gone back to RedHat shortly after because of the many quirks

So, VoidMain, why are you keeping quiet about Mandrake troubles? What are those? Don't worry: I won't be offended, it's just that I'd like to know as I haven't seen any problems with it yet.

As for GNOME, yes, that does suck. It's too Windoze-ified, and trying to get the GNOME dialer up and running was a real bitch. Once it is running, it tries to take over my modem. After an on-line session with GNOME, I have to turn the modem off completely to reset it so it will work from KDE. I still have Win 95, and even that doesn't fuck with the modem to render it inoperative when I try to start it from KDE. Then there's that crappy "Start Here" thing that's even worse than Winders with its "Start" menu. And then there's Miguel's getting in bed with His Gatesness and .NET. GNOME: Yyeeeeechhhhhhhhh!
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[ May 06, 2002: Message edited by: jtpenrod ]

[ May 06, 2002: Message edited by: jtpenrod ]

[Master of Reality]

hmmmmm... maybe i will try out redhat 7.3.
wait, which one to choose professional or personal??

[ May 06, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality ]

[voidmain]

I wouldn't get too worried about 8.2 getting a bad review and I wouldn't put too much weight on it really effecting a huge wave of M$->Linux conversions one way or the other.  And I also don't see it as a close comparison of the Win95->98->ME->YOU->THEM->XP->.NET->MSLinux "upgrade" paths.

The nice thing about Linux is you can easily go with your favorite distro's best version and just upgrade the pieces you want/need. Unlike the M$ world where you just about have to do a blanket upgrade of your entire company everytime M$ farts out a new release.

I run several different versions of RedHat (even still have 5.2 running on one machine), debian, and BSD and communication between them works just as well as if they were all running the same OS and version.  

The nice thing about the new distros is they would include bigger changes (like KDE 3.0 vs 2.0). While I upgraded all of my desktops to KDE 3.0 the day it was released I am in no rush to get RedHat 7.3, but it certainly would be nice to be able to install it directly off of CD rather than having to install the OS then come by later and upgrade KDE. To me it's just a convenience thing.  But if the installer is messed up on a new distro release, or they ship a buggy kernel by default, I'll opt for an earlier distro version until a newer one comes out that fixes the major problems.  

I haven't had much trouble with RedHat in this regard ever. 7.0 was probably the worst since 5.1 and it wasn't all that bad.

As far as what things I don't like about Mandrake. I can't say as I can remember specific reasons in each case but the latest was when installed Mandrake 8.1 (I believe it was 8.1) on my Dell Laptop.  It just didn't like my hardware.  RedHat had no trouble with it.  I had problems before trying to get two network cards working on a Mandrake box (I think that was Mandrakes first release) and didn't have a problem at all with it in RedHat.  Long story short, Mandrake really is nothing more than a RedHat base with a different installer (which I do not like as much as RedHat's) and different default configurations (which I usually find very displeasing for server work which is what I do mostly). There are more examples but it may just be personal frustrations I've had with Mandrake after using RedHat for several years prior. But I certainly won't cut Mandrake down. If people on here like it, great! It's good to have a choice. Certainly beats the dark side.

[jtpenrod]

That explains that. I already knew that Red was best for laptops, with all the proprietary hard these tend to include. So far, I haven't tried to set up a server with 'Drake, so I avoided all those problems as well. That's not too surprising either considering that Red is more orientated to corporate useage whereas 'Drake was intended to be more of a desktop, client OS anyway. As for installers, Red's is certainly prettier to look at, yet I don't think that 'Drake's is any less capable. Both are easy for newbies to use. I also did an install of Slackware 8.0 last week. Now that's one I wouldn't recommend the Linux virgin to attempt. except for that, Slack seems to be a helluva distro.
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[ May 06, 2002: Message edited by: jtpenrod ]

[voidmain]

Re: Drake's installer. I don't recall, can you do an HTTP, FTP, or NFS install in addition to the normal CD install?  That's one thing I've always liked about RedHat.  I could just walk up to any machine with my boot floppy and do a full install from a local Apache server.

[Master of Reality]

out of the thousands of people who must be downloading red hat 7.3 right now (a lot of the servers i tried were full), i still managed to find a server that could give me 200 kb/s bandwith all the way from the Netherlands!
I have always found The Netherlands and Germany to be the best places to download something from, i'm not sure why, maybe its the lack of people who download stuff there, but then why would there be so many german servers (i think there was 6 mirrors at redhat.com that came from germany.)

[voidmain]

Uhhh, what time was it in Germany when you found them to give you good bandwidth?  I'll bet it was sleep time for most of Germany. Isn't the Internet great?