Debian

[Calum]

mandrake's good, but it fails to be the newbie distro it is touted as. It applies a lot of defaults that are shit and need to be reset to decent values immediately after install, and that's no job for a newbie no matter how easy it is. the main difficulty is knowing which mandrake defaults are crap to start with.

Last night for instance i installed mandrake again and i said 'i'll wait till supermount fucks up before i disable it'. less than an hour later supermount fucks up, so i disable it. which took two goes because it needs to be cat > to your fstab file since it fails to work as it implies in the man page. You wouldn't know this if you were a newbie and you would probably reboot to fix it. Not a good start.

Mandrake is filled with these goodies, and while it is an excellent distro i am eager to try red hat.

[beltorak0]

yes, the 2.5 kernel can "hotswap" kernels without a reboot.  This will definately be included in the 2.6 release.  Although I fail to see the real advantage of it (especially for a desktop), wouldn't you have to kill all processes, dump all modules, then swap the kernel?  Is the 1 minute post really that aggrevating?  maybe i should do some reading or get the latest 2.5...

as for the windows partition, if the "umask=000" doesn't work, drop a ",rw" right after it (no spaces).  It might be getting mounted read-only.  check your boot messages.

-t.

[voidmain]

umask=000 will cause it to get mounted with all files having rwxrwxrwx (777) permissions. Everyone can then read/write files on the partition, not just root which is the default. And that is only something you would use on FAT/VFAT file systems as those file systems are not capable of understanding file permissions.

[ December 23, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[preacher]

quote:Originally posted by Calum:
mandrake's good, but it fails to be the newbie distro it is touted as. It applies a lot of defaults that are shit and need to be reset to decent values immediately after install, and that's no job for a newbie no matter how easy it is. the main difficulty is knowing which mandrake defaults are crap to start with.

Last night for instance i installed mandrake again and i said 'i'll wait till supermount fucks up before i disable it'. less than an hour later supermount fucks up, so i disable it. which took two goes because it needs to be cat > to your fstab file since it fails to work as it implies in the man page. You wouldn't know this if you were a newbie and you would probably reboot to fix it. Not a good start.

Mandrake is filled with these goodies, and while it is an excellent distro i am eager to try red hat.

Funny Ive never had that supermount problem, but it seems to me that its much easier for a newbie to disable supermount. Just go to mandrake control center, then mount points, click on the cdrom icon, then click on the little options button. After this all you have to do is deselect supermount. This isnt exactly hard. As for redhat,  I havent used it since 7.1, so things may have changed, but simply put I had trouble with my hdd controller card, and my sound card at the time. This put a bad taste in my mouth, and when I switched to Mandrake, neither problem was present. My friend who started using red hat 8.0 told me that no mp3 support was included. Is this true? If it is true, why would they do this? Recently while trying to find a perfect linux distro, I came across slackware, and let me just say that it is the fastest, and smoothest running linux distro around. Too bad it doesnt have a lot of the utilities that I like in Mandrake.

[Calum]

my point of contention is not how hard mandrake is to use (it is easy) but that it doesn't tell you stuff. I for one didn't know you could do that point and click stuff to disable supermount and i have been using mandrake one year. I only found out supermount even existed because i read it in a review of mandrake 8.1. I only have the download edition so maybe all this is spelt out in the manual but to be honest, newbies are more likely to get the download edition well before they splash out on the boxed-with-manual edition. I just think mandrake should be more helpful a system. It has all this great stuff in it, why doesn't it tell people how to use them?