[plug] Mandrake 9.1 rant (was: RH 8.0 migration woes)

[Scott Middleton]

Hi Pluggers

Personally I'm liking 9.1. 

I use this machine in my lounge room to play movies on my TV, surf the
Internet, record TV and play all types of media (DVD SVCD DIVX, XVID and
all the other initials). But most of all it has to be easy for my wife
to use.
I needed to install:
Mplayer
Nvidia video drivers
The TV-out(twinview) of my Geforce
an old Provideo TV card.
Win4Lin

I installed everything when Mandrake asked and all i had to install to
get the other stuff working was the kernel-source and libgtk-1.2-dev for
gmplayer. That was easy 
urpmi kernel-source  (much like apt-get install)
urpmi libgtk.... Much to my shock it even downloaded the dependencies.
With urpmi you can even put a local mirror in their to keep your
mandrake up to date (The only one i know of here is planet mirror).

To install nvidia was quite simple as well. (rpm --rebuild <rpm-source>)
then the usual rpm stuff.

The TV card was a bit different because my card does not auto-detect so
i had to put that in /etc/modules myself and modify modules.conf.

The Mandrake control center(re) let me decide where the xinerama stuff
was going to be. The only problem i have, is when i want full screen on
mplayer it automatically goes to the normal screen instead of the TV. I
have yet to experiment more on this since i only did it all on Friday.

Cutting my Linux teeth on Debian, my previous experiences with other
distributions was not satisfying. Mainly because of the package
management, with urpmi i am not minding it so much. 

Mandrake crashed on me when i was playing with the XF86Config-4 file (I
couldn't even ssh) whereas Debian usually wouldn't. This could be just
because of the new versions of XFree86 4.3 over the 4.1 in Debian.

It is hard to get used to Linux doing things for me (semi-automatically)
like nfs or samba mounts, the Mandrake control center did this for me
easily. I could configure my .xawtv whereas in Debian i would be getting
editor out to modify the file myself.  If your a sys-admin it could make
you very lazy and forget how to use the console.


This does not mean that i wont use Debian any more but Mandrake is a lot
flashier in the lounge room and quite fun to install. Sorry if this
sounds like a review but it is the first time I have seriously tried
another distribution and I like it and i thought i would share my
experiences.


Regards


-- 
Scott Middleton
shop.linuxit.com.au
ph  (08) 9331 8051
Stop being a Microserf and join the revolution of the Penguin.