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

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 04:23:01PM +0800, J Michael Gilks wrote:
| I had a few quibbles as well and am currently installing Debian on another box
| to be a file, printer, DHCP server and maybe LDAP if I can figure it out.
| 1. Could not go back in the install menu. Any mistake would mean start again. 
| Unusually for me I managed to get through the install first time. However 
| backing up in the install is usually a lifeline for me.

Eek.  Which distro are you talking about?  Mandrake had a "previous" button
all the way through, and I'm pretty sure that you can do the Debian
install process in whatever order you want to.

| 2. New user numbering. Did not get a chance to add an extra user during 
| install. On one machine I did a new install, but kept the /home partition. 
| This has 2 users. After booting I added a new user, but Mandrake gave a uid 
| of 500. This is different to their old numbering system, so the new user had 
| no access to their /home directory and could not start X.
| Time out for swearing and throwing things, until I thought to try chown -R on 
| the /home directory and it worked.

Or vipw and change the UID :)

| Never yet found a distribution I was totally happy with, but Mandrake gets 
| better as a desktop and I stick with Debian for servers. Got to love APT.

Agreed.  Though I'm still using Debian for my desktop because it's
already set up and working, and I really can't be bothered spending more
time setting up Mandrake properly.

| Incidentally the only Mandrake apt4rpm repositories I can find are for cooker.
| Does anyone know of a repository for the basic distribution?

No idea.  urpmi seems reasonable enough for installing software that
comes with the distribution.

CP.