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

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 12:29:54PM +0800, J Michael Gilks wrote:

| Just spent yesterday putting on Mandrake 9.1 to two computers.
| Seems to do allthe right stuff, albeit with new menus.

Okay, so this isn't directly to do with what John was asking about, but
I installed Mandrake 9.1 on a spare partition a couple of days ago, and
found that although it looked flashy, it was subtly broken in a few ways
(listed in no particular order):

1. It detected both of my graphics cards properly and gave me the option
to use Xinerama for dual-head, but didn't let me specify which head was
on the left and which was on the right.  (Okay, fairly minor, but ...)

2. AFAICT the only way to modify the LILO boot menu is with vi[1].
Likewise Samba configuration.  Not really a major problem, but I had
great expectations of the thing after 

3. The font installer was kind of dodgy.  It insisted on converting TTF
fonts to Type 1, and managed to install fonts so that OpenOffice liked
them, and they showed up in xlsfonts, but KDE and Mozilla wouldn't touch
them.  Bizarre.

4. It hangs when it boots on my machine when the BIOS is set up to
switch the machine on at a given time.  Admittedly this isn't Mandrake's
fault as Debian does the same - looks like a kernel bug in the rtc
driver as 'rm rtc.o' fixed it.  I don't know why the rtc module is
even being loaded, as the system seems to work fine without it.

5. The "first time wizard" that popped up gave me the choice of
KDE/GNOME and various themes therein.  I clicked GNOME, thinking that if
I didn't like it I could always go back to KDE... Well, I haven't quite
managed this.  I changed the default on the MdkDM drop-down list, and
that worked for "manual" logins where I click on the username and type
in a password.  For "automatic" logins when the system first boots up,
though, it still starts gnome.  That is despite having specified KDE in
the Mandrake boot control panelly thing, and despite ~/.wmrc saying
to start KDE.

6. For some reason, Mandrake decided that I have an OHCI USB controller
rather than a UHCI one.  I'm not sure where to change this - it isn't
listed in /etc/modules.

7. Printer configuration was brilliant - much better than the awful mess
that is trying to convince Debian and CUPS to behave well together.
'twould be nice if I could browse to an SMB printer like you can in
Windows rather than manually typing in the host name and share name
though.

8. I'm not too fond of the default Mandrake theme and much prefer the
standard KDE one.  On the other hand, the Mandrake menus are sensibly
organised.  (Unlike Debian's confusing defaults.)

Conclusion: I suppose it works given sufficient effort in setting it up,
but then again, so does Debian :P

CP.

[1]  Or emacs, or ...