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Mandriva Businesses Linux Business

Mandrake Linux 9.2 Hits the Street 410

Posted by michael from the not-debian-but-pretty-good-anyway dept.
joestar writes "Just announced at Mandrake's website, Mandrake 9.2 (FiveStar) has just been released. Mandrake Club members get full access to 9.2 ISOs (through BitTorrent), as well as... all 9.2 contributors and translators. But the best news, in addition to all (impressive) 9.2 features is that everybody can access the traditional binary & sources tree! Public release of Mandrake 9.2 ISOs will happen at the same time as Mandrake 9.2 Pack availability in retail. It makes sense."
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Mandrake Linux 9.2 Hits the Street More

Mandrake Linux 9.2 Hits the Street

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  • I was wondering what had become of Mandrake.

    Now, if only Gentoo woudl release a version that would boot an IBM RS/6000 7025 F50 from a CD, I'd be happy.
    • Hey, on a machine like that you should be running AIX, not Linux. Then again, if you insist on only wanting to run Linux on that fine RS/6000, I'll gladly take it off your hands and load a proper OS for the machine.

      • I have the AIX disks for it, up to version 4.3.x, IIRC. These machines are just for me to mess with, I got them for free (yes plural...2 of them), along with 2 SSA RAID towers + hardware to put them together. I'd probably have to run AIX to access those, but I really just wanted to have an OS I knew I could mess with because once I wipe these things out, I'm not sure I have a C compiler I can install for AIX (missing disc).

        If you can't tell, I'm not really experienced with bare bones OS installs (I.e. usua
    • Now this isnt a troll (at least, not this time), but Ive always been curious by a particular dichotomy in what people say regarding this.

      They tend to make fun of Microsoft releasing another OS every few years (95, 98, ME in 2000, Win2k, WinXP in 2001, Windows 2k3). But they also seem to blatently ignore all the 'point' releases (which seems really insane in the case of Apple, which makes you pay for the point release upgrades).

      Now Im not going to say that they shouldnt upgrade or improve their product- qui

      • My question, then, is why is it good for one OS but bad for another? Is it just a blind, rabid hatred of everything Microsoft? Or is it just habitual complaining?

        The complaints would probably cease, to an extent, if Microsoft didn't intentionally break little things in every release and make other attempts to force you to buy an upgrade. Linux distributions, on the other hand, never force you to buy an upgrade. (And when they have tried, they usually get their asses kicked over it. We don't like it at

  • Streets? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bluegreenone ( 526698 )
    If by "streets", you mean the gilded hard drive pathways of MandrakeClub's paying members, then yes, Mandrake 9.2 has hit the streets. For the majority of the public you're talking a release in 1-2 weeks.
    • > For the majority of the public you're talking a
      > release in 1-2 weeks.

      As mentionned in the post, the entire tree, including binary and sources is available publicly on a number of mirrors... (http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ftp.php3)

  • Question for current Mandrake users (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kikta ( 200092 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @01:18PM (#7210640)
    So I was a Mandrake user for the both the 7.x and 8.x series. I liked it a lot, but I also had quite a few crashes (usually KDE apps). I know lots of other people have had the same gripe about Mandrake in the past, i.e. that it was very nice, but pretty unstable.

    Has Mandrake's stability improved in the 9.x series? I'd especially like to hear from folks who were testing the Cooker versions that became 9.2. Thanks.
    • Having used 9.X for some time I think not. I liked Mandrake a lot, but it's instability was frustrating after RedHat. I eventually went back to RedHat (to prepare for the RHCE not for any real reason). I'll give Mandrake 9.2 a whirl, it's a nice system - but I too hope that 9.2 has ironed out a few of the X glitches (gdm was my bugbear).
    • I never had any problems with stability, of course, I use gnome. My only gripe is because of the new club member deal, I have to try and do an ftp install for the first time ever ;-).
      • I have to try and do an ftp install for the first time ever

        Don't. It doesn't work. Tried it 6 times last night (mirror on ftp.uninett.no was already available), but the perl-install process loops on downloading package lists. It can't find hdlist2.cz which is supposed to cover media 3. I was even stupid enough to fry my root partition in an attempt at clean install when upgrade didn't work (separate /home partition. Nothing lost but time). Now I'm back to using RH9 with XD2. It's stable and has gorgeous f

    • It also got rid of a strange bug that Mozilla on 9.1 had on rendering some Japanese pages (maybe UTF related?).

      It seems much faster and stable, overall. Also, OpenOffice 1.1 on totally ROCKS! (much faster! Handles Japanese perfectly!).9.2

      I would hang out and tell you more, but I am in the process of installing bittorrent's gui so that I can install 9.2 from the website.

      Later!
    • Linux?? Unstable???

      Oh fuck! The world is ending, Slashdotters! ;-)
    • Must be those big glitzy desktops? We build two flavors of Mandrake 9.1 boxes where I work --

      Flavor #1 (monitoring station) has 8 monitors running IceWM, all 8 monitors peppered with X apps.

      Flavor #2 (server) are rack mounted and only accessed via VNC servers. These boxes are LAMP setups and run Perl apps continuously.

      Our uptimes reach 100 days easily, and then we have to reboot for power cord moves, rack changes, stupid stuff like that. We've never had to reboot a Mandrake 9.1 box in either of these con
    • > Has Mandrake's stability improved in the 9.x series?

      I never had problems with Mandrake's stability. At least since version 8.2.
    • I never used 7.x and 8.x, so I can't comment on that, but I Started with 9.0. 9.0 was usable, but barely; the MCC was crufty and a lot of it was generally crufty. When I used 9.1, that all changed; many of the wizards actually WORKED, and I was able to actually use everything for long periods of time without crashes. I'm using 9.2RC2 ATM, 9.2 final is downloading via bittorrent, and I have to say Mandrake has reached a level of refinement with 9.2. I upgraded from 9.1->9.2RC2, so I Don't know how the
    • And as that its probably a little better then sid (or the same, or worse..). I love it because it has all the latest greatist new geewiz stuff.

      Personally I'd say the most stable release was 8.2, so maybe the 9.2 will be too. I've been using the 9.2 beta for about a month now and its been pretty good so far (but I can't wait for more packages to become available for it!).

      Mandrake is great for those of us who want a cutting edge computing. Probably the best thing for the server yet.
    • I used Mandrake through 6.x to 8.x and I thought it was pretty stable using it for years it as a very solid and dependable server.

      But as a desktop and as a demonstration of usability it sucks bigtime. In the same 6-8 time period I thought the UI got increasingly bad becoming nearly unusable by the end. I picked up 9.1 and my opinion hasn't changed much. They still ship a nearly generic KDE with a bunch of slapdash tools with the result that the desktop looks like a cluttered mess.

      Usability is definitely

    • So I was a Mandrake user for the both the 7.x and 8.x series. I liked it a lot, but I also had quite a few crashes (usually KDE apps). I know lots of other people have had the same gripe about Mandrake in the past, i.e. that it was very nice, but pretty unstable.

      Ive been using Mandrake on my servers and desktop for awhile now. My servers are SMP P2 and P3s, and no problem what so ever. Mandrake even had updates for security holes that urpmi took care of.

      I even use cooker on my main desktop (i wanted to t

    • (Posting this from Mozilla 1.3 on Mandrake 9.1...)

      I've been using Mandrake as my main OS at home for maybe a year and a half now. A couple of applications (Mozilla and KPPP are the main culprits) tend to hang or become unresponsive after they've been running for a few weeks, but that's my only real complaint with it. I wouldn't describe Mandrake as unstable. I've only ever once managed to crash the desktop (on 8.2), and I've never had a kernel panic.

      I use Gnome rather than KDE, so I don't know if the latt

    • Has Mandrake's stability improved in the 9.x series? I'd especially like to hear from folks who were testing the Cooker versions that became 9.2. Thanks.

      YES

      As long as you don't install the Flash plugin, that is. The Flash plugin for Mozilla, for some reason, periodically locks up Mozilla in such a way that everytime you click in the address bar, Mozilla locks. xkill is the way to deal with it, but it doesn't fix it, just gets the window out of your way. Rebooting makes the problem go away, until you

  • Mandrake (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ripper: "Mandrake, have you ever seen a Commie use Windows?"

    Mandrake: "No, Jack. I can't say that I have."

    Ripper: "Linux. That's what they use, isn't it? Never Windows?"

    Mandrake: "Well, I believe that's what they use, Jack. Yes."

    Ripper: "On no account will a Commie use Windows? And not without good reason?"

    Mandrake: "I don't quite see what you're getting at, Jack."

    Ripper: "Windows. That's what I'm getting at. Windows, Mandrake. Windows is the source of our economy. Seven-tenths of the earth's economy

  • download rate (Score:5, Informative)

    by bluegreenone ( 526698 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @01:19PM (#7210653) Homepage
    FYI I'm getting an average of about 20KB/sec with bittorrent. Certainly not lighting fast. Peak has been about 140KB/sec, low around 5KB/sec. Estimated total time about 17 hours.
    • "FYI I'm getting an average of about 20KB/sec with bittorrent. Certainly not lighting fast. Peak has been about 140KB/sec, low around 5KB/sec. Estimated total time about 17 hours."

      Never trust a torrent's estimated download time. Bittorrent is always looking for a better host to download from. I've seen a torrent jump from 5 K/s to 320 K/s in the space of 30 seconds. And I've seen the reverse happen as well (probably because the person with a huge connection dropped from the torrent.)

      Add that to the f

    • What kind of upstream can you contribute to the torrent? Especially when a lot of people are joining (such as when slashdot posts it), there's not a lot of 'spare' bandwidth available so you'll be limited by your upstream contribution.
    • Currently the max I've seen is 66 KB/s, min 230 B/s, average ~43 KB/s sitting at an estimate of 11 hours with 9% down on the PowerPak.

      Even when the FTP servers are getting hammered I can get better rates than this, usually under 2 hours for a complete CD ISO.

      I WANT MY OC-3!

    • I havent gotten over 8KB/sec in a couple months. Anyone know what is going on here? (and no you trolls I'm not using dialup or ISDN)

  • "Transparent" proxies (Score:5, Interesting)

    by javilon ( 99157 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @01:20PM (#7210665) Homepage
    Some of the members of Mandrake Club can't get the ISOs because they are behind "transparent" proxies set up by their ISPs. The reason is that MandrakeSoft is using the user's IP to allow the bittorrent download, but for people behind this proxies MandrakeSoft sees the proxie's address instead of the user's address and doesn't authorize the use of the bittorrent tracker.

    This is happening to anyone using Spain's Telefonica ADSL. This covers almost everyone in Spain.

    • Another thing about BitTorrent: if you're using a DSL Router/firewall, which gives DHCP addresses to your machines of the form "192.168.x.x" then your IP address is internal-only; the IP address that machines on the internet think you're coming from is actually the router's IP address.

      So in order to get BitTorrent working at decent speeds, you need to forward a few ports (which means you can only have BitTorrent at decent speeds on one of your machines -- someone please correct me if there's a better way

    • I always thought a transparent proxy was exactly that. Transparent.

      A transparent proxy sits in between requests to that the target server, the request appears to be coming from the original users IP. It is able to capture requests for objects which it is has already cached and return them directly instead of hitting the target. Other than that it should be transparent, to the extent that it should be difficult for you to even detect...

      It sounds like what you have is a good old fashioned proxy. Not a t
  • So I just days ago, got my dad off of Windows and onto Linux by installing Mandrake 9.1 He got tired of the virii and security updates from Microsoft, the ad-aware spyware removal updates and the Norton AntiVirus updates when all he does is use the net to retrieve email.

    Is there a simple way to upgrade or do I have to download the ISO's and reinstall (probably won't if that's the case)? I use OS X at home so I'm not sure how to upgrade a Linux box.

    • You have to update the package repository so that it points to new 9.2 sources and then run

      urpmi --auto-select --force
      in a terminal as root. Wait a couple days for Easy Urpmi [zarb.org] to get a list compiled for 9.2.
    • Is there a simple way to upgrade or do I have to download the ISO's and reinstall (probably won't if that's the case)?

      You can download the ISOs, start the install program, and odds are that you will see an option to upgrade an existing installation. That will probably work (back up /etc and /home before you do it, of course).

      When I was using RPM-based distributions, I found that was the only way that I could upgrade. Trying to get the latest and greatest any other way always lead, sooner or later but

      • > You can download the ISOs, start the install
        > program, and odds are that you will see an
        > option to upgrade an existing installation.

        If you do the install without formatting the partition containing /home, both user documents and user settings should be preserved. It was really neat when I recently reinstalled Mandrake and all my KDE settings were preserved. ^_^

        > When I was using RPM-based distributions, I
        > found that was the only way that I could
        > upgrade. Trying to get the latest a
        • > Other than the fact that upgrading the thousands
          > of apps required to upgrade, there happened to be one app

          I meant to say "Other than the fact that upgrading the thousands of apps required to upgrade took a subjective eternity, there happened to be one app
  • One of the features that they cite is "File names can now be intuitively renamed", referring to clicking on the name slowly, ala Windows. Was right click -> Rename not intuitive enough?

  • Network install for the cheap (Score:5, Informative)

    by waffle zero ( 322430 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @01:30PM (#7210792) Journal

    I've had success installing Mandrake using the network install floppy. Here are some simple instructions [umr.edu], but the gist is that you download the network.img [umr.edu] and note the location of a rpm mirror for when it asks you. It downloads a 45mb cramfs image and uncompresses it to memory so you should ideally have 90+mb of ram, or mount a swap partition from one of the other terminals.

    I would recommend doing a very minimal install consisting of nothing but GNOME or KDE and any servers you wish to run. Then after the install, use urpmi [linux-mandrake.com] to install any other packages. With 9.1 I would get lynx and use it to grab a list of mirrors from Easy Urpmi [zarb.org]. I recommend using Texstar's repository whenever he starts packaging for 9.2. The page currently only has 9.1 and earlier sources, but expect people pestering him from this link to illicit an update.

    • Instead of depending on the mirror list on the Plf site, you could install and run urpmi.setup, with which you can set up media for urpmi, like Main, Contrib, PLF and Jpackage. Not sure if there are already 9.2 mirrors for these media though.
      Btw, I heard that not all the mirrors have their trees fully synced yet, so a minimal install with basic gui, urpmi and urpmi.setup might be a good idea indeed.
      • All the mirrors I've tried so far appear not to have the RPMS2 directory synched yet, which causes an error when doing a network install. The installer's 'hdlists' source file is telling it that RPMS2 is there but when the program tries to access it, the folder is not there and the installer dies. Doh.
  • From: http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/9.2/features/#13 [mandrakelinux.com]

    Since Netscape and the last few remaining proprietary applications have been removed, Mandrake Linux 9.2 is a "100% Free Software" product. This means that everyone is granted the right to access the sources, modify and redistribute the software. This also means that Mandrake Linux 9.2 can be deployed on as many machines as desired.

  • not to burn karma on grammar bitchiness or anythin (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ravagin ( 100668 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @01:40PM (#7210910)
    Mandrake Club members get full access to 9.2 ISOs (through BitTorrent), as well as... all 9.2 contributors and translators

    So if I join the club I get access to all the contributors and translators? Like, I can make them mow my lawn and stuff?

  • So club members download the ISOs. How long until someone makes a torrent for the rest of us?

    C'mon guys, we're waiting.

    PS. Yes, we should all support our favorite distros, but some of us support many projects, some in ways other than just joining their club or buying their boxed releases.
  • ...And I'm glad I went back, because I've been looking for a well-implemented Multi-Network Firewall [mandrakesoft.com] product that can be deployed for free (as in no money) for a couple of my non-profit clients. Certainly, the for-profits don't mind spending $1000+ on a good firewall software package, but the non-profits (a charity and a church) have need for something like this, but simply can't afford a non-open-source package. Hoorary for Mandrake!

    I've already renewed my Mandrake Club membership, and if you appreciate t
  • For a distribution that claims to have the "latest and most up-to-date" software, I'm very unimpressed with some of the software that's included. Here's a couple of examples:

    No Samba 3.0.
    No KDE 3.2.

    • KDE 3.2? (Score:2)

      by Synn ( 6288 )
      Um, KDE 3.2 is ALPHA software.

      Why should Mandrake ship alpha software on the desktop?
    • The don't have Gnome 2.5, either. Retrograde trolls.
    • Samba 3.0 (release) is in the cooker contribs with package names samba3*. I'm running it now at work. It's packaged to be installed (but not ran) simultaneously with Samba 2.x, using a 3 suffix for all conflicting files and directory names.

      Haven't seen the 9.2 release contribs though - has anyone? At least a Samba 3.0 RC should be in there, if not the release.
  • Are they going to be releasing 9.2 as a single DVD?
    That would rock to just have to pop in 1 DVD and go to bed :-)
  • Mandrake changed their site recently, and I could no longer find 9.2 RC2. It also looks and feels corporate, not the friendly, geeky old Mandrake of ages past.

    I confess that I have been guilty of using Mandrake software in the past without ever paying. Since we use RedHat at work, I have been switching over home machines from Mandrake to RedHat, and actually forked out a big $60 to RedHat for their annual support.

    Years ago, I switched from RedHat to Mandrake for its ease of installation and update, but I

  • The irony of bittorrent (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vlad_petric ( 94134 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @02:50PM (#7211828) Homepage
    As a MDK club member myself, I first applauded the measure to release first to us and then to everybody.

    As I'm downloading it right now, I'm wondering however if releasing to everybody through bittorrent wouldn't have been a better choice, as that would imply faster downloads for club members as well ...

  • Shrike freshrpms weighing in at 300meg...

    Because the sauce is just so much better when it's red...
  • Mandrake Linux 9.2 Hits the Street

    I'd like to ask Mandrake users: does it hurt to hit the street? And does the street hit back?

    Jokes aside, but if all those release bumps still hurt you by pushing for re-installation, please consider the distro [gentoo.org] with which you will be always up to date without any hitting the street.

  • The versioning is still there, but the only ISOs that are available are for RC2. You have to dig for those, and I'm not convinced they're really a good thing since they're a release candidate rather than the shelf version.

    I'm still pondering the idea of going silver with them, just to contribute to the cause, but...well, I'm broke.

  • Try to imagine an accountant, an auditor and finally a tax inspector looking over that 'Mandrake Club' line for 'professional services' in the books. While the name is catchy and goes well with the yellow-star-on-night-blue-background theme, I would advise the company to choose a more business-like name for future products.

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