Mandrake 7.2 release - a dud?

[dogbert at clue4all.net (Brian J. Conway)]

> Any try Mandrake 7.2 yet?  We had it on a machine here and there seemed to be
> nothing but problems with the new installation tools, and fancy system
> wrappers.

I have Mandrake 7.2 running on 4-5 machines now (one's not mine), from
light server environments to desktops, and haven't run into the
slightest problem that I couldn't easily fix myself.  I think the only
thing I'd hold against them is that /etc/skel/.bashrc was setting the
Xauthority variable on login and thus killing SSH X-forwarding, but that
was easily commented out.  I've been recommending it to anyone from a
newbie up to a seasoned veteran with confidence.

> The installation utility allowed me to delete items to be installed, but
> didn't handle dependencies correctly (left stuff in that required stuff I
> decided not to install).

I don't think I've run into this problem, and all the installations I've
done since the first beta have run very smoothly.  The graphical
installation is very nice (choose expert mode to get real control), I've
had all the dependencies installed automagically that were needed, and
the package selection is a very quick, yet informative process (much
easier to navigate through than RedHat's graphical package selection).

> The latest edition of 'rpmdrake' required considerable fiddling to get to
> work correctly, and often seg faulted, leaving the RPM database out of kilter
> (rebuild required).

Hmm, I don't use that one myself.  I've always just used rpm, but I'm
very impressed with MandrakeUpdate, which likens itself to a graphical
version of what Debian users have been bragging about for a long time
with apt-get, and it runs very nicely.

> More annoying, and what finally made me back off and use 7.1 for production
> systems, was the 'Aurora' startup/shutdown GUI - it seemed that most of the

'rpm -e Aurora', though I usually unselect it in the installation.  I
never liked it, I'm not sure why it was included as a default.

> time I shut down or rebooted the system, the file systems weren't cleanly
> unmounted, and the system "fsck'd" more often than not, printing out lots
> of scary error messages.

Hmm, I really haven't seen any of those at all.  I'm running ReiserFS on
all my partitions except a 10MB /boot partition, and I certainly won't
be going back to anything else anytime soon, though I'm tempted to play
with XFS and JFS as they mature further.  Are you sure you aren't
running into a hardware issue somewhere in there?  I really have only
had the best of luck with this distribution, and have recently switched
all of my past RedHat machines to it without further hesitation.

> The background graphics have gotten silly instead of elegant, but all that's a
> matter of taste.
> 
> KDE 2.0 looks good, and the device detection during install continues to be
> improved.

I'm a WindowMaker person myself, so I'll trust you on this one.

> So it looks more like a beta release.  There are also many more update packages
> on the web site than usual.  It reminds me of the 6.x RedHat releases...

A lot of the update packages on the site include packages that were
upgraded from the first beta to the final release.  Besides, I really
don't think you can blame a distribution if there's a new root exploit
in wu-ftp (yes, many other servers are offered), or any other package
for that matter.  Perhaps if they were including a lot of obscure
software that no one had ever heard of, but all the updates I've seen
have just been security updates on tried-and-true packages that were
necessary (insert another wu-ftp crack here).

Brian J. Conway
dogbert at clue4all.net
Geek for hire: http://clue4all.net/resume

Men may control the free world, but women control the boobs.
(http://www.pvponline.com/archive.php3?archive=20001024)
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