[TriLUG] Mandrake frustrations

Steve Litt slitt at troubleshooters.com
Sun Dec 26 23:58:47 EST 2004


Hi William,

Others have addressed your specific questions, so as a 4 year Mandrake user, 
let me address your frustrations.

Mandrake can be frustrating, and certainly installation is the most 
frustrating of all, but I've found it to be a great distro for a "superuser 
desktop". It has all the apps you could ever desire on those 3 little CD's.

I've found that as I use more and more Mandrake versions (I think I started 
with 6.x), you get used to its little foibles. And yes, I concur with Jason 
-- always configure via NFS to avoid CD flipping, which occasionally stops 
the whole process.

Another thing -- never, ever, ever test the video after configuring it. 
Testing can halt the install, requiring either a complete reinstall or some 
very fancy footwork.

By the way, I use Mandrake only for superuser type stuff. For my kids' 
computers, I use Knoppix, which installs reliably in 30 minutes or less.

SteveT

Steve Litt
Founder and acting president: GoLUG
http://www.golug.org

On Sunday 26 December 2004 07:36 pm, William Sutton wrote:
> Mandrake experts (particularly Lovelace), I started installing MDK 10.1
> today (downloaded from a mandrake linux mirror site, 3 CD isos, all burned
> to 700 MB CD-R disks under Red Hat 9 via command line (sorry, exact
> utility escapes my pea brain at the moment but it's a standard CLI
> CD-writing tool).
>
> Install has been somewhat painful to this point.
>
> The good:
> - MDK installation automagically recognized my video card (Matrox G450)
> and provided a chance to configure it as such, including Xinerama, as well
> as for my two ViewSonic E90fb monitors.  Easiest time I've ever had doing
> that, especially compared with Gentoo where I actually had to write a
> Gentoo FAQ on the subject...
> - mp3 playing works (hurray)
>
> The bad:
> - During installation, 3 different packages were reported as being unable
> to install, one of which was XScreensaver (didn't make a list, but the
> reports were the same during two separate and differently customized
> installation processes (first one I tried deselecting individual packages,
> when that didn't work so well, I installed a second time (fresh install)
> by starting small and adding extra packages))
> - On initial boot and graphical login, I discovered the mouse didn't work.
> Investigation revealed that the XF86Config file was referencing /dev/mouse
> but the only mouse device MDK had created was /dev/mouse0.  This was
> rectified by the simple expedient of editing the XF86Config file (simple
> if one knows where to look, a real pita if one doesn't; fortunately I do)
> - On logging in after setting the mouse up, I discovered that there's no
> configuration option for the printer (!) (so I didn't select office
> productivity...geez ya think it would still be a default item!) so I
> tried to "install" the files from CD...woops, message 'Please insert the
> medium named "Installation CD 1" on device [/dev/sr0]'.  Unfortunately I
> have no /dev/sr* devices in my system...(what's going on here?)
> - To get around the /dev/sr0 problem, I went to download the various
> dependencies from rpm.pbone.net (google search for the various file names
> from the rpmdrake gui tool)...found the ones I wanted but about every
> other search I did crashed mozilla....
> - once I had the various dependencies I (thought I) needed, I installed
> CUPS...logged out of X, logged back in....still no gui configuration
> options (!)
>
> frustration is beginning to mount...
>
> I can put the CDs up online as iso images (I think...if I can figure out
> httpd under MDK) for inspection & verification but I don't think the
> problem necessarily lies with the images themselves...
>
> I've got a lot of issues listed above and would dearly appreciate some
> help and a sense that I'm not completely stupid here.
>
> William



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