Mandrake 9.1 is disappointing

[NHaughton]

I thought I'd try moving from Mandrake 9.0 to 9.1 this week. I did a fresh install over my old partitions, retaining only my /home partition as unformatted.

Oh dear! It installed all right, and looks very nice - but so much doesn't work properly. The whole thing runs like a dog compared to 9.0 (why???) which itself isn't exactly greased lightning. Worse than that, annoying idiosyncracies have crept in. For example, Mozilla 1.3 (installed with the OS) will run from a desktop shortcut in KDE, but not from a desktop shortcut with the same command line in Gnome, even though I can run it from a terminal in Gnome with the exact same command line. Oddly I had no trouble at all with installing Mozilla 1.3 in mdk9.0, nor did I have any trouble running apps from either KDE or Gnome (they either worked in both or not in both). Several other little niggles like this have crept in.

So what gives here? I remember that 8.0 was okay, but 8.1 was a mess, whereas 8.2 was fine again. Is there something at Mandrake about rushing .1 versions out before they are ready?

I have binned 9.1, and gone back to 9.0 for the moment because warts and all it is easier to live with.

Sorry Mandrake, I wish you well but you will have to do better than this. I would have posted this message on your club website - except that the forums server is overloaded and inaccessible.

[blamm]

Its BETA = Unstable... Chill and let them finish.

[RWiggum]

Originally posted by blamm
Its BETA = Unstable... Chill and let them finish.

Ummm, no. Mandrake has released 9.1 as a final production release. If it will soon be in stores in shrinkwrap, it's not a beta.

[pr0c]

i couldn't DISagree more. For a point release (9.1 instead of 10.0) it has many major changes utilizing cutting edge technology such as the 2.4.21 kernel. It also uses Xfree86 4.3.0 which adds a few key video cards including Intels new ones. As a matter of fact the differences between 9.0 and 9.1 are far greater than Redhat's changes and they went up a full release number (8.0 to 9.0).


As for running slower than 9.0, i find this very untrue, it runs the same for me, if your looking for better performance i'd suggest tweaking your kernel a bit, its real easy to do. Just changing from the default 586 to your 686 (assuming you have one) will be a big difference. This release definitly should not be running slower than 9.0.

Now don't get me wrong here, i'm not trying to pick on you and as a matter of fact i like Debian better than Mandrake to begin with i'm just trying to let others know that not all experiances are like yours.

With all that being said, i'd still suggest RedHat9 over Mandrake9.1 for many reasons that i will not state since i don't wanna anger people. :)

[z0mbix]

I installed MD9.1 last night and was pleasantly surprised. They, like RedHat have done alot of work with fonts to make the overall user experience much more user friendly. It is also nice and fast and mozilla/evolution open in under 5 seconds on my system which is very nice. Installing windows fonts was a one click solution as it found my win partition and installed off that with no user input. I've always been a GNOME fan so to see that 2.2 was included was good for me. Mozilla, Galeon and Openoffice all have the same (anti-aliased) fonts. OO opens nice a fast too. I have no complaints yet as it found and configured all my hardware. It won't be replacing Debian, but I admit that they have done a great job with the 9.1 release. It's nice to see that most things have been thought of. I haven't used urpmi yet but as soon as I find the need to upgrade I will certainly give it a go, especially having heard so many great reports of it. I also like the default "Galaxy" theme for gtk/qt. I will be trying it on my laptop over the weekend so I'll be interested to find out if it finds and configures my pcmcia Compact Flash card and Linksys WPC11 wireless network card.

Mahdi, if you are reading this, did you get your liksys card working in 9.1?

[NHaughton]

Try Tuxracer for example - does it respond to the keyboard? Not on my installation, but it's fine in 9.0.

Maybe I'm just unlucky.

[dungscooperdave]

I just finished upgrading to 9.1 from 9.0. It seems to be very nice to me, but I've always been a Mandrake fan. :D

[NHaughton]

I'm a Mandrake fan too (since 8.0), and 9.1 looks very nice, I agree. There just seem to be a lot of niggling problems with it that I haven't had with 9.0. I wish I were wrong, I really do.

[CMonster]

Try Tuxracer for example - does it respond to the keyboard? Not on my installation, but it's fine in 9.0. -works for me and I'm still using RC1

[dungscooperdave]

I had this really weird problem with it last night. I'm using the smp kernel because I'm running a dual processor system. I had left my computer on for a while at the console login screen. After a period of time, instead of turning off the screen (like apm) Linux just blanks it. So when I came back, I pressed a key or two to get it to un-blank. All the colors were kind of messed up. The standard gray-white color was fine, but bright white was showing up as red, and bright green was showing up as a dark red. Anyone have any idea what caused this? I just rebooted and it was fine, but it just seemed kind of strange.

[bwkaz]

SMP and APM in any kernel is currently broken badly... might that have anything to do with it?

I believe that "console blanking" is done via APM if you have APM support set up at all in your kernel, though I could be wrong.

[Okie]

9.1 is ok, (nothing to write home about) xsane made my flatbed scanner work (finally) although the scanned photos still look better with (barf) Windoze's software...

i wonder if us Americans should trust it since it is French made, i am sticking with ol' trusty Slackware...

[YECoyote]

Originally posted by NHaughton
Try Tuxracer for example - does it respond to the keyboard? Not on my installation, but it's fine in 9.0.

Maybe I'm just unlucky.

Did you download the driver for your vid card? Mine was slow too, until I d/l'ed the driver from Nvidia, and modified ect/X11/XF86Config-4 file.

glxgears score before the new driver: 250
glxgears score after: 1900.

[NHaughton]

Originally posted by YECoyote
Did you download the driver for your vid card? Mine was slow too, until I d/l'ed the driver from Nvidia, and modified ect/X11/XF86Config-4 file.

glxgears score before the new driver: 250
glxgears score after: 1900.

No, but then I didn't need to for 9.0 either (it's ATi Rage Pro). Under 9.1 Tux simply won't see the keyboard, but under 9.0 it is problem free right 'out of the box'. There's definitely something amiss with 9.1 (on my machine) whereas 9.0 is largely fine.

[NHaughton]

[i]
i wonder if us Americans should trust it since it is French made, i am sticking with ol' trusty Slackware... [/B]

I wouldn't rise to the bait. There're always two ways of looking things - you should expect that.

[dungscooperdave]

Originally posted by bwkaz
SMP and APM in any kernel is currently broken badly... might that have anything to do with it?

I believe that "console blanking" is done via APM if you have APM support set up at all in your kernel, though I could be wrong.
No, I don't believe the console blanking is done by APM. It's different from normal APM in that it doesn't actually turn the screen off, it just erases all the text on the screen. Even if it is done by APM, though, I don't think that that's what caused the problem anyway. A similar thing happened to me again the other day - I was browsing some websites for a while, and then I closed X and got dropped back to the console like normal. I did a 'poweroff' or 'halt' (I can't remember which, but they both do the same thing anyway), and I noticed that the text that is normally bright green wasn't even there at all. It was just filled by blank spaces instead. It's kind of weird, but nothing major that I can't deal with.

[willoughbyva]

I installed 9.1 a week or so ago. I had a little problem with my sound, but go it sorted out. i think they have done a good job with it so far.