[ILUG] Mandrake 7.0

[lbedford at wbtsystems.com]

I have to say I am majorly less than impressed with Mandrake 7.0. It has
to be the worst installation system I've used yet, and it doesn't work.
Time for them to think this one out again.

(Background: My machine:
Home Built Celeron 366, Gigabyte BXE Motherboard, 192Mb ram, 12Gb WD hard disk,
Intel EEpro100 network card, NCR 895 SCSI card, Plextor Ultraplex 40X). Oh, and
a Micrsoft Intellimouse Explorer USB mouse, and an MS Natural Keyboard Pro,
(USB) with built-in usb hub.

I started by getting the iso from their web site, and burning it to a CD-R/W in
work (I checked the md5sum before I burnt it). I went home, slapped it in,
and it went through into X. So far so good... worked away, got to 
repartitioning. Deleted my BSD partition, and added a / and a swap partition.
It added them as /dev/hda5 and /dev/hda6. Bit miffed by that, but not
put off yet. Then it crashed trying to load packages from the CD. Rebooted.
It wouldn't start X. Copied from CD-R/W to CD-R. It ran X but crashed again.
Wouldn't boot X again.

Next day... put it into my BSD machine, and shared it over NFS. Installer
worked, and actually installed. It crashed after adding a user, and wouldn't
make a boot disk or a bootable hard disk. Wrote the rescue disk. Wouldn't
boot. Tried the redhat rescue disk. It also got upset. (not sure whether
this is a problem, but everything else boots okay). Restarted the install
with the text mode NFS installer. Installed okay, but got the USB stuff
all wrong. Eventually managed to get to a login prompt. Local tty's are
not allowed to let root logon (I think I picked Low security). Login,
su to root. Fix the usb stuff. Kernel oops. I give up. I'm waiting for
a distribution with _proper_ USB support, and which isn't released in beta 
format.

</rant>

L.
-- 
---
Liam Bedford						System Administrator
WBT Systems, Block 2, Harcourt Centre, Harcourt St.	01-4170153
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