[ILUG] First Impressions of Mandrake 8 (beta)

[Wynne, Conor]

Well well,

I had a crash of my system - Harddrive failure - , so I decided its time to
check out that Beta release of mandrake 8 - at least to test. 

Its well impressive, the install was easier than a windozs install. It
detected correctly my voodoo5 (and installed accelerated x-server (4.0.2 I
think) 
I couldn't re-install quake3 (to finally see what its like on a v5) as one
of the kids ate the cd! OK, maybe I should have fed them. 

But my TV Tuner (Miro PCTV) was configured automagically with a 2.4.2 Kernel
and lo and behold, it worked! Likewise for the SBLIVE! (but I'm getting used
to that working with most distro's these days) 

The GUI is beautiful, if not altogether stable, I checked out KDE 2.1 and
Gnome, aswell as a couple of the other boys. 
If they can get it 100% for the final release, there may actually be a
contender for the desktop market (and I don't mean just us geeks!) I mean
you normal commonor gardener users. I am going to BUY the final release.
Yes, pay money for software

They have made significant updates to all their own tools aswell, which
justifies a version 8 (from 7.2) in my eyes. 

I had a couple of nagging issues, like the compilers don't get properly
installed, but hey it is BETA! 

Later,
CW