Over a year ago I first put some form of linux on my laptop. My distro choice at the time was Mandrake 9.1, but I moved on to try other distributions.
To date my old Dell has seen:
- Mandrake 9.1
- Mandrake 10.0
- Suse 9
- Ximian (on Suse – I know it’s not a distro, but it is a big change)
- Debian testing
- Ubuntu
- Mandrake 10.1 (official)
The last one went on this evening 🙂
Kevin in Mandriva (formerly Mandrakesoft) provided the CDs for an experiment we are conducting, so I decided to give it another go on my laptop.
The installer annoyed me almost immediately. Although I was installing from CDs on a laptop that is devoid of floppy drives (unless you swap the cd-rom for the floppy – which I have misplaced) it kept on asking me to insert a floppy. I ignored the error message, but I wonder how a complete novice would have reacted.
The rest of the install was fairly uneventful (much swapping of CDs) and finally I got to boot into my shiny new install. Or did I? Well you could say that I did, but it wasn’t particulary usable. KDE for some odd reason was only semi-working, but a reboot seemed to fix that.
As Mandrake 10.1 has been out for some time updates were going to be necessary, so I needed to get the networking going.
With other distros configuring the network via a GUI is usually relatively simple, unless you are either trying to do something complex or make a really dumb mistake.
Mandrake was a little awkward. Due to the way I’m setup here (I’m using NAT, but not DHCP) I had to configure the networking semi-manually. For some odd reason there was no option to set the DNS via the GUI when setting up a static IP. I had to do it from the shell.
What was really frustrating was setting up the online updates. I know I eventually managed to do it, but I must have logged into at least four different places on the mandrake sites (why do they have so many??) to get their network to recognise me as a legitimate user.
If you are going to use Mandrake/Mandriva I’d recommend having a look at Easy URPMI, as it would probably have saved me at least an hour of frustration 🙂
What did strike me as more than a little odd is that, although you end up with a choice of browsers and mail clients with the default install (and I was trying to follow the default closely), neither firefox nor thunderbird are available by default. Neither application seems to be available on the CDs either. You can pick them up if you use Easy URPMI to configure some online repositories, but I would have expected them to be included by default.
I’ll probably keep Mandrake on the laptop for the next few weeks just to see how I get on. I want to explore it properly before I move onto something new, or back to using Ubuntu 🙂
Leave a Reply