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 🙂
2006 Beta1 is out. They added plenty of bu^[ new functionalities.It should be fun to test out, i might probably post a couple of screenshots later.
Steph
Steph
What’s the version number on the new one? Have they included firefox this time?
Michele
Since 2005LE, Firefox is the default browser. It is currently 1.0.4 patched with latest security stuff.
Steph
Steph
Is there an upgrade path from 10.1 to 2005LE?
Michele
Well the usual, urpmi.removemedia * then add the urpmi.addmedia from http://easyurpmi.zarb.org from ESAT/HEANET (both main and contrib et plf/plf-nonfree if you need them). Then watch it install, before rebooting, make sure that you install the kernel designed for the box. I would install the updates AFTER the first reboot, just to ensure that the system boots up properly first.
Steph
Steph
I’ll give that a try 🙂
Michele
If Easy URPMI only saves you an hour of frustration, you must be employed at Mandriva or something. Me, it’s more like weeks 🙂
Harald Korneliussen, currently upgrading from 10.0 Official(?) to 2005LE
I read your laptop reviews with interest. I’ve been using Mandrake for a number of years and gradually dual-booting into Windows less and less. Being the cautious type, I haven’t yet seriously tried out other flavours as I’d like to iron out a few annoyances and to fully optimise the configuration of my computer system before comparing with other distros. Being cautious, I’ve previously upgraded versions by booting up from the Install CDs while keeping /home as a separate partition and selecting the “upgrade” option at the start of the Install procedure. The procedure outlined by Steph sounds interesting and useful allowing me to dispense with downloading CD ISOs and just install over the Internet.
I don’t remember having problems installing 10.1 but I definitely had no requests for a floppy. The install procedure each time was very smooth, quick and easy. I particularly like the Mandr* package selection GUI (much easier than dselect or aptitude when I played with Debian woody and sarge). The Install/Upgrade procedure nicely handled the upgrading of system settings in /etc by creating new configuration files (based on the old ones), naming them appropriately (with .rpmnew) and then asking me if I wanted to use the newer or older version. The one problem I noticed with the install procedure was that the files pertaining to the previous 10.1 sources remained in the /var/lib/urpmi/ directory.
Once the installation is complete, I’d concur with the recommendation of Easy URPMI. It’s just quicker and easier to install and update packages once you know what to type.
Anthony
Thanks for the feedback.
I’ve moved my laptop back to using ubuntu for the moment.
Michele
Does anyone know a good list of well-supported laptops (running Linux I mean)?