[techtalk] Mandrake 8 revisited

[James Sutherland]

On Wed, 30 May 2001 Martin.Caitlyn at epamail.epa.gov wrote:
> Hi, James, and everyone else,
>
> > Not Perl SCRIPTS per se; vim-enhanced (the "colourful vi") is a binary
> > linked against libperl.so. When I installed vim-enhanced, installation of
> > libperl failed - leaving me with a broken vi, instead of an error
> > message from the RPM installer...
>
> Ah... this makes sense to me now.  I didn't see a colorful vi because I am
> currently using the old fashioned, plain vanilla vi, not vim.  If you don't
> have that installed, yep, you'd have no vi left.  That would be
> frustrating.
>
> Tell me:  how many "standard" UNIX commands are linked against libperl.so?
> Do you know?  We've already established that gcc is not unless you install
> gcc-color.  vim is an issue.  What others are there that you are aware of?

I don't know which commands do this - gcc and vi (regular "vi", not just
vim) are, if you install gcc-color and "vim-enhanced". vim-minimal still
points to plain old vi, AFAICS...

I managed to resolve the problem by getting a working libperl.so installed
from another mirror, so I'm not sure how many other utilities would have
been affected.

> > Moral of the tale: A little checksumming goes a long way - so why don't
> > they?
>
> I can't answer that.  Have you thought about writing Mandrakesoft and
> asking that question?  I'd love to see it fixed in 8.1, or better yet, in
> an update to MandrakeUpdate for 8.0.

That would be nice; some time next month, I might get a chance to write my
own support for that!

> [re: MandrakeUpdate]
> > It has improved, but still needs work: better
> > handling of corrupt/partial RPMs, for example.
>
> Agreed.  I guess what set me off was the tone/language of your posts.  It
> seemed to me that you were warning everyone away from Mandrake, and to me
> that was like throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water.

Not the intention - I'm still running Mandrake now, having managed to work
around this problem. I haven't rebooted since I installed it, though -
I've faithfully downloaded and compiled nearly every new kernel, and then
not rebooted into it!

> I can list some pretty rough edges in Red Hat, Caldera, and
> TurboLinux, yet all are decent distros and I wouldn't warn people away
> from any of them.

Indeed - I'd still recommend Mandrake, and use it myself - I just don't
like some of the "user friendly features" they've added. Like Microsoft's
charming little paperclip - seems like a good idea, but turns out to be
the most irritating piece of stationery on earth :-)

> > It IS valid. You disagree - that's fine, but it does NOT invalidate the
> > criticism.
>
> I think my choice of words may have been poor.  Every so often it still
> shows that English was my second language, and sometimes what I mean to say
> just doesn't come out right.

Understood - what is your native language, BTW?

> Your criticism is valid.  My objection was to the conclusion you
> seemed to be reaching, specifically, that Mandrake is a really poor
> Linux distro.

Not the case - I do like it, I just hate some of the "user friendly
features" they've included.

> That is the point of disagreement.  I think it's a really good distro
> with some flaws.  So far, that accurately describes most distros I've
> tried.  The only two I wouldn't recommend are Storm, largely because
> the companyis no more, and Slackware, largely because it is maintained
> primarily by one person and is usually a bit behind the other distros.

Have you tried Corel Linux? I gave it a go once, but the setup program
hung on the boot logo - not a good start...


James.