[techtalk] Mandrake 8 revisited

[Martin.Caitlyn at epamail.epa.gov]

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?

> The problem, in fact, is undetected corruption of the RPMs on the mirror
I
> was using. MandrakeUpdate handles dependencies a little "oddly" - if you
> try to install foo which depends on bar, it adds bar to the list of
things
> to install.

...which, in theory, should make life a whole lot easier.

> However, if installation of bar fails, it goes on to install
> foo anyway - leaving you with a non-functional foo.

Ouch.

> 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.

> Partitioning issue, in fact; there are two ways to format Zip disks. One
> makes the disk appear as a partitioned HDD with a single logical
partition
> (hence /dev/[hs]dX4), the other regards it as unpartitioned, like a
floppy
> or CD ROM. Unfortunately, some Zip drives assume the former, and make the
> partition appear as the entire disk. A nasty hack; more information on
the
> LKML archives if you're interested.

Thank you.  It's useful information.  If and when I have copious free time
I'll definitely look into it further.  In the meanwhile, I'm just glad that
my Zip drive works in both Red Hat and Mandrake, and if somebody asks me
how to make it work I can give them an answer.

[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.  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.

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

Regards,
Cait

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Caitlyn M. Martin             martin.caitlyn at epa.gov
Systems Analyst              (919) 541-4441
Lockheed Martin
(a contractor for the US EPA)
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