[Techtalk] Mandrake 9.2

[Hamster]

On Sat, 18 Oct 2003 09:27:08 -0700
Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> wrote:

> I know that hordes of people adore Mandrake, but no matter how hard I try,
> I just can't like it. There are too many weirdities. 9.2 is no exception.
> Like all Mandrakes, the install is easy and flawless. Actually using it is
> where the trouble begins. The primary troubles are in the over-abundance
> of GUI config tools. There's the Drak stuff, and whatever comes with
> window managers and desktops, and random Red Hat detritus. 

If you truly want to be scathing, you also need to point out that Mandrake
is actually 1/3 Mandrake 1/3 RedHat and 1/3 Debian.

I guess you must use Mandrake in a different way to me, I've not run into
the sorts of problems you've mentioned. The releases between 8 & 9 have
greatly consolidated all these gui tools, and I've only seen dodgy stuff
happen on my machine when I've used to a gui tool to configure X. I think
the thing to remember though is that X itself comes with several config
tools that also produce some "interesting" results!

But as a general rule (unless I've really missed something) the drak
tools deal largely with hardware, and abstract thing likes fonts, mount
points, lilo/grub and security settings. If you want to configure KDE then
you just use the KDE configuration tools that Mandrake helpfully places in
the Configuration menu.

The one gripe I have is the Mandrake version of KDM (called KDE). Its broken
in several places, but its very easily fixed by creating/editing
/etc/sysconfig/desktop and adding the line DISPLAYMANAGER=kdm. This way you
get KDE as she was written by KDE.

How gnome works under mdk is I'm afraid something I've never looked into.

oh heh. If I'm being honest I have two gripes about mdk, the second one
being its toxic msec programme. That gets deleted with extreme prejudice
after I install.

>There are
> incompatibilities, whatever you do in one messes up another. I don't know
> who pioneered using config tools that maintain their own databases,
> instead of simply being a front-end to the system files, but  I'd like to
> find them and slap them. Mandrake is too full of such for me.

The neat thing is that you don't have to use any of these gui tools.
If you want to, just edit the files directly from the command line.

Anyway, just my two cents, I hope this doesnt turn into some sort of distro
holy war. What works for one doesnt have to work for another.

Hamster