[CLUG] Mandrake 7 - first look

[Donncha O Caoimh]

I installed Mandrake 7 last night. The graphical installer is really
sweet. I thankfully didn't have any problems with the installer finding
my graphics card (Riva TNT) or my mouse.

Everything was reasonably easy. I went for the expert install which let
me configure which packages I wanted to install. This is a nice
tree-based representation of the packages, but I did notice that the
list would disappear and then re-appear sometimes, but that was fixed by
scrolling up or down.

The partitioning software was impressive too, but it nuked most of my
8GB fat32 partition. I lost most of the files on the C: drive when I
resized it down to 5.6GB or so. I'm copying stuff off it now using Linux
onto another fat drive but the C: drive will have to be formatted.. I'll
probably reduce it to 2GB this time anyway - not much use for it anymore
:)
I did attempt to resize an ext2 partition but was warned that it would
destroy any information on it.
Moral of the story: make backups and use fips or Partition Magic.

There are a a load of window managers included as well as a host of
applications. I didn't think the "Pentium optimized" binaries would make
much difference to normal apps but windows seemed to pop up faster than
in RH 6.0, and the system was more responsive.
Of course, this could be due to a newer XFree release.

Will I use it? At work no, I don't need the eye candy. Window Maker,
RXVTs and Vi is all I need for work, I find I can't use "normal" editors
anymore anyway (they just get in the way) but I may very well use
Mandrake at home for the family.

Oh, I couldn't get kppp to configure pppd for use on Esatclear, but
netcfg and usernet are included too so you can use them instead which
work very easily. (They aren't selected by default in the install, make
sure to look for them and select them).

The supermount thing didn't seem to work either for some reason even
though /etc/fstab included the supermount keyword in the cdrom line.
*shrug* I'll look into it.

Donncha.