Distribution Watch: A Month Later with Linux-Mandrake 8.1

By: Brian Proffitt
Friday, January 11, 2002 01:38:55 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/4000/1/

A Month Later

It has been over a month since I first installed MandrakeLinux 8.1 Gaming Edition on my primary home machine and after a grueling month of use, I am here to report that Mandrake Linux has been surprisingly deft and convenient to use.

Admittedly, in the past, I have always been a little suspicious of Mandrake Linux. Indeed, some of my direct experiences with this distribution have left me feeling a bit shafted and wondering if Mandrake Linux was some joke the French were paying back on me after I ticked off their customs officials back in 1987. I immediately discounted this theory when I realized the obvious: everyone ticks off the French customs officials, so it wasn't just me.

Still, when Gael Duval released Mandrake Linux 5.1 back in 1998, this distribution had some major obstacles to overcome. A derivative of Red Hat, Linux-Mandrake was always targeted at the home user, a target Red Hat itself seemed to briefly flirt with back in the late Nineties until Bob Young decided to shift the focus of Red Hat to the more lucrative (and less mercurial) server market.

This decision by Red Hat may have done Mandrake Linux a huge favor--by separating itself from the home market, Red Hat's departure left the field relatively clear of competitors for the French distribution. The only major challenger thus far is SuSE Linux, which still maintains its Personal Edition. But even here, there is a caveat: SuSE's own marketing statements push their Personal Edition towards "the advanced home user."

Mandrake Linux has no such compunctions. They unashamedly want to kick Windows off of users' desktops and be a direct replacement for the Microsoft operating system. And while one would expect that this would be a laudable goal in the minds of most Linux supporters, in actuality Mandrake Linux's goals have frequently landed the distribution in hot water with many in the Linux community. Critics of Mandrake Linux have cited that it is a distribution that tries to out-Windows Windows. And while world domination isn't far from the minds of the Linux faithful, taking on even the appearance of the Opposition is apparently enough to attract venomous statements.

It didn't help, certainly, that MandrakeSoft, Mandrake Linux's parent company, was one of those Linux distros that puts a lot of funding and personnel resources into KDE. Given the amount of controversy that surrounded KDE before its developers released the desktop environment under the GPL, this was not the most popular horse for MandrakeSoft to bet on. Even today, Mandrake Linux takes quite a bit of heat for its KDE support from users that don't like KDE because it's (a) not GNOME, (b) an anti-GPL, anti-freedom environment that's all part of a plot by TrollTech to rule the world, and (c) not GNOME.

These particular criticisms are no less than any of the other distros get, but Mandrake Linux seems to be the brunt of a huge Linux user pile-on for vehemence. In the end, much of the unique displeasure for Mandrake Linux appears to be the fact that it is trying to be the "easy" Linux distribution--something that many hardcore Linux user can't help but find offensive.

Through all of these storms, Mandrake Linux had its own internal battles to fight. To be easy, the developers apparently recognized that this would have to be a piece of cake to install, for a tough installation is the bugaboo that will scare off Joe User faster than KISS showing up at a tent revival. Until Mandrake Linux 7.0, installation was something Mandrake Linux had a lot to work on. With 7.0, the DrakX installer seemed to turn around. Things were picking up for the rest of the packages, too, though the 2.4 kernel, KDE 2.0, and GNOME 1.4 were still a ways off. When these milestones arrived on the scene, all the pieces seemed to really fall into place for Mandrake Linux.

Mandrake's partnership with Macmillan Software as its U.S. distributor hasn't hurt the distribution a bit. Macmillan, now called Pearson Education, had a nice little toehold on the U.S. retail channels already from its sales of second-tier games. This is the match that led Mandrake Linux to show up on the shelves of Wal-Mart. Odd sight that it seems, this channel hasn't seemed to detract from Mandrake Linux's success. [Author's disclosure: I am a former employee of another division of Macmillan, Sams Publishing. I currently perform freelance editorial work for Pearson Education.]

In Mandrake Linux's continued quest to soak up as much of the home user market as it can, it is concentrating on that all-important arena of home use: gaming. And, working with TransGaming Technologies to integrate WineX into Mandrake Linux, MandrakeSoft has released the Gamer's Edition of Mandrake Linux 8.1.

It was this version of Mandrake Linux that I set out to live with on the 350-MHz Pentium II machine that serves as my primary work and test platform.

Beyond the Initial Installation

In my first review of Mandrake Linux 8.1, I did not get much farther than the initial setup and playing around with all the fancy new toys. Once that first look was finished, however, I had to get my machine up to my home office standards. For me, that means talking to the Internet, talking to my printers, and talking to the other machines on my network, including Windows and Mac machines.

The first goal was pretty much already established right after the install, since I use a DHCP server on my firewall to the outside world. I like this option because no matter how cranky Samba gets, I can be assured that all of my machines, whatever the operating system, are going to see the Internet.

Printing is another matter. I can directly hook an HP OfficeJet to my Linux box if I need to, but normally I just try to point the print queue at the HP OfficeJet connected to my wife's Windows 2000 machine on the other side of the office. I like this arrangement as a test, because its a quick way to assess the usability of whatever distro I'm testing. In this instance, I was able to use the CUPS tool within the Mandrake Control Center to hook into that remote printer without any hassles. Print speed was good for a remote connection, and fonts carried over well.

As far as Samba itself went, I have to admit that I've had easier times setting up Samba servers before. I tried to hold off and not just use the same old smb.conf file I use on my network--unless I really have to. The whole point of a review, after all, is to see how the GUI tools configure smb.conf from scratch. After a couple of false starts, I was able to get everything on my network talking to each other. And, since I was using Samba, it was also possible to get my Mandrake Linux box to converse with the Mac OS X machine--a recent newcomer to my network that also uses Samba. That was a rather surreal experience, but it's doable.

Ups and Downs

Beyond my initial goals, I found some ups and downs with configuration of Mandrake Linux as I used it over the past month.

One of the ups was just how fast everything seemed to work, particular in the GNOME environment, where things just blazed by. This may seem ironic, given Mandrake Linux's long-standing support of KDE, but I did a better impression of speed in many activities in GNOME than in the primary KDE environment. KDE wasn't pokey, mind you, there was just always this hesitant little pause before things got going.

Another up was the Mandrake Control Center, which is Mandrake Linux's answer to a centralized operating system control panel. With just one exception, I found the components in the Control Center to be easy to use and very responsive.

That exception leads me to one of the downs: the Control Center's Software management tool. I had occasion to use this tool several times over the course of the month and I found that this was a really slow app. On every start up, all of the sources would be checked for potential changes so a list of what could be installed and what was already installed could be generated. I would have rather the program just started and given me the option to manually start a check for changes, but if there was such a method, I could not find it.

The problem was, this was the GUI's primary way of getting into rpminst, the app for installing RPM packages in Mandrake Linux. Towards the end of the month, I was just clicking on the RPMs directly in the Konqueror or Nautilus file managers to bypass the Control Center and (since rpminst was pretty darn slow too) by the very end of the month, I had pulled out my copy of Running Linux to review all of the RPM command line parameters and just doing it that way.

Of all of the problems I had over the month, this one was the one that bugged me the most. It's not a showstopper, by any means, but a little oomph to these processes in future releases would not be unwelcome.

Another down worth reporting turned out not to be such a big deal--but until I located the solution, I was about ready to call my editor and chuck the whole review altogether. Such is the powerful hold games have on us: when they work, we are content, and when they don't, the whole world is crashing down around us.

In the initial review, I reported (quite sincerely) that The Sims, which is the game custom-fit with its own version of WineX for Mandrake Linux worked like a charm. Sound, speed, graphics--all was running well. Then, about a week into it, the trouble started. They say that on the seventh day, the Almighty kicked back for a break. Well, on my seventh day, my Sim world's sound decided to take a break from me.

No longer could I hear my little creations as the roamed about the world I had fashioned for them. The sound was gone, and I was seriously upset. On every other aspect of Mandrake Linux, the sound was working fine. My CDs were blaring from the speakers, Gaim was chiming whenever someone IM'ed me... what the heck was going on here?

About two days into this aggravation, I found the solution prominently displayed in the little 18-page "Install and Quick Reference" booklet for The Sims that came with the box. Not the big 108-page manual that also came in the release, mind you, which is what I had been checking. Nope, just in the little guide, which had a nice little Troubleshooting FAQ on page 9 that told me that my KDE sound server might be interfering with the game's sound. This clicked for me, since I remembered turning on the KDE sound server after the initial review. I turned the sound server off and found that I could hear The Sims again.

I am not ungrateful for the help I found in the guide, not by any means. But is it that hard for TransGaming or Mandrake Linux to switch off a running sound server during game start? Maybe it is, but if if not, that would definitely be one thing for the "To Be Fixed" list.

All in All

Up until now, I would have ranked Mandrake Linux about Number 4 on my personal list of favorite Linux distros. After this past month of really getting to work with it on a daily basis, I would have to move it up the ranks to Number 2--right behind SuSE and ahead of Red Hat.

It is not Number One with me yet, because of the problems I mentioned earlier. These were just enough to offset Mandrake Linux from being my favorite. It was a near thing. One thing I have never enjoyed about SuSE is its disagreeability with non-SuSE RPM packages. Not only was it pleasurable to use a distribution that had "standard" RPMs (if there is such a thing), but the presence of the Mandrake Cooker development project meant that I was getting access to RPMs for programs that were only a few days out from their initial releases. But, when I weighed this against my issues with Mandrake Linux, I found Mandrake Linux was a little short on the overall categories.

How close was my subjective comparison? Close enough that I no longer feel pressured to migrate back to my "home" SuSE platform anytime soon. I plan on keeping Mandrake Linux running for quite some time. While overall I found it to be slightly less than SuSE's performance, there is no denying the allure that the WineX application has for me as a user. The ability to run Windows-based games inside Linux is a siren's song when I put the reviewer's hat away.

So, for now, Mandrake Linux runs a very close second for me in the Linux distribution category. For other power users, I suspect that this might be a similar conclusion. For the home user to which this distro is targeted, there is no doubt in my mind that Mandrake Linux is the best offering I have seen to date for that audience.