Journal severoon's Journal: Linux: Mandrake 10.0 Experience 5
Hey all, thought I'd share with you my recent experience installing the Mandrake Linux distro just last week. I'm sad to say that it seems Linux, at least Mandrake, is not quite ready for prime time yet.
Let me begin by heading off at the pass those who will say, "Ah ha! Well, there's your problem, you shouldn't have gone with Mandrake. You should've gone with a good distro like Debian/Gentoo/Linspire/SuSe/etc." I reject the validity of this point because, as someone who likes the idea of Linux but mainly uses Windows these days, I just don't have the time to investigate in careful detail the differences between all of these. I did about a half hour of cursory research, chose Mandrake, and moved on. If there is a up-to-date page that lists all of the distros and compares/contrasts them, I was not able to find it, meaning that anyone else wishing to adopt the Linux platform and only wanting to do only about a half hour worth of research will not, either.
Ok, so, I d/l'd the images and burned them onto CDs. Booted off the CD and in about a half an hour (not including d/l and burn time) had Mandrake up and running. So far so good. This machine happened to be on a Windows domain, so next comes Samba.
I do not claim to be a Samba expert, but then again, all I wanted to do was get the machine on the domain and get filesharing enabled both ways. Perhaps I'm not the most savvy Linux doc reader and HOWTO tracker, but I'm not a disaster either, and I was very disappointed with how long it took me to figure out how to get this machine on the domain. I was dismayed when I couldn't find SWAT installed and discovered that, despite specifying that I wanted Samba during the installation process, SWAT was left on the CDs. Ok, so I put SWAT on and run it up...and found absolutely no indication of how to get the machine on the domain through this supposed "web adiministration tool".
Finally, I found the magic incantation to join a Windows domain on a discussion board, not in Samba docs or the SWAT help files. (Who wrote those help files, by the way? Clearly someone who expects that anyone using SWAT is dedicating a large part of their career to learning and using Samba.) Then after about another hour's research, I discovered that it seems to actually see files on the Windows boxes, I must run an app called smb4k (uh huh) and mount shares on the Windows boxes.
Now I had a crazy idea. If this is the application to use for getting access to the Windows boxes, why not try to expose some Linux shares to the Windows boxes using it? Alas, it was not to be. Apparently it did not occur to anyone working on Samba that one might want a single application from which one could expose files in both directions...this must be that silly Windows naivete on my part that I keep hearing about. Finally, I cracked open the
I realize it's not fair to blame Mandrake for this. After all, this is Samba, not Linux, and I understand the difference. So far, the only complaint I have with Mandrake is that I asked the installation to give me Samba and it didn't also automatically install SWAT. So now it's time to install Firefox. I d/l it, run the installer...everything goes smoothly and the browser pops up on my desktop. I've been running Firefox on my Windows box for about two months, so the first thing I want to do is configure it. I click Tools -> Options...Options? Where are you Options? After a bit of poking around I discover it's under Edit -> Preferences, like Netscape, on Linux, but Tools -> Options, like IE, on Windows. Greeeeat. So much for multi-platform...apparently Firefox is a different browser on Windows than Linux...now I'm starting to wonder what else I can expect will be different.
Ok, so it's on now, and the installer's popped up a browser window, I've configured it, and I'm running. I close it, and a little later decide to do some more web browsing. Over to the menu app launcher...Firefox nowhere to be found. Ok, I think, Mandrake must not work with every installer to add apps to the menu. I'll just add it myself. After a bit of poking around and 10 minutes of reading menudrake docs, I get the menu item in...but no Firefox icon. Just a generic application icon next to the launcher button. 30 minutes more poking around, no luck, no success. I install Limewire and have a similar experience, I have to manually add it to the menu and then no icon. Now I have two apps with the generic system app icons next to them. I look forward into the future and try to imagine a menu of app launcher buttons, all with generic system app icons next to them. My stomach turns.
Ok, enough time on that. Time to do my web browsing. I click the generic icon to launch Firefox and see the Firefox entry added to the taskbar. The wait symbol spins for about 10 seconds, and then it disappears. No explanation, no error message, no nothing telling me why it didn't load properly. I run it again...same thing. This time, I pop up a console and try. Ah ha! Now I see an error message at the prompt saying that Firefox terminated because some dependent library is not installed or configured properly. But I just had it up and running!
No problem, I reinstall it. The browser pops up at the end of the install as before and I browse. Close it, reopen, and...nothing. Open a console, same thing...some kind of library problem.
So, am I impressed? No. I do so want Linux to work well because I hate the evil empire, but the only friends I have that run Linux successfully as their main desktop at home either live and breathe the platform, keep abreast of every new development for it, and don't mind spending hours figuring out how to add skins to xmms or configure the proper icons in the app launcher menu, or they've simply gotten it to a workable point and become frozen in time, afraid to make any major changes to the way their doing things for fear of opening a Pandora's box.
It's been about three years since I did a brand new install of any distro, and I heard that the latest wave of releases solved all of these problems. I'll admit that I spent less time mired in doc for this go-round than I have in the past, but I am still left with a bad taste in my mouth. It's sad, really, because I do so want Linux to work for me.
More reviews (Score:2)
1. SuSE is probably the best for a quick "get up and going" distro.
2. Linux still sucks overall.
Your Mandrake experience in particular does not surprise me. When I installed Mandrake, my sound card would NOT work (no matter what I did), and my network connection finally just outright failed. Even more annoying is that Mandrake lacks a network install CD, so you have to download all THREE ISOs. Talk about a pain.
Of course, with new distros
Mandrake root (Score:2)
I see lots of people (like you) that think there is a magic solution to "I have trouble with linux" and that solution is to try another distro. But all distros are the same. It's the same freaking software. So if you figure out how something works under one distro, you can get it working under any other distro. Installing a new distro does not automatically fix anything. In fact I think it makes things worse, because ra
Re:Mandrake root (Score:2)
I think the people hard at work on this latest wave of releases would more or less heave a giant sigh of frustration if they read your comment that "Linux is still a hacker's OS." This latest wave was widely billed as the anti-hacker release. :)
In any case, I'll reiterate that much of my frustration was not due to problems with Linux per se...it was primarily Samba. As far as Samba is concerned, I'm going to have to disagree with your notion that in this case flexibility comes with complexity. The comple
Re:Mandrake root (Score:1)
Re:Mandrake root (Score:2)