Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 21:02:13 +1000 From: "Haikal Saadh" <haikal@freeshell.org> To: "Andy Hung" <ca_hung@hotmail.com>, "Cameron Green (wildmail)" <camerongreen@wildmail.com>, "Cuong" <theuncontactable@hotmail.com>, "dave" <replenish@hotmail.com>, "Jeremy Mawson" <jem@loftinspace.com.au>, "Nik Saers " <niklas@saers.com>, "Nishchal Kush" <n.kush@student.qut.edu.au>, <admiral_paul@hotmail.com>, <patsimon12@yahoo.com>, "Wes Clarke" <fleshkeep@powerup.com.au> Cc: <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: A FreeBSD User Reviews Mandrake. Let the flames flow. Message-ID: <000001c29b84$9a400370$9802a8c0@warhawk>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I gave it a chance. Honest. But it still wasn't good enough. A bit of background. My laptop's been dormant for a while, underpowered, overworked dog that it is, but I need a laptop as will be on the go soon, and will need a computer of my own for internet access, and to store my photos until I get back to Home Base. I want a flavour of unix simply because, well, to bullet it out, O I hate windows 9x/ME, and my laptop's really too underpowered for 2k or xp. O I want to impress chicks (okay, fine, let's be realistic here...show my l33tness to my other friends, and impress (or upset) potential employers by nmap'ing their networks and setting their laserjets to use letter and triplicate instead if a4 because they were too slack to set a default password) After seeing all the hype about the new generation of linuxes, having a laptop to spare, (and seeing as how FreeBSD 5.0 is still not out yet), I decided to give Mandrake 9.0 a whirl. Before I went on, I decided to outline some requirements for my laptop. So here goes. Base Requirements: O No Bullshit setup/configuration. O Must work with my digital camera. O Must be able to get on the web with a Mozilla-type browser. O Must run evolution. Sorry, no other mailer will do. O Must be able to get on ICQ,YM,MSN, and IRC. O Must have an workable office suite. (OO.o or gnome office) Extended Requirements O Must be able to do stuff while listening to mp3's off an smb share. Super Extended Requirements O Must be able to run Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia flash (or equivalent) (dream) O Java! O Anything else I can think of. Okay, let's start from the beginning. The hardware Toshiba Satellite 2100CDT, 400mhzish cyrix chip, 64 meg ram, 3com pcmcia nic, 4g of harddrive space. The Installation. Package installation was a royal pain, as it was slow as, and in grand linux fashion, insisted on crapping shit all over my harddrive. The final install weighed in at around 2.5 gig, as the installer did give me gnome and kde, and I did not make any efforts to stop it. The installer itself, I found too colourful for my tastes...as if it was aimed at 7 year olds or something. All in all, not much substance. Took me way too long to get from bootup to formatting partitions, and from formatting to installing packages. An experience which I would not have to relive again. (Compared to FreeBSD's not as pretty, srprisingly much more functional installer. Once all that was done, It rebooted and gave me a gdm logon screen. Oh, and it had a pretty framebuffer thing which told you in nice colours what services were starting. Boy did it take ages to start...it took longer to start up that windows 98 used to. And in grand linux fashion, started up a whole heap of services which are highly unnecessary on a laptop. Saslauthd? Wtf is that? I don't use sasl to authenticate against anything. This is a lapop, which gets used on about three different subnets and has one user account. Why oh why. The first few hours... Were spent in frustration because my network card was not being detected. After much frustration at google and google groups not being able to answer my question, I finally set the bios setting to use 16-bit cardbus, and it worked. No mention of this setting having to do anything was mention on the web. (And google is the web as far as I'm concerned). Oh, and I forgot to mention, not having a configured network seems to upset a lot of things. Urgent looking (but ultimately harmless) messages saying things like (paraphrase) 'Could not find hostname, your network is seriously misconfigured' popping up on logging in. Well I have news for you, bub. The hostname is 'localhost'...at least that was what 'hostname' said. Right, anyhow, once I got the network card fired up, it didn't do anything. Didn't try to get a dhcp lease or anything. Frustration followed. Quick look at /etc/ made me hurl (why can't linux have /etc/rc.conf?), so I decided to try the fancy gui tools, of which there were quite a few. I tried linuxconf first, as that's what a lot of linux weenies like to talk about, and...It Didn't Work! Made some shoddy excuse before shitting itself. I tried the mandrake supplied tool, and haha! It worked. Newsflash, Mandrake dev team: Don't install tools that don't frigging work. FreeBSD's /stand/sysinstall, like the installer, may not be pretty, but it works. Everytime. And you have no other tools to confuse you either. Moving on... First thing I tried was see if my camera worked. It's a sony cybershot, which hooks in via usb and pretends to be USB drive. A mount /mnt/camera later, I could move files in and out. Woohoo! Of course, I could surf, and chat with xchat and gabber. So I was happy for a few days. I tried to install the software, but out of the box, the only source mandrake recognises are the CD's. I had to MANUALLY add an ftp source and an index file which I had to SEARCH for (it wasn't in any of the manuals, or within 5 clicks of the mandrake website or google). Compare and contrast, again to FreeBSD, which lets you pick whether to install packages off CD, ftp, http or a myriad of other source, and _has preconfigured ftp sites *all over the world*_. And then.... I tried listeing to mp3's over thenetwork with xmms over an smb mounted share, and it crawled. Sound drop outs everytime I tried to do anything, like copying files from cd or network. Oh, and even though CD's were automounted, I had trouble reading one...it had file names with spaces in it. Nah, refused to copy. Not sure if the spaces were _the_ reason, but a nearby freebsd box was able to read the same cd just fine. The CD in question was a Macromedia promo CD witch I got at a seminar a while ago (I just went for the freebies, didn't get much, apart from a lime frog (not a crunchy one :D)) Moving on, I tried to install the flash demo from the cd under wine, but the thing crashes after installshield finished extracting, and that's the end of that. I wonder how people manage to get WarCraft 3 going, what me not being able to even INSTALL a systemwise less demanding app than warcraft 3. Maybe I shoulda RTFM, but really, after the xmms test and the cd read fiasco, I wasn't going to try. So now... I'm installing Redhat 8. Will it be good enough to make me not overwrite it with FreeBSD once 5.0 comes out? Stay tuned. The verdict? Well to be fair, it was nice while it lasted, and for a basic internet client with a gnome desktop, it's okay, but It must be an embarrasment for someone to be outformed by windows 98. (it boots up faster, and I can play mp3's and surf/ copy files without dropping out). It craps junk all over disk which I don't need, starts up slow as, and really...at the end of the day, left my wanting for the simplicity and... Logicalness and sanity of a FreeBSD system. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 7.0.3 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com>; iQA/AwUBPe3gtOhz+6gkNePcEQImjwCgx55Lv3HQOpBwvuNqYdlo0peeFVQAn07r R7eBAd/+mVkcoUF4+sVb0t8G =5XW9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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