I upgrade to Mandrake 10.0

After a horrible Windows virus infection last year, I moved from Windows to Linux. Fed up. I have been a UNIX user and sometimes administrator (HP, Sun, DEC) for about 20 years: as well as owning Macs and PCs at various times, I have been the proud owner of the wonderful AT&T UNIX PC (which had the best keyboard ever created for editing) and a SparcStation. My company had carefully avoided relying on any applications that would tie us to a particular operating system: Eclipse, Java, Open Office, Mozilla, Bugzilla and so on, just in case we needed to make this kind of move.

9.1: I chose Mandrake 9.1 last year purely because it was supposed to be easiest to install. Everyone has something better to do than system administration of personal computers! I had played with a Red Hat 7.2 in 2002, and was not really happy with the out-of-the-box fonts and Java support. However, we had been able to run VSS client fine under WINE emulation with FAT filesystem.

9.1 had installed relatively easily, but I found that the distribution had some bad holes in it: the kernel sources appeared to be a different version from the binary, so when I tried to rejig HZ I couldn't get a working recompiled kernel. More importantly, the lack of a reliable writable NTFS meant that I couldn't really use WINE emulation to run most of the applications I needed to. Linux needs good NTFS for WINE to work; WINE needs better documentation/wizards and study to make work; and Mandrake needed better guidance on its init.d and pserver.

VSS not working was no problem, I had decided to use CVS anyway. But I couldn't get pserver working, to make the CVS available to remote Eclipse clients. Oh dear, a real spanner in the works, because we all like to work on each other's code regularly. I found the Web a very unreliable source of information: configuration information regularly did not mention which distro and application version it applied to. (In retrospect, I should have just got a good book to help me.) Cleaning up and recovering from the Windows virus probably cost me a man-week, and the problems with CVS and VSS probably has cost me the same.

I have been looking at Subversion or moving to BSD, but walking through my newsagent I impulse bought May's LinuxFormat magazine, from the UK, which includes a Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition distro. Maybe I should risk an upgrade and then see if CVS pserver works easily?

10.0: I must say, it has been the easiest install or upgrade I have ever experienced. The only hiccup was that I needed to delete some old vmlinuxes at the appropriate point in the dialog. Apart from that it was all smooth: maybe only two or three prompts to start and the to ask for more disks.

When it asked for disk 3, suddenly I discovered that the magazine had given me a second disk 2 rather than disk 3. I knew that Mandrake organize disks so that this would be applications so I could cancel at that point without fear. Mandrake upgrades connect to the web and get more recent versions than the disk anyway.

The result: everything seems fine. The system boots; all my files (I use a lot of partitions) are fine; internet, partitions, printer and user settings are maintained; sound has started working magically; and the most recent Open Office seems to work. The next step is to check through Eclipse and whip CVS (or Subversion) into shape.

Except... the only downside was Mozilla. It installed a nice new Mozilla 1.6, but the mail application does not come up. (Similarly, Evolution would not fire up, out-of-the-box.) I downloaded a Mozilla binary direct from Mozilla, and it had the same problem: something to with not being able to use some XUL file. I am guessing the problem is either because of the missing disk 3 (but why, then would the fresh install of Mozilla fail?) or because I was installing it over an existing version: perhaps I needed to delete my ~.mozilla/ or something.

Anyway, in the end I downloaded Thunderird, the standalone Mozilla client, which works beautifully. My settings and my backup mail archives had been deleted, but we keep everything related to business on IMAP so I only lost a few friend's email addresses: I had forgotten these were not on the IMAP server, but I can get them back.

So, all in all, this was a completely non-stressful install. I had expected that Mozilla might take a little extra time anyway. (My definition of stressful is whether it distracts me from my foreground work on another system, and I am happy it didn't congest my naive multitasking wetware.) I am looking forward to seeing what performance impact the new kernel and the pthreads has on Topologi's editor. Traditionally UNIX has had a very smooth feel especially switching between applications; contrast with Windows which always felt bursty to me especially when working with more than one application; both Mandrake 9.1 and Red Hat 7.2 felt jerky to me, which was disappointing because of my good experiences with "real" UNIXes.

If I do find any big problems with Mandrake 10.0, I'll blog them. And, yes, I realize that Mandrake is intended as an end-user distro rather than a hacker's distro. But like Sun's JDS, this is just a wonderful distro to install; I suspect the same is true for the other Linuxes (and BSD?). And the typical applications are consolidating in number and maturing in quality.

Valé Windows: So far, in the 6 or so months I have been using it, I only recall missing Windows once: when I had to do some simplified Chinese typesetting. It seems that Linuxes may still have the crappy notion of localization rather than internationalization, which is no good for all the users who need to work in files of a different script than their locale. But we still have our old Windows license and we can boot that up and run it when we need it: its not going anywhere.

What are your experiences with Mandrake 10.0?