10.2 Beta 2 DVD: First impressions

Hi,

I'm probably going to get told off here for not reporting on bugzilla. But I 
find that thing generally impossible to navigate, bugs tend to get ignored on 
there anyway unless they are for x86, and with the amount of 'similar' bugs 
that thing throws up (numbering in the hundreds), I simply don't have the 
patentice to trawl through the thing to check every time I post if the bug is 
going to be ignored anyway.

I generally just want to be giving feedback anyway, nothing I post here is a 
show-stopper, and I would personally like to get some debate going in here, 
as this list is fairly quite. I apologise to anyone I may offend.

Generally, I find the release to be of very high quality. I find applications 
crash a lot less often than they did with 10.1, which was my main motivation 
for trying 10.2.

I'm mightily impressed by the way the distro handles 32-bit applications, 
namely Cedega, which I use a lot. Kudos for that.

Minor bugs I've found:
I run a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels. The installer didn't seem to realise 
this, and wanted to push my monitor to 1600x1280, which it can't handle. I 
had to manually correct this. Upon booting, when the system asked for my 
mandrakeclub details, only (at a guess) 1024x768 of the screen appeared 
occupied in the top left corner. The rest was black until KDE started.

Changing IP address was a pain. After changing from DHCP to a static address 
(the installer shouldn't assume I want this, just because it's available on 
the network), no programs loaded at all. I think this is due to X not 
handling the ip change very well, and programs were unable to communicate 
with the X server until I logged out and back in again.

The Kaffine media player always segfaults when I tell it to quit. Bringing up 
the KDE crash dialogue.

amaroK refuses to work with the xine plug-in which it's configured to use by 
default. Details in http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=14299

I don't understand why both Konqueror AND firefox are included. Surely there 
shouldn't be competing products on the default installation ... ?

There are some graphical glitches in the boot-up splash screens, but I assume 
these are likely to be present in the i586 release as well. So I assume it 
will be fixed soon.

These are hardly show-stoppers. But I feel that if the devs don't know about 
them, they won't be fixed. Of course, if I've reported complete crap here, 
feel free to correct me. 10.1 was a personal disappointment for me, I would 
often find stuff randomly crashing for no reason, 10.2 is shaping up to be a 
solid release with predicable crashes (sorry for the bad humour, I'm 
British).

I really love this distro. When my girlfriend saw Linux, and generally how 
secure and spyware free it was, she fairly quickly wanted 'the cute penguin'. 
Mandrake really is doing a lot for the Linux community by getting non-geeks 
like my girlfriend interested in Linux.

Regards,
-Richard.