Re: 10.2 Beta 2 DVD: First impressions

Richard Brooklyn wrote:

>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.
>
>  
>
This is not good news at all.  I've read some issues on the Club forum 
as well, which leads me wonder "what kind of crap product is Mandrake 
trying to push out the door?"

I ask this because:

The mixer issue in x86-64 also shows up in x86 10.2 RC1m  (whoops)
SoundBlaster has issues (related to mizer hanging on start and shutdown)
Apps and libraries that should have been updated, but weren't.

In the past, Mandrake has put together awesome products, but I can't 
help but feel that quality is slipping with this release.  Quality not 
only in x86 but x86-64!  I'm downloading the DVD release of beta 2, but 
I'm not even sure I am going to load it after reading this report.

I've played with some other x86-64 distros that look good and solid.  
Fedora and CentOS top the list as OS's that have it together.  Let's 
hope Mandrake gets this attitude and gets the release right, or i fear 
an exodus to Fedora or CentOS may be in order.