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Mandrake 9.2© Copyright Darrell Anderson. After deciding in early 2003 that Linux was not ready for my desktop, I decided in late 2003 to take another look. Except for a handful of times, I had not booted to my Mandrake 9.0 partitions since I stopped investigating Linux in early 2003. Because I was loosely familiar with Mandrake—at least with respect to being a Linux newbie—I decide to stick with that distro for my next wave of investigating. I had paid the full store-front price for Mandrake 9.0, but I decided I would not do the same for the current version 9.2 because I still was only investigating Linux. I visited an individual with a broadband connection and downloaded the ISO images for Mandrake 9.2. If my experience remained true, I did not want to try the 9.1 version because in the software world alternate revisions typically tend to be buggy. Just as I had in early 2003, I decided to devote most of my energy to Linux. I spent approximately four weeks breathing, experimenting, and studying Linux. I consider the effort successful and am now much more comfortable and “at home” with Linux. Although still a novice, I now have a much better grasp and confidence of many Linux characteristics, configuration files, etc. Mandrake 9.2 came with KDE 3.1.3 and I noticed improved response for my aging K6-III+ computer. That pleases me. If the Linux community truly wants to become more popular on the desktop, then programmers must find ways to optimize and provide a functioning GUI on mid-range computers. There are millions of such computers still in use in this world, especially in third world areas. Linux programmers cannot assume everybody has a P4 2.0 GHz system. Before I performed any installations, I “ghosted” an image of my entire hard drive. I like to have an escape path. I then methodically edited my GRUB menu.lst file so I could boot from my second drive if necessary. That also required editing the fstab file on the second drive. After some trial and error I finally could boot from either hard drive. I also created some floppy boot disks and wrote some crib notes about booting with those floppies. The first thing I did was burn the Mandrake 9.2 CDs. The ISO images were installed on a spare hard drive. I used my Mandrake 9.0 distro and K3B. The session went without event and I quickly had three CDs ready to install. I never had that kind of smooth success with Roxio on my NT4 system. In my first attempt to install Mandrake 9.2, I decided to perform an “update” installation. I had read that “updates” sometime fail and many people recommended performing an “install.” I still am experimenting with Linux, and I was unconcerned if the “update” failed. My Linux partitions contained no “productive” data or configuration files. My only concern was to not lose basic desktop configuration information. Yet, even that was not a critical concern because of my second hard drive image. If things blew up I needed only recopy partitions to restore. The update mode did not work well. Without the benefit of being an experienced Linux user, I could not say what went wrong or why. All I know is my system did not function well and was not responsive. My Mandrake 9.0/KDE 3.0 configuration was not speedy but was noticeably faster than my new Mandrake 9.2/KDE 3.1 configuration. I decided to try again using the “install” mode, which meant reformatting the /usr partition. Thereafter my new Mandrake 9.2 / KDE 3.1 configuration worked much faster. Unlike with Mandrake 9.0, this time I decided I did not want to perform a full “blind” install. I am not into games or video and I did not want to install such software. I also am not a developer and I chose to not install related programs. I experienced mixed results. I think the problem is basically the way Mandrake presents the installation options and the infamous “RPM dependency hell.” I noticed that after selectively removing certain files from being installed that some deselected files were installed nonetheless. More than likely because something I had selected had a dependency upon those programs. I later tried to create a check list specific to Mandrake 9.2 of what I wanted installed. Yet, the entire installation process is fatiguing because a user has to review almost every option to decide what gets installed and what does not. Like with Mandrake 9.0 I then performed several reinstallations to learn and get a feel for how this process works. Basically I wanted to “test” my written check list. During one such run, the Mandrake installation program froze completely. I pressed the computer reset button and quickly discovered my GRUB boot loader no longer functioned. I have no idea why Mandrake screwed with my boot sector, but my guess is that Mandrake uses LILO by default and the point when the system froze was when I was making those manual changes. Nonetheless, I was ticked. Big time. Fortunately, those boot floppies and my second hard drive image eventually pulled me through. I also have boot floppies for my NT4 and DOS partitions. Technically I was not totally stranded, just inconvenienced. I still had that second hard drive image too. Restoring GRUB was time consuming and frustrating, but having a plan and backups saved my bottom. I also learned a thing or two about GRUB. Overall the experience was beneficial, but my human nature is no different than anybody else’s—a crash is not the preferred or most convenient way to learn. I then somehow got possessed with trying to better understand the boot sequence and hoping I could improve my boot times. At one point in my experiments I noticed that something had gone dramatically wrong and by boot time and overall system response was seriously dragging bottom. I suspected a font configuration and caching problem because I had been trying to change the location of where my TrueType font collection was stored. Fonts seem to render much better now, probably due to the updated version of XFree86. As far as I can tell, the Mandrake font installer program will install TrueType fonts only to a hard-coded directory location located on the /usr partition. If I needed to perform a clean install the /usr partition would get reformatted and I later would have to reinstall my TrueType font collection. Time consuming and a PITA. I also find the installer program user-hostile and not particularly intuitive to use. I rendered the Mandrake font installer program as useless and I decided to learn to install TrueType fonts manually by using the high road. I repartitioned my hard drive to create an individual partition for /usr/local and I created a mount point to the new partition. That is where I wanted my TrueType collection installed. Thereafter I would not need to reinstall my TrueType fonts. Instead I would need only to copy a backup of or edit my etc/fs/config file. My plan eventually worked and I wrote some instructions for installing TrueType fonts. Through this process I learned the importance of backing up my /etc directory. Copying config files is a lot easier than trying to edit new versions after performing a clean install. A lot saner too. During this process I decided I wanted to create Mandrake 9.0 partition as well as have my Mandrake 9.2 partition. My second hard drive image contained my Mandrake distro but not the main drive. The main drive contained only the newer 9.2 distro. I wanted the 9.0 partition solely as a backup for when I goofed seriously and could not access my 9.2 partition. My philosophy was similar to why I had an NT4 alternate C: system partition. I wanted a back door to manually revise and edit files. Several times my alternate NT4 system partition saved me grief and I wanted the same protection for my Linux partitions. So during this entire process I had to not only create a new /usr/local partition, but create sufficient space to copy my original Mandrake 9.0 partitions to my main drive. I then had to edit fstab and GRUB menu.lst files to be able to boot in just about any combination plausible. I also had to create or update my boot floppies. Time consuming and I learned much and eventually I was successful. I now can boot to Mandrake 9.0 or 9.2. As you might suspect, through my subsequent experimenting with 9.2 I was thankful I could boot to 9.0 to edit my config files and get back into 9.2. Through all of this I now have some better notes and a better understanding of what is going on under the hood. FWIW, OpenOffice (1.1x) has to be the world’s all-time second slowest program to open. The all-time champion probably is OO 1.0. I also am confused about why when I create a new blank document in OO that the default font is italics. I tried changing the font style to no avail. In fact, the toolbar buttons indicate that the font is not italics. I will keep using Word 97. Mandrake 9.2 finally recognized my wheel mouse. Mandrake 9.2 again refused to configure my ISA sound card. Fortunately for me, I needed only to restore my backup copy of /etc/module.conf. Mandrake 9.2 again defaults to LILO for the boot loader. I prefer GRUB. Hopefully the Mandrake people get a clue. I found the Mandrake 9.2 Start menus to be better organized. I hate and despise the way Mandrake tries to intercede and create the Start menu. The entire reason for this nonsense is that Mandrake offers multiple window managers and they try to create an appropriate menu tree for each window manager. A noble goal but there is too much confusion and overhead. I also have no idea why they need to create a graphical image of the menu structure. The Windows method is so much easier to understand and manually maintain. Once I finished all of my repartitioning madness and configurations I decided to spend more time logged in as a user rather than root. However, when I “su” to root I notice a lot of error messages in my log files. I also notice several error messages in my X session log and when I boot into KDE from Init 3 level using startx I notice a slew of error messages in my KDE logs. The problem seems to be with the X keyboard compiler and keyboard mapping. I do not know how to fix those errors. I also notice errors in the boot logs and I suspect the Mandrake programmers are modifying the Linux kernel. Overall, I am satisfied with my progress. However, I think some of my frustrations are specific to the Mandrake distro, and because I like a lean and mean computer, I am going to next try Slackware. Of the prepackaged distros Slackware is supposed to be the most “pure” Linux distro. I have spent much time and effort keeping my NT4 system lean and mean and I want the same with my Linux system. I don’t like a lot of overhead. I also notice that many people who use Slackware tend to claim that their system responds quite well even on older mid-range hardware. Thus, I am tempted to think that some of the things the Mandrake people do are causing some slow-downs. Finis. |
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