[Wolves] mandrake 9.1 upgrade

[Ron Wellsted]

On Monday 15 Apr 2002 5:56 pm, Steve wrote:
> like ron i've recently tried mandy 9.1 . i upgraded my latitiude c500
> laptop from 9.0. It took about 1 1/2 hour to update/install, which is odd.

Last time I tried an mandrake upgrade (on a 333Mhz AMD laptop) it took 3+ 
hours so you did quite well.  A fresh installtook about 20-30 mins.


> Things that are good
>
> 1>Nice + clear installer

Yep, very good, I found it was easier to use than M$ win2k/XP installer.

>
> 2>Improved config tools

I was impressed the way the package installer automatically selected the 
required dependencies and prompted for the required CD(s),  (just like 
apt-get!).  This is something every multi CD distro should have by now.

> 3>Some new included packages, like the excellent flphoto , a lovely little
> photomanager, with a fast and easy thumbnail/web export function.
> http://www.easysw.com/ ~mike/flphoto/ + loads of video encoding tools,
> mplayer and so on.

Though I had problems getting mplayer to work with alsa.  Why can't the 
config/install scripts config the defaults for the environment it finds on 
the system?

> Things that are not so good
>
> 1) ACPI doesn't seem to work. Apparently the kernal gets a broken bios
> message, and then appends lilo 'acpi=off' . I was hoping a good
> implimentation of this would help with the battery life...but hey ho. Ron
> had issues with this too..anyone else? How is it sposed to work?
>
- - - - - 8< - - - - -

Part of the problem is that the ACPI code is not an official part of the 
kernel yet and is still experimental.

>
>
> <Moan alert> Sometimes tho, i think that the focus appears to be moving
> more towards trying to get anti aliased fonts to work, and to create
> vaguely pretty themes, essentially replicating the visual look of XP and OS
> X, rather than ensuring stuff like ACPI/upgrading/ actually works - and
> works well. This worries me, i understand the arguments for making
> something user friendly, but that has to be carried across to how it
> *functions* as well as how it *looks*

True, after all one of the "selling points" of Linux is its 
reliability/robustness etc.

-- 
Ron Wellsted
http://www.wellsted.org.uk
ron@wellsted.org.uk