A Month later with Mandrake Linux 10.1 Official
Mandrake 10.1 Official
by: jeremy1701 http://www.linux-mandrake.com
A special thanks goes out to
www.linuxcentral.com for providing the Mandrake 10.1 Official Club Edition CD's/DVD to linux forums for review.
Introduction
Since my
review of Mandrake 10.1 Community I have updated my laptop to Mandrake 10.1 Official. I was so impressed with the community edition that I also changed my home server from Ubuntu 4.1 to Mandrake 10.1 Official. I’ve been using it on both boxes for about a month now. I’ve attempted to put together a thorough review of my experiences using Mandrake 10.1 Official on both of them fro your reading pleasure.
Installation
There’s little change in the installation since Mandrake 10.1 Community. In all honesty, I think Mandrake has one of the best installers of any Linux distribution that I’ve tried. Besides being easy to use and having nice looking graphical interface, two features that new Linux users will find comforting, it also has one of the best hard drive partitioners I’ve come across, a feature that many advanced user will take delight in. One thing of particular interest to note is the easy of use that the PowerPack DVD provides. Rather then having to mess around with six or so CD's I can simply pop in one DVD to install anything. This is an extremely nice feature if you plan on doing any fiddling with your system.
Usage
I use my computer for the same basic things that almost everyone does. When I’m not busy tweaking it, programming for fun or trying to get my server to perform better, I mostly do a little work from home, surf the net, check my e-mail, listen to music, occasionally play a game or two and try my hand at digital photography. This is where my Pentium III, Compaq Armada m700 laptop comes in. I do all these things using this computer exclusively, as I can do them from any location in my home thanks to its portability and wireless technology.
On the other hand, I also like to play system administrator for the limited number of computers I have in my home. My so-called server is an old, 500 MHz, Pentium Celeron, Compaq Presario 5724. I’ve updated it to 256 Mb of memory and an 80 Gb hard drive, but other then that it’s all original parts. Compared to today’s systems, this thing is real a dinosaur. However, it runs Mandrake like a champ (albiet much slower then Ubuntu) and in the past, I frequently had uptimes greater then thirty days. It currently acts as my file server, internet sharing gateway, wireless access point and Samba server. I’ve even managed to get it severing up a few web pages thanks to Apache and
www.dyndns.org.
Office 
OpenOffice.org Calc
Like many others, I am forced use Microsoft Office exclusively at work. In the old days working from home would be a nightmare, as I’d almost inevitably have to fire up Windows to use MS Office. Now days Linux, of course, comes with OpenOffice.org, so working from home is no big deal. Whether I need to work with Word, Excel or PowerPoint files, I know I can open them, edit them and save them in OpenOffice.org without worrying whether or not the changes will be compatible.
I also have to view and edit pdf files on a semi-regular basis. The Mandrake 10.1 Official PowerPack DVD comes with Adobe Reader, so viewing pdf files is simple. I prefer a native open source project, so other then the initial test to see if Adobe Reader worked, I’ve been using Xpdf or Kghostview. For editing pdf files, I’ve found
Scribus to be almost as good as Adobe Acrobat.
Mandrake 10.1 Official goes a long a way in proving what we Linux users have known for a while now; Linux can easily replace virtually any office PC with little notice or complaint from the end users. It's office products are reliable and easy to use for those computer users that lack abilty, but can also handle the more complicated tasks and challenges of an advanced office user.
Internet and e-mail
What good would a computer be these days without being able to surf the net? Mandrake 10.1 Official comes with several browsers, including Mozilla and Konqueror. I had to install Firefox separately, but Mandrake RPMs are available on the net and easy to install using URPMI. Konqueror still seems to have issues rendering some pages, especially those heavily dependent on cascading style sheets. Firefox, on the other hand, is quickly becoming one of the best browsers out there. It’s lightning fast, comes with a built in popup blocker and runs fantastically on Linux. I use the mplayerplugin for almost all types of media on the net. Its easy installation and support for virtually any codec has made it easier then Windows to surf the net the way it's ment to be surfed, in all its multimedia glory.
kwifimanager makes for easy wireless configuration
Surfing the net wirelessly is a snap. Mandrake autodetected and configured my wireless PCMCIA card perfectly during installation. Using Kwifimanager, I can easily switch access point profiles so I can go down to the local café (where they offer free wifi access) without having to reconfigure my whole connection.
Kontact - Personal Information Manager
Kontact handles everything I need and more. It syncs perfectly with my Palm Pilot, allowing me to share contacts, memos, tasks and my calendar between work and home. E-mail filters and spam filters mean I get virtually no spam and my e-mails are always in the correct folders. The only thing Kontact isn't able to do is connect with Openoffice.org so I can mail-merge a contact directy to an address label like Avery. It's certainly do-able by simply exporting the contacts and then using Openoffice Calc to merge the data, but in the future, I would hope to see a more fluid system, like Outlook and Word.
Multimedia
Mandrake comes standard with quite a few multimedia applications, each having it’s own unique qualities that make it more desirable then the other. Personal preference plays a large part in selecting which player you should use. For me, Kaffine more then meets my needs for watching DVDs and XMMS works great for listening to CDs.
The new kid on the block for streaming music is
Amarok. It’s a media streamer, music database and player. I keep all my music on my file server and listen to it on my laptop using Amarok. It automatically updates my song list if I add music on my server and it’s fully compatible with
Audioscrobbler. It has some very nice looking skins and excellent visualizations. In the past, I’ve been a big fan of Rhythmbox, however I should point out that when switching networks, it would crash because it couldn’t find the music server. Amarok handles this situation much more gracefully.
Programming
What little progromming I do can be easily handled with either Kdevelop or Quanta. Kdevelop is a feature rich IDE for programming in virtually an language, although it's mainly designed for C++ and KDE development. Quanta is an advanced HTML IDE, designed to be much like Microsoft Frontpage. For those of us out there that prefer good old fashioned editors to IDE's, there's always Vim, my prefered editor of choice.
Server
As I mentioned earlier, I was so impressed with Mandrake 10.1 Official on my laptop I decided to switch to it from Ubuntu 4.1. The transistion was painless and simple; within a few hours my entire system was back up and running (hey, it's only a 500 Mhz PII. Installation itself took over an hour!). The standard Internet Connection Sharing wizard that ships with Mandrake 10.1 is far to rubust for my home use. It sets up Shorewall as the firewall and portfowards everything through the Squid proxy. Since I don't require that level of sophistication, I simply installed Firestarter and was up and running. It's wizards are simple to use and provide adequate protection for a home system.
Samba virtually installed and configured itself. My Windows accounts and printers were automatically detected and were usable with little to no configuration, other then walking through a few wizards. It almost makes me long for the old days, when firewall, internet connection sharing and Samba could only be hand configured. Rsync works perfectly to sync both my laptop and my Windows box to the server. This works nice as then I have only one computer to backup. I use a simple Bash script sync my home directories and then do the actual backup. It even burns the backup to CD.
Configuration
Mandrake 10.1 offers several tools for configuring your system with wizards rather then by hand. Sometimes these are okay and other times they can be a bit of a hassle. Some prefer the old school, hands only method of configuration while other prefer the Windows style GUI for everything. I, myself, lie right down the middle. Configurations wizards work great for some things, others I wouldln’t use a wizard to if you paid me, and still others I use a wizard and then tweak by hand. Regardless of the method, it’s always best to know what’s really going on behind the scene in case you don’t have a wizard handy.
Web-min is one of the two major graphical tools you can use configure your system. It works well and has modules for just about anything you’ll need to configure. I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes it lacks in intuitiveness, but it more then makes up for it with it's capabilities. Note that a lot of the modules are just front ends to yet another front end that would work just as well, for example the Samba configuration tool in Webmin is just another version of S.W.A.T. Web-min is available for any Linux system.
Mandrake Control Center (MCC) is the other graphical interface you can use to configure your system. As the name implies, it’s the default configuration tool for Mandrake. It’s all encompassing to almost every part of you computer, from hardware and software to firewalls and servers. Be warned that sometimes, if you use MCC and then edit your configuration files by hand, MCC will overwrite the changes you made with it’s last known settings. This can be a real PITA, especially when you don’t realize its happening or when the deafult settings aren't what you want.
Peripherals
Mandrake uses USB Hotplugging to auto-detect and access USB peripherals. Simply plug in your USB device and, if appropriate, its associated icon appears on your desktop. In the background, the device is mounted under the /mnt directory. Any device that’s read as mass media will be handled like this. My 256 Mb, USB stick, my Fuji digital camera and my SD card reader are all seen all mass media and work perfectly. Even my Palm Pilot can be used to access its SD card as mass media using
Card Export II from Softstick.
Other devices require specific drivers to get them to work with Mandrake. Those drivers may or may not be available, depending on what your device is. Syncing my Palm Pilot with Kontact requires the kpilot backend and conduit. Using the kpilot wizard, my device was detected and configured to work the first time I synced it. Further syncing, backups and program installation requires nothing more then the standard Palm Desktop does.
Gnomad works with almost any Creative device
Using a program called
Gnomad2 and the libnjb library, I can even use my Creative Nomad Jukebox III with Linux to transfer files to and from my device, create and edit playlists and even change settings on the device. The program and library are easy to install and come in both RPM and tar.gz formats. The project is under constant development and new devices are being supported all the time. The development team is very helpful and always willing to spare some time to get your device working if you can’t yourself.
Conclusion
Whether you’re new to Linux or an experienced guru, Mandrake offers some excellent features for a home or small network environment. You can configure and install virtually everything using the Mandrake Control Center. Almost everything can be done using a wizard. This can be both comforting and daunting, depending on whether you're a Linux newbie or a Linux guru. In the end, Mandrake 10.1 Official is by far the most user and hardware friendly distribution that I've ever used. I would recommend it to anyone requiring a stable, reliable and robust distribution.
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