Chris Johnston

I decided to take the plunge and installed Mandrake 9.2 onto my Linux server. The good news is that for the most part, everything went fine. There were absolutely no problems during the install. Once again, Mandrake proves that installing Linux can be a very painless experience.However, the problems came after the install. The first problem was with the almost 250megs of updates that needed to be installed. Yes, you read that right, 250megs. Plus, you have to install a new kernel as well. This can only mean one thing, in my opinion, Mandrake 9.2 was rushed out the door before it was fully tested.

The first thing that I noticed was the spartan menus and lack of some programs. I still haven’t found FreeCell. Now, I had read that 9.2 installed the bare minimum of programs, so I made sure to individually select programs that I like during the install. Even still, there were several programs that I had to manually add after everything was up and running.

The biggest problem that I have had with this version is getting Samba up and running. It took me forever to get it so that my windows computers could log on to my Linux Samba shares. In addition, I still haven’t been able to mount my windows share so that I can read to it. However, to give Mandrake some credit, I am not sure if this is because of my own ignorance with Samba, or an indication of a lack of tools. (Somebody has got to create a useable simple GUI interface for Samba.)

The bottom line on this release, skip it. Or at least wait until they have all the bugs ironed out. Currently, there is a huge problem if you have a LG CD-ROM drive (Mandrake will kill it) and a list of problems that is several screens long. If you are happy with how your 9.1 computer is running, then give this release a lot of thought before you install it.