Good evening ladies and gentlemen and all the ships at sea. I am here to
express my enthusiasm for my recent purchase of the retail edition of
Mandrake Linux 7.2. I have been running the RC1 "version" of the upcoming
Mandrake 7.2 distribution. I have been quite satisified with it aside from a
few bugs. Obviously when I heart of its release I immediately rushed to
Wal-Mart and picked up a copy. The price wasn't too bad, pennies less than
$25 and after reading the back of the box I felt I was getting quite a deal.
After returning from my shopping trip I opened the box, and what a box it
was. On the front there is an image of a smiling penguin. Perhaps he's
smiling because you are purchasing a fine piece of software or maybe it's
because you have just stepped in something and he's laughing at you (more on
this later.) The cover of the included manual is much the same as the front
cover of the box. All of these sweet, smiling penguins make the packaging
look very pretty. After unpacking the cds and such I dove right into the
meat and potatoes of the package. I popped the first cd into my cd-rom drive
and rebooted my system. Everything seemed to being normally but then the
hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end. I chose to do an Expert
Installation, as usual. To my amazement when it came time to select packages
I was given three options I hadn't seen before. I had a choice of minimal,
normal or custom installations. No big deal I thought as I chose the custom
installation. The next screen began to make me wonder as I was prompted with
a short list of "packages." I deselected what I did not wish to install and
then was quite disappointed to see the installer move on to installing
packages without allowing me to decide what I didn't want installed. Before
I go much further I should note that the option of selecting a security level
as well as the ability to turn off supermount, enable numlock and hard disk
optimisations was not available even though I selected the expert
installation. Now, back to installing packages. After going through the
motions of installing packages it quickly moved to configuring my network.
Simple enough, I'll just give the installer a placebo and reconfigure after
rebooting. Time zone and printer configuration go off without a hitch. The
next step, choosing a root password and then adding user accounts was equally
as simple. Next up, X. What a rude awakening. No option of choosing
whether I wanted to use 3.3.6, 4.0.1 or 3.3.6 3D enabled. Interesting I
thought as I also noticed the lack of the ability to chose whether or not to
start up in run level 5. After setting up X I expect to be greeted by the
install boot manager screen. Instead I am politely asked to remove all media
from all drives and reboot. Now I'm beginning to wonder as I carefully check
the box and its contents for a Microsoft logo. On to the reboot
[editor's note: expect things to get ugly ie PG-13 and worse]
The pc speaker beeps and up pops the Li...Grub? It installed Grub on my
system? Glitch number one for the glitch list. Now the system begins to
start up. Aurora makes the boring startup messages a bit prettier but that's
about all. Something that is purely aesthetic and I would normally not elect
to install but again, no real harm done. The real harm is in all of the
services that are being started. Anacron, at, apmd, portmapd, imap, ipop3,
sendmail, postfix, rwall, rwhod, everything but the kitchen sinkd. Glitch
number two, one easily fixed but a slight pain nonetheless. The login prompt
appears amid the huge ascii penguin. I being to type in my username when
suddenly the screen flashes and I'm looking at another "pretty" login prompt.
I am in run level 5. Now I begin to get pissed off. KDE2 loads and
everything looks normal until I notice that my favorite file manager, gentoo
does not appear. Neither does gkrellm or the nmap front end. What the hell
is going on? I begin to poke around a bit. I try to connect to my isp but
guess what? PPP was not installed. Perhaps it wasn't installed because I
wasn't given the option to do so. One nice bonus was the inclusion of
StarOffice and a Java Runtime Environment. However some things were missing.
Oh well, gentoo is a small package that is easy to download. Time to
configure KDE 2 a bit more. How nice, a KDE2pre version of KDE2. Now I'm
really glad I spent $25 on this package. I decided to check version numbers
against the RC1 cds I have. The first one I checked was kdebase. Same
versions, 1.99-xxx. I thought the final release was to have 2.00-xxx?
Enough of this, I am disgusted. I have used each concurrent release of
Mandrake Linux 6.1. I have downloaded TWO of these distributions over a slow
56k modem connection, taking as long as a week to get the latest distro. Now
when I finally decide to give a little back and purchase a retail package I
get this steaming pile of penguin shit. I expected to be running the final
release of KDE2 as well as having the programs I always use available as
well. Granted I can download a tarball or rpm of Gentoo if the RC1 release
has it why should I expect to not be in the final release. The extras
included are nice but they do not outweigh the missing pieces in this
release. I don't like grub and do like lilo however the installation
routine, even when passed the expert or all options does not allow a choice.
Nor does it allow me to choose what XFree86 version I wish to install. I am
forced to install hundreds of packages I can do without. I do NOT need Tetex
and all of its fat installed. I speak English, bad English and some German
so why would I need French man pages and documentation installed by default?
Call me a control freak if you will but the biggest feature I appreciate
about the whole Linux/Open Source approach to software is the ability to
control what options I install. I can spend more time getting things done
instead of having to download software (gentoo) and software updates (KDE2.)
Worse yet this could in fact be called beta software. Granted even an early
linux beta is more stable than anything Microsoft squeezes out I don't care
to pay my hard earned money for beta software. This whole disaster could
have been avoided had the box been more clearly labeled. How am I supposed
to return this now that I've opened the packaging? I truly hope that you
have a good explanation for this premature ejactulation, that is if 7.2 is
your baby. I truly hope you aren't giving in to the evils of greed and
bastardizing linux the way Red Hat has. I am writing this letter not to pick
a fight but to express my CONCERN. In the course of a year I have gone from
being 100% dependant on Microsoft Windows to utilizing Linux to do nearly
everything I need it to do. I believe another year will allow me to
completely abandon windows for linux and Mandrake appears to be leading the
pack. What am I supposed to think when I purchase a retail package that
contains pre-release software? I like to consider myself loyal however my
loyalty toward your distro has been called into question. This package will
not go to waste. The manual is well written and the included extra software
is nice. I can pass this on to someone who wants to try linux for the first
time but I can't loan this to someone who is more advanced and needs more
control over what is installed. I certainly this fumble was caused by
MacMillan publishing. This will definitely tarnish your reputation if it
continues. Please think twice next time, if not break it up with a plunger
and flush twice.
--
Greg A. Bur
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.rivertown-computers.com
