Ryan's Journal

I'm attempting to use Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva) on my laptop (named "daddy", thanks to Ai-ris). It installed beautifully, as advertised, except for a couple random package failures. It also happens to not recognize my wired ethernet card, though it luckily picked up on my wireless card, so i can actually use the net. Whereas the install was great, the day-to-day operation is almost as abominable as Windows 98.

A brief rant on Windows 98 - it's never actually booted without telling me something was wrong with the registry other than when I first restored it. This is pathetic. Once I add something, like my wireless card, Win98 can no longer deal with itself and commits seppuku as soon as it starts. So Mandrake is doing slightly better.

But just barely. The random crashes in Mandrake are more arcane, though more widely spaced in time, and the filesystem errors brought up seem to indicate bad sectors, but Mandrake never finds any. So I'm trying to upgrade from Mandrake 8.1 to 8.2. (Historical note: this was caused by a 357 byte sector in RAM at the 47Mb mark that was bombing certain things at the wrong time; it was replaced, and Mandrake 8.2 has behaved admirably well since then) This process involves downloading ISO images of a cd containing the installation information, like a raw, byte-by-byte snapshot of the cd's contents. There are three cd's, each image being 650MB. This takes anywhere from an hour to 10 hours depending on the connnection - and finding a good connection is an art form. So Mandrake releases their software March 18th, and all the good connections have been swamped since then, as I've found while I try to download it.

There have been ups and downs as I hunted for Mandrake-82-cd1-inst.i586.iso, but one thing I realized was the checksum for the files (a way of guaranteeing file integrity) were the same as those for a file called MandrakeLinux-82rc1-cd1-inst.i586.iso, a name indicating a test version of the system. Only just now have I learned that some extremely irresponsible individual uploaded the Mandrake-82 files under the release candidate names, and now most of the mirrors around the world have picked up the rc1 names instead of the final names.

I realize this is technically boring for most people other than myself, but I think it's absolutely beyond excuse to go releasing files with the wrong names WITHOUT SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT IT ON YOUR WEBPAGE. I had to dig around in some arcane forum posting to find official word on my suspicions, that MandrakeLinux-82rc1 and Mandrake-82 were actually the same thing.

Inexcusable, and a total waste of my time. This had better be a stable operating system. (By the way, I'm using my most local mirror at ftp.rmpfind.net).

You must login to leave a comment