Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

Continuing with our review series of distributions for AMD64 processors, the next product we tested was the 64-bit edition of Mandrakelinux 10.1. Unlike the previous three distributions (see Debian on AMD64, Fedora Core 3 on AMD64 and Gentoo Linux on AMD64), Mandrakelinux 10.1 for X86-64 is not readily available for download, and even the Silver-level members of Mandrakeclub were only given access to the ISO images some 6 weeks after the official release on November 10th, 2004. That said, we noticed that, just before Christmas, the x86_64 directory on Mandrakelinux mirrors was populated with RPM packages together with a small installation ISO image, so rather than asking Mandrakesoft for a review copy, we opted for a network install instead. As always, the boxed edition of Mandrakelinux 10.1 for X86-64 is available from Mandrakestore ( €119.00).

First, the system specifications: AMD64 3500+ processor (2.2GHz), K8N Neo2 (Socket939) mainboard from Micro-Star International, 2 GB of DDR SDRAM, 2 x 120 GB Maxtor hard disks, Plextor PX-712A DVD/CD rewritable drive, and NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card. The monitor was a standard 19 inch LCD from Mozo International.

We downloaded the 4.5 MB install.iso image from a mirror site. Although the ISO was in the /official/10.1/x86_64/ directory, it turned out to be just a generic installation image with no built-in specifications that would indicate its architectural affinity. After detecting and loading the correct network card module and confirming that DHCP should indeed be activated (other options included static IP and ADSL), the installer asked to specify the installation method (FTP, HTTP, NFS or hard disk). It continued with a request to type in a preferred FTP/HTTP server and a correct path to the install directory. Since the installer itself does not include a list of available mirrors, you need to look up the information before starting the installation. After the usual partitioning and package selection screens, the installer was ready to begin downloading and installing the new operating system.

From this point on, the installation proceeded without much human interaction. As with previous three distributions, we chose a complete workstation with GNOME and KDE, as well as a handful of server applications. The local mirror delivered the packages at the maximum available connection speed which meant that the installation completed in less than two hours. After a few more screens helping to configure the boot loader, X server, security settings, adding users and specifying the root password, we were presented with an option to update the system with security and bug fix updates.

And this is were we spotted the first bugs, or more precisely, some amusing geographical anomalies. This time, the installer did supply a list of available update servers, neatly arranged by countries in which the servers were located. However, only a dozen or so countries were on the list, while the remaining update servers, be they in Brazil, Hungary or Japan, were all listed under "United States"! The next geographical mishap happened on the survey page, where we decided to let Mandrakesoft have our hardware data. But when we got to the drop-down list from which to select our country of residence, we noticed that a number of big populous countries, such as China or Japan, were not listed at all, while Antarctica or Pitcairn (a tiny Pacific Ocean island of less than 50 inhabitants) did appear on the list. Since our country of residence wasn't listed, we pretended to be descendants of those famous mutineers on HMS Bounty and registered Pitcairn as our country of residence.

Of course, these are no showstopper bugs, just something for the Mandrakelinux developers to polish before 10.2. However, worse was to come.

The first surprise came after logging into KDE, which greeted us with a desktop background that proudly proclaimed "Mandrakelinux 10.1 Community". Community!? But we had pointed the installation sources at the "Official" directory, so how come we ended up with the Community edition? We rushed to check the "mandrakelinux-release" RPM file, which confirmed that what we installed was indeed the "Community" edition, despite it having been placed in the "Official" directory (the same RPM package in the official/i586 directory correctly indicated the "Official" status of the i586 branch). A quick question on the expert mailing list brought dead silence - a marked difference from our earlier experiences with the Debian mailing lists and Gentoo forums, where questions were answered and problems solved with much more enthusiasm.

After coming to grips with the fact that nobody really knew what edition of Mandrakelinux we had installed, the next logical step was getting product updates. Based on experiences with Fedora, SUSE and other distributions, we expected to find a "Update" icon somewhere in the KDE system tray and we weren't disappointed; there it was - the "Mandrakelinux Updates Applet". A double-click brought up a dialog, which... well, before turning this experience into a long story, let's just say that, after having made the effort to configure the applet and register for an update account, we still weren't able to get any updates - that's because this is a paid service, only available to Silver-level members of Mandrakeclub. It would have been nice if the applet had informed us about this fact beforehand, but it wasn't the case.

Surely, there is another way to get updates - through the good old Update module of the Mandrakelinux Control Center. Unfortunately, this turned out to be another frustrating experience - no matter how many times we tried to configure the update sources, the application kept displaying an error message claiming that it could not find any available mirrors, most likely, it said, because our installed architecture was not supported by Mandrakelinux updates. But upon examining several mirrors, the update directory for x86_64 was available and populated with RPM packages, so why the misleading message?

And this is what we thought was possibly the biggest problem with today's Mandrakelinux - because of the distribution's increasingly commercial nature, we were often unable to determine whether a particular feature was disabled in order to make the user join a premium service, or whether it was deliberately crippled so that the user doesn't easily find a way around the club membership net. Either way, the experience was not pleasant. Of course, there is always a possibility that these were just bugs. But if that were the case, there were already too many of them, even before starting to use the distribution proper.

Eventually we found a way to configure the application to get updates - by resorting to the command line and using the "urpmi.addmedia" command. Unfortunately, by that time we started having serious doubts about the quality of this distribution, where lack of attention to detail and various "joined the club" tricks seemed to be the order of the day. In a way, Mandrakelinux 10.1 started to resemble LindowsOS 4, which installed a bunch of flashing and rotating icons of various other Lindows products into the system tray, all screaming "buy, buy, buy". Not quite as bad, but close enough for discomfort.

In all fairness, once we got through these early troubles, the distribution turned out to be a pleasant product. The hardware autodetection was flawless, the applications we tested behaved as expected, and Mandrakelinux Control Center is a friendly utility for most general configuration tasks. Like in Fedora Core, many 32-bit applications and libraries were installed on the system alongside the 64-bit ones - the 32-bit libraries (referred to as lib*) are in /lib, while the 64-bit libraries (referred to as lib64*) are in /lib64. On the download server, the two branches are stored in two separate directories - main and main32; the main directory lists a total of 3,875 packages, while the main32 directory lists 573 packages, including OpenOffice.org and MPlayer. Interestingly, the popular PLF site hosting third-party Mandrakelinux packages now has an x86_64 directory with over 100 RPM packages, including many multimedia applications and codecs which cannot be legally shipped with Mandrakelinux.

Is Mandrakelinux 10.1 (X86-64) worth €119? As we did not test the commercial edition of the product, we cannot really answer the question, but the FTP edition has given us enough warning signs to put any recommendations on hold. Frankly, it is hard to see how Mandrakelinux will compete with other 64-bit distributions on the market, especially with the likes of Fedora, but also Debian or Gentoo, which are free of cost and available for download immediately after release (or continuously updated). Additionally, all three of them have more up-to-date packages (Mandrakelinux 10.1 ships with GNOME 2.6 and KDE 3.2.3), fewer bugs (especially when compared to Fedora Core 3), and more responsive mailing lists and user forums, actively monitored by the distributions' developers. Mandrakelinux 10.1 X86-64 is not a bad product, but it is marred by lack of polish and some unnecessary commercial tricks.

Index entries for this article
GuestArticles	Bodnar, Ladislav

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to post comments

Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

Posted Jan 7, 2005 7:24 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

"Of course, there is always a possibility that these were just bugs."

As a long time Mandrake user, I can confirm that this is indeed the case and it has been like this since about 2000. There is a clear pattern to the bugs as well: they usually have to do with a GUI application, more recently it seems that the persons responsible for the mirrors want to have their share of brown-paper-bag cockups as well.

The irony is, for a home user like me, Mandrake provides the best selection of packages (Red Hat is not good for a KDE user, SuSE has no PLF equivalent) with an easy installation. Their own software however, has always been buggy and what worries me is that recently this has spread to the release process as well. There are some engineers that know what they are doing, the kernel people and the people handling security updates get it right most of the time and the guys who wrote urpmi certainly knew what they were doing. But the majority of the people who produced the Mandrake Control Center and now later some of their other apps, should simply never be allowed to code again.

The cockup that happened last Easter when all mirrors (including security updates) were unavailable for more than a week and even longer for older releases, indicates that Mandrake lacks any kind of formal process to do things. The constant re-designs of the Control Center tells the same, somebody is doing them just because he likes to do ui design and he has no boss to tell him that it already looked great in the previous release and he should now concentrate on fixing bugs.

My all-time favorite Mandrake bug, which shows clearly what we are dealing with, was in the Internet Connection Wizard, which had a button with a text: "Press here to run the wizard ->" (don't remember the exact text), but at the end of the arrow there was no button, it had been moved to the left side of the app :-)

All in all, Mandrake is a great distro, with a history of being truly free (not like Lindows) and if you find a Control Center app that doesn't work, don't use it, there is always a standard Linux way to configure things (command-line, text files... ).

Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

Posted Jan 7, 2005 9:31 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

I feel this review was a unfair in reviewing what may, or may not have been the Community edition, downloaded from a mirror directory that may, or may not have been officially there. (Who knows, maybe the mirror directory was just in the process of being populated?). At least at the point when the reviewer noticed that Whoa, this looks like "community" even though the directory name said "official", he should have halted the proceedings and started looked for another, more certain source for the official edition.

I certainly have endured my own share of Mandrake bugs in various versions. Not having tried 10.1 on amd64 I cannot comment on the quality on that version, and it could be as bad as the review says. However, the "Community vs Official" is the company's attempt to do something about the quality problems. Those looking for a finished product instead of bleeding edge should go for Official, and I feel reviews should also review it, not Community, which really is a kind of public beta. Certainly no review should be published where the reviewer appears to be unsure which version is actually being reviewed!

Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

Posted Jan 17, 2005 9:46 UTC (Mon) by swbobcat (guest, #27315) [Link]

>>Is Mandrakelinux 10.1 (X86-64) worth €119? As we did not test the commercial edition of the product, we cannot really answer the question, but the FTP edition has given us enough warning signs to put any recommendations on hold. Frankly, it is hard to see how Mandrakelinux will compete with other 64-bit distributions on the market, especially with the likes of Fedora, but also Debian or Gentoo, which are free of cost and available for download immediately after release (or continuously updated). Additionally, all three of them have more up-to-date packages (Mandrakelinux 10.1 ships with GNOME 2.6 and KDE 3.2.3), fewer bugs (especially when compared to Fedora Core 3), and more responsive mailing lists and user forums, actively monitored by the distributions' developers. Mandrakelinux 10.1 X86-64 is not a bad product, but it is marred by lack of polish and some unnecessary commercial tricks.<<

This gets right to the crux of the matter: Mandrakelinux has been my preferred choice OS for the better part of 6-7 years -- I *HATED* Red Hat with a passion. If SuSE can release their x86-64, extention and Fedora, Gentoo, et al. Then Mandrake does not, it makes one stop and wonder: WHY???.

Like the reviewer I have been finding too many bugs that I have notified Mandrake about which have remained UNFIXED to this day. The last release that worked well for me in the 32 bit world was 9.0 -- yes I did say 9.0. with every succeessive release there seem to be more and more bugs, and with each release and the problems that I reported before have still not been fixed. I REFUSE to pay good money for a buggy product. As much as I like Mandrake, I have ditched it. I am in the process of building a 64 bit system with an AMD Opteron 144 processor. It is still not finished being built but we have enough parts for test runs. I tried Mandrake 10.0 64 RC1 and it stunk; I tried Mandrake 10.1 RC1 and it too stunk. SuSE 9.1 was also a non starter. To my great surprise Fedora Core 2 runs like a charm on a minimal system, though Fedora Core 3 not as well, but this may be because it is still a minimal system.

The truth of the matter is that Mandrake is making a GIANT mistake in not releasing ISOs for Mandrake x86-64. Can someone -- anyone -- tell us what the difference would between releasing ISOs for 32 bit systems and for 64 bit systems?? the answer is NONE!!! We are moving to a 64 bit future, and Mandrake is abdicating its LEADERSHIP ROLE in the Linux Community. When it comes to our collective 64 bit future, Mandrake will have become an "also ran". Fedora is becoming the New Mandrake at least in the 64 bit world, and it also seems to be the case in the 32 bit world as well.

If I could send a message to the management of of Mandrakesoft it would be this: Pull your heads out of your asses and wake up!!! Fine you have a right to make a profit, then why not release the LAST version of your 64 bit system. If people need the latest and greatest, they will be glad to pay you for the pleasure, those who can't afford to can use the "old" stuff. And there are also those of us who have been burned having bought the distro only to find that the bugs present made it a total waste of money. BUY Mandrake ?!? Not until I have TRIED it FIRST and make sure that it is going to work!!!!

I commend Mandrake on the idea of releasing both a "Community" and an "Official" release, as it is hoped that by the time the "Official" version is released, Mandrake has fixed some of the bugs found in the "Community" Release. In short the "Community release is simply NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME.

To the CEO's et al at Mandrake, you best start thinking about addressing the 64 bit question because if you don't you will be left behind. Linux users are NOT trapped to any SINGLE distro, and right now especially in the 64 bit space FEDORA IS THE ONE TO BEAT!!! It is the distro that Mandrake should have been.

Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

Posted Jan 18, 2005 12:08 UTC (Tue) by jadawin37 (guest, #27341) [Link]

I didn't try the MandrakeLinux on AMD64. I'm a user of Mandrake 32 bits since Mandrake 9.1. The last month I bought (54,00 euros) the Official Edition of Mandrake 10.1 (DVD), mostly because I enjoyed the 9.1, and wanted to upgrade.

9.1 edition was fine for me : every hardware was well recognized, there were some bugs, but minor ones. 10.1 is a disaster for me : my USB flash disk isn't usable, and I made an extensive use of it. All my hardware is the same as before, and everything was fine with 9.1.

I believe this as something to do with the change of kernel (2.6.8 vs 2.4.21). What really annoyed me is that I made a report with full informations to MandrakeSoft, and had no response. I made another one, no response... as usual. When I bought 9.1 18 months ago, I choose the PowerPack with 2 months of support (79,90 euros). I quickly get bored at waiting 2 or 3 days for an answer, written in bad french (SMS style), and most of the time not very usefull. Not to mention all the emails with no anwer at all. That's why I took the 54 euros DVD for 10.1.

I made a point to actually buy my distro, to give money to these projects. May be next time it will be another distro.

The Mandrakelinux Updates Applet

Posted Jan 7, 2005 11:32 UTC (Fri) by grantingram (guest, #18390) [Link] (1 responses)

Clearly if the reviewer doesn't know what they are reviewing I can't help feeling that the whole thing is a bit suspect!

Still being in the dark ages of the 32 bit world I can't comment on Mandrake's 64 bit offerings but a couple of points about the "Mandrakelinux Updates Applet":

• All the applet does is tell you when updates are available. When you ask it to update all it does is run the Update Module in the Mandrake Control Centre.
• You can get the update applet thingy to work for less than a silver club membership. You can get it for twenty euros a year.
• Whether it's worth twenty euros or not is a completely different question!

The Mandrakelinux Updates Applet

Posted Jan 17, 2005 19:16 UTC (Mon) by Zach (guest, #27327) [Link]

This review was fine and brings up a lot of valid points. Granted its obvious the reviewer wasn't a regular Mandrake user, but I don't see why that should be a problem.

I've been using Mandrake since 7.0 and know it pretty damn well. Since 10.1 I've been back to using the 32-bit version because of my experience with the 10.0 x86_64 version.

The fact is, Mandrake's x84_64 offerings are more buggy and *more restrictive* then I find acceptable.

Mandrake is dropping the ball and I hope that they are able to see this sooner then later. The other x84_64 offerings are not yet competitive with Mandrakes overall robustness, but the margin is certainly shrinking.

If there was a distro right now that had a similar amount of polish and mature configuration tools with a less bug riddled x84_64 version available I switch in a heartbeat.

In fact it was because of the 10.0 x84_64 debacle that I dropped my Club account (standar memeber).

Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

Posted Jan 7, 2005 17:09 UTC (Fri) by cdmiller (guest, #2813) [Link] (1 responses)

Don't know about Mandrake 10.1 on X86-64, but in general we find Mandrake 10.1 a nice replacement for Redhat on a number of our servers. I even switched from debian to Mandrake 10.1 on my main work desktop for easier support of the radeon with dual display. I do miss some network utilities not being packaged, so I keep a debian station around. The Mandrake workstation has been solid, not suffering from some of the annoying bugs found in debian releases of the latest software only available in unstable. I don't use gnome or kde so I can't comment on them.

From my limited experience the best thing one can do is run "man urpmi" and read the urpmi documentation. After picking a mirror just use the urpmi command line tools. If you run a back office environment, set up your own local mirror, ours updates itself nightly. It's far easier than setting up a debian mirror as different versions and architectures are in their own directory trees.

Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

Posted Jan 17, 2005 17:55 UTC (Mon) by namronatsoc (guest, #16250) [Link]

I have the same TYAN motherboard and Opteron processors but I can't get the Silver Club CD ISOs to install. It gets to the language selection screen, maybe, and sits there. It locks up and goes no further. 10.0 would install but was very sluggish. My WD Raptor HDD seemed to be a problem. So now I have the latest BIOS. Suse 9.1 Pro for 64 bit runs beautifully, but I can't get MDK 10.1 to install. I did get 10.0-64 to work but it was sluggish with the older BIOS.

I've been a user of MDK since 7.0 but this 64 bit distribution is frustrating me.

Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

Posted Jan 9, 2005 23:43 UTC (Sun) by stock (guest, #5849) [Link]

I run Mandrakelinux 10.1 AMD64 here on a dual-Opteron K8W Tyan board, and
it runs awesome. I also ran Mandrake 10.0 AMD64 which was also pretty
good, but had some pitfalls with its 64bits applications : Mozilla didn't
have flash and other plugins, but also Konqueror 64bit didn't have flash,
or realplayer fucntionality.

Inside 10.1 AMD64 a new approach is started. The apps which should work
to pass a Desktop functionality test, but fail in 64bits mode, are just
replaced with their 32bit counterparts from the 10.1 i586 DVD. Actually
its a handy idea to have a 10.1 i586 DVD standby. Something fails? Try to
install the i586 edition of that. As far i can see its amongst others
OpenOffice, and Mplayer :

[jackson:stock]:(~)$ file /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin
/usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel
80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.2.5, dynamically linked (uses
shared libs), stripped
[jackson:stock]:(~)$ file /usr/lib64/openoffice/program/soffice.bin
/usr/lib64/openoffice/program/soffice.bin: cannot open
(/usr/lib64/openoffice/program/soffice.bin)
[jackson:stock]:(~)$

Mplayer :
[jackson:stock]:(~)$ file /usr/bin/mplayer
/usr/bin/mplayer: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1
(SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.2.5, dynamically linked (uses shared libs),
stripped
[jackson:stock]:(~)$

I assume there are some more key applications which are "just" the i586
edition. Then again there's still some bugs inside too : like gnucash :

http://forum.mandrakeclub.com/viewtopic.php?t=32247 :
[jackson:stock]~)$ gnucash
ERROR: In procedure dynamic-link:
ERROR: file: "libgw-wct", message: "/usr/lib64/libgw-wct.a: invalid ELF
header"
[jackson:stock]~)$

For more AMD64 issues keep an eye on
http://forum.mandrakeclub.com/viewforum.php?f=22 .

Again moving from 32bit to a 100% 64bit clean Server or even Workstation
OS overnight is _not_ easy. Its also one of the reasons why Micrososft
dodged Itanium2 from their platform list, for now. AMD64 is the better
platform cause one can always drop-in the "old" 32bit edition of your
favorate application.

All in all i'm pretty impressed with Mandrake 10.1 amd64 (official
edition) because after all, i have 64bit Opteron power under my keyboard,
pretty awesome when doing things like generating pdf documentation from
inside OpenOffice, creating DVD iso's or editing multimedia formats.

And here comes the main Mandrake advantage over other distro's like SuSE
9.2 : every application you need for linux needs is out there in SRPM/RPM
format. Check .e.g. rpm.pbone.net. Even the most exotic add-on software
will build clean on your Mandrake system. From the SuSE camp i sometimes
hear other sounds.

Download your favorate package-1.23-1mdk.src.rpm , and a rpm --rebuild of
that will run your stuff in no time. Well thats for i586, it seems 64bit
QT/KDE compiling on AMD64 needs a couple extra switches. But never did i
experience performance or functionality problems after a succesfull
compilation on a Mandrake system. Mandrake is here the clear winner of
all linux distros out there.

Robert M. Stockmann
<stock@stokkie.net>

Another useless review by Ladislav

Posted Jan 14, 2005 9:59 UTC (Fri) by ranger (guest, #6415) [Link] (2 responses)

<sarcasm>
Is LWN worth $5/month? As we do not read all the articles, we cannot really answer the question, but the "Distrbutions" articles have given us enough warning signs to put any recommendations on hold. Frankly, it is hard to see how LWN will compete with other Linux sites on the internet, especially with the likes of LinuxQuestions, but also OSNews or mandrakeusers.org, which are free of cost and with articles or posts available for reading immediately after publication (or continuously updated). Additionally, all three of them have better distribution reviews, less opinionated speculation (especially when compared to LinuxQuestions), and more responsible authors and responsive user forums, actively monitored by the distribution reviewers. LWN is not a bad site, but it is marred by lack of polished "Distribution" articles and some unnecessary commercial tricks.
</sarcasm>

Seriously though, I don't care for distro-bashing, and this is all this article gives us. Having to be a bit more careful with money now, I'm going to have to reduce spending somewhere, either expenses on the distribution I prefer (Mandrakelinux) or supporting LWN. With low quality Mandrake-bashing articles like we've come to expect from Ladislav Bodnar (and then hyping them on distrowatch.com as well ...), care to guess which one I'll give up first?

Give one Mandrakelinux release a fair review (ie do something besides concentrating on the update applet), ensure you are accurate (the "Community" trees do actually get updates quite regularly, besides the security updates), and maybe I will reconsider.

But, 7 paragraphs of uninformed rant for 1 paragraph of actual useful information on the amd64 release is not even worth my time. Most of the comments are more worthwhile than the article itself!

Another useless review by Ladislav

Posted Jan 16, 2005 0:43 UTC (Sun) by ladislav (guest, #247) [Link]

As an important contributor (employee?) of MandrakeSoft, perhaps you should spend more time making sure that the bugs mentioned in the article are gone by the time 10.2 is released, rather than wasting time bashing those who point out the problems with your favourite distribution. Or do you believe that the bugs are not there and that I just made them all up?

Contrary to your belief, I am not trying to harm any distribution. All I do is point out the problems which the developers might not be aware of so that they can fix them and produce a better product next time. It's up to you if you want to fix the bugs or if you simply discard them as invalid.

Another useless review by Ladislav

Posted Jan 17, 2005 0:43 UTC (Mon) by theonlybiker1 (guest, #27308) [Link]

I hate to agree with the review.. and in turn disagreeing with you but..
I don't have an update module that works (10.1), and 10.1 is way more buggy than 10.0 was.
Before you flame me, I've been a loyal Mandrake user since 7.X days. OK?
I'm going to reformat this HD and go back to 10.0.
I can't keep it this way since it's my main 'puter and need it to maintain my sanity!!
thanks for listening.

oh, hardware:
Asus a8xxx board, AMD 2200XP chip, 768MB PC2700. 21" Dell CRT.

Frank

Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

Posted Jan 14, 2005 11:34 UTC (Fri) by geekbrains (guest, #27249) [Link] (1 responses)

I guess the Author of this review was not aware that the official edition of Mandrake 10.1 X86-64 was not released publicly at the time of his review (In fact I've received a mail from Mandrake stating the availability of 10.1 Official x86-64 today 14 Jan 05). As everyone knows the RC3 is dubbed as Community edition and might probably polished for a final official release, it should'nt be considered for a review.

At the same time it should'nt be blamed on the author alone as the mirror was populated with a wrong hierarchy (by right it should be under /pub/distro/Mandrakelinux/devel/iso/x86_64/)

Its a shame that the regional anomalies do exist :(

Regarding the updates for a (unsupported) community edition, its natural that the Mandrake update coudnt find any updates as there're none generally. But there are many servers providing updates for community edition and it can be configured by editing the source of the updates using urpmi.addmedia or else thru MCC.

Albeit of not testing MDK 10.1 x86-64, I'm well satified with the performance of 10.1 i586 Official under my Athlon XP 2500+ on Asus nForce 2 Deluxe Motherboard with dual channel Memory of 1GB DDR 400. Infact I've never seen any Linux distro getting installed within 20 mins (Mine got installed within 17 mins, that includes manual package selection). Upon booting up, it was a breeze that I was welcomed by a clean desktop.

Final words..Mandrake pulls more crowd towards linux IMHO.

:)
Anand

Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

Posted Jan 16, 2005 23:48 UTC (Sun) by patrick_darcy (guest, #10128) [Link]

i think u made your first mistake in your first paragraph.
u decided not to get the dvd from Mandrake but to do your
own thing over the internet.

im glad that at least u had the ability to install from from
ftp or wherever u got your software.

i have been using 10.1 64 since the day it was available for
the silver club members. its running rock solid , looks great,
is quite fast and fun to use.

lighten up.

if u want to do a review at least give any distro the courtesy
of giving u a copy of their software .

if they then refuse then u can complain and whine how they wouldnt
cooperate with u :)