Gentoo easier than Mandrake 10?

Jet Dee · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Bham, UK

Very hard to believe, but I have had so much more trouble using mandrake 10 than gentoo 1.4 ever gave me. Not only is the install process less clear, so it's harder to see what's actually going on behind the scenes, the partitioning system is a mess. The gentoo docs recommened a journalled boot partition of 100 megs. Mandrake autoallocates one that is 20% of your total hard drive space, regardless of how much space you're allocating for linux in a dual boot set up. And the basic install doesn't give you the option to configure a reiser partition, that's only available through another option which is less intelligible.

Now, Mandrake finally installed, I tried getting xmms, xine, mozilla-firefox et gaim installed. First time round these all failed, because mandrake has an uncanny ability to only be able to install apps from it's CD's. Secondly, it seems to think there was a fourth cd, which there certainly was not.

Most of this software installed later on, I create a link to my windows partiition mp3 folder and open xmms to play some music. This crashes. It actually crashes. I can't play music with a music player in linux...

This left me to having to use totem, a video player. Ah well, small inconvenience for now.

Then I went to mozilla's page to get firefox ( i love the mouse gestures). However, I can't even get this to install. Understand I am a relative linux newbie, but having un-tar'd the file, i try to ./configure . This doesn't work. I try to make install. this too fails.

Through rigourous searching I find I need to be logged in as root, and executing the install file from a terminal, which I do.

This manages to install properly, and a firefox window springs open. But then, when I try to get this placed into mandrake's start menu, it cannot find firefox. It found lynx and another browser, but not firefox. by now I am understandably :twisted:

This was the last straw, so I rebooted, XP cd in drive, ran fixmbr, and deleted all my mandrake partitions. I'll take some convincing to foray there again.

Unfortunately I don't think I'll be going to gentoo in the meantime either. The pc I use is a family pc, and it's gonna be hard going teaching my family to use and maintain a linux pc themselves (i leave for japan in two months , for the duration of a year, and ssh'ing back into the pc to fix small problems is not very manageable with a 10 hour time difference and no real linux knowhow. )

Shame really. Windows can be a bitch, but it does everything mandrake couldnt . Looks good, is easy to use, plays my music, lets me talk to my friends over msn with a decent GUI, and is easier to navigate IMO.

Sorry for the rant, but I thought it's worth congratulating everyone who gave something to Gentoo. It's probably the best linux distro I've encountered, and the easiest to install and maintain, at least you understand what you're doing thanks to the great documentation. Keep it up!
_________________
Seven years of screwing my PC's up, and here I am, still standing ;-)

Stormy Eyes · Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2004 6:25 pm Post subject:

What I like about Gentoo is that it gives me to tools to do things my way. When you use Mandrake, you're working within narrower limits 'cos Mandrake expects you to do things The Mandrake Way. Naturally, it's often easier to do things your way than to do things somebody else's way.

Jet Dee · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Bham, UK

Haha, yeah, you're right. I just hoped that Mandrake would let me learn linux an easier way, with good documentation/tutorials on how to setup cron jobs and other complex linux things. I reckoned on it being easier than sifting through forum threads, but I guess not.

Damn, this would be a good machine to run Gentoo on as well. Fluxbox would fly,

it's an Athlon XP 2500+ with 1 gig of ddr333 ram.

In fact, if I had my own pc, the only thing holding me back would be linux support for games. I've an ATI radeon, so the situtation doesn't look good on that front.
_________________
Seven years of screwing my PC's up, and here I am, still standing ;-)

Stormy Eyes · Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2004 8:06 pm Post subject:

Jet Dee · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Bham, UK

Haha. Yeah, KDE does look good , but a guy over at my regular discussion board haunt did some really cool things with Flux, so I've got a desire to make it look as good as possible. Eyecandy all the way, I spent enough money on my pc upgrades for a good reason

_________________
Seven years of screwing my PC's up, and here I am, still standing ;-)

charlieg · Posted: Sat Jun 12, 2004 12:38 am Post subject:

thechris · Veteran Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 1203

as i was reading this post, i was thinking it might be a duplicate of somehting i might have wrote!

i'm fairly sure there is a 4th cd that contains commercial apps and such. probably star office 7 which was (is?) available with commercial purchases of the distro.

most of the issues seem to be linux issues overall -- like the firefox thing. it takes a good deal of time to learn linux, especially if you get hardware issues...

djh-world · Posted: Sat Jun 12, 2004 10:26 am Post subject:

Mandrake holds your hand, it spoon-feeds you linux in patronising chunks.

Just like Windows.

Professor Frink · Posted: Sat Jun 12, 2004 7:44 pm Post subject:

yemu · Posted: Mon Jun 14, 2004 5:34 pm Post subject:

i wanted to show Linux to one of my Friends and decided to give him Mandrake. It was a bad idea. Actually i don't know how this distribution may work well. all these stupid automagic tools, which do everything wrong. I wasn't able to make modem, printer and digital camera to work...he was very dissapointed....after this I decided to show him Gentoo - the linux distribution that really works well :-)

I don't know other linux distros besides gentoo and mandrake, and I must say that Mandrake is like windows (tries to do everything automatically and spoils everything).
so if you have a choice: do not use mandrake
cheers
yemu

ps. i've ben using mandrake for a couple of years before i discovered the beautiful world of gentoo :-)

_________________
Centrum Jêzyka Francuskiego VOILA - http://www.voila.edu.pl