Re: [tlug] small redhat 9 review :)

[Godwin Stewart <gstewart@example.com>]

And Thus Spake Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> (on Mon, 31 Mar 2003
09:35:06 -0500):

> My experience with them in Red Hat 8.0 (I was curious--so sue me) was that
> they are just as shitty as these sorts of tools have always been.

OMG - WHat should be done to me then?

I got curious (so sue me) and installed Mandrake 9 on a friend's box a
couple of weeks ago. It's all the rage over here in France (what else would
you expect) so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

To start with, you can't set up your partitions how you want unless you
trick the installer into accepting your settings by logging into another
console, using fdisk, then asking to resume the install process.

Then you're told that /root has to be on the / partition - you can't assign
/root to its own partition... (since when?)

Once the thing is up and running you can't halt it again because the sodding
automount hangs... (who wants automount in the first place?)

I couldn't get the ECI HiFocus modem running because the "usbdav" module or
whatever it was refused to unload... (what the hell is that anyway?)

If you want a distribution you can insult without any fear of it being
unjustified, Mandrake 9 is without the shadow of a doubt the way to go. I
won't be touching that distro in a long while now. Up until then I told
people to stay away because "I'd heard" that it was crap. Now I can honestly
say that it's shit after a very unpleasant first-hand experience.

> I used the graphical package tool, which corrupted my RPM database once
> and destroyed it another time. I used the user / groups tool, which
> somehow managed to cause the rest of the redhat-config tools to segfault.

Seems like déjà-vu to me.

> I was *not* impressed with 8.0--of course, I have not been impressed with
> a Red Hat x.0 release since 5.0.

Personally, I haven't been very impressed with RH, x.0 or not, since 7.1.
OTOH, I downloaded the Slackware 9.0 ISO the other day and still haven't had
time to give it a spin. I have a spare partition of about 10 gigs hanging
around on my disk so I might put it to good use and turn this box into a
quad-boot machine :)

-- 
G. Stewart   --   gstewart@example.com -- gstewart@example.com
Registered Linux user #284683
---------------------------------------------------------------
And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports
on it, you know they are just evil lies.
        -- Linus Torvalds

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