Mandrake 10.0 (geek post)

I've upgraded my system to Mandrake 10.0. A few impressions ....

Good points

The big features of 10.0 are the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.2. The new kernel is definitely faster. Boot now takes just under a minute from the LILO prompt (this is on an Athlon XP 2500) and would be faster if I ran something lighter than KDE. Applications also open faster, particularly OpenOffice.

KDE 3.2 didn't come as a surprise, since I'd upgraded to that earlier, but it's nice. People who run more KDE applications will probably notice the improvements more.

Other improvements are fairly minor: prettier Mandrake-specific tools, simpler menu etc.

Problems

This is the first distro using Mandrake's new system of releasing a "Community Edition" a few months before the "Official Edition". Read "Beta" and "Stable" respectively. Mandrake try to do a balancing act between being newbie-friendly and including the latest releases of packages, and the two goals are not always compatible. The Community/Official distinction is probably the best way round this - newbies should definitely wait for the Official Edition, when the bugs have been fixed. Some people have reported installing, configuring and running 10.0 with no problems whatsoever, but although installation went smoothly and took less than twenty minutes (not counting time spent choosing packages!), I had more fun hacking configuration files than at any time since I first installed Linux using RedHat 6.0.

1. I had no sound with my onboard VIA chipset for ages. I ended up hacking /etc/modprobe.conf (note that the 2.6 kernels now use this file rather than /etc/modules.conf, a fact that I wish I'd known 24 hours ago!). Seems to work fine now, though.
Magicdev didn't work for me, so I got rid of it and went back to supermount.
2. Installing the nVidia drivers was problematic - they would work fine the first time, then fail to load on reboot, though again would work perfectly if I recompiled them. For some reason, on both 9.2 and 10.0 the nVidia drivers cause the screen to display a flashing mesh of white rectangles on exiting X, which means you have to do a dirty reboot. This wasn't a problem in 9.2, but is in 10.0. Rebooting from a terminal in X gets round this problem - fingers crossed.
3. A small gripe - wvdial is not included on the CDs, though after a few false starts, I found them on a Cooker mirror. I love wvdial, and have it run at boot, which is almost as good as having an ethernet or ADSL connection (minus the speed, of course).
4. Speaking of ethernet connections, I still haven't managed to configure the ethernet connection on my office computer under 10.0

All in all, then, a nice distro, but definitely not for newbies.