<snip>
> ... I'm using gcc 3.3.1 with Mandrake 9.2. (I tried Mandrake 10.0 but
> the new and "improved" KDevelop is ... well, don't get me started).
Please do "get started" and comment further on this point.
</snip>
Well... since you ask, here goes:
It all started because my hard drive crashed. I mean hard, like I've never
seen before. Within a day it wouldn't even show up on the BIOS IDE scan. I
had just done a recursive search from the root directory using Konqueror in
file manager mode (maybe not a good idea, but I'm not sure.) The search
never finished and the system crashed. After that it wouldn't boot any more.
After a few choice words and suspicions about Konqueror, I accepted my fate
and prepared to re-install Mandrake. Since I had to reinstall anyway I
figured I'd check for a new version. 10.0 looked stable and a little
Googling didn't turn up any bad reviews, so I installed that.
The OS looks pretty much the same as 9.2, but with a bunch of new Everaldo
icons and graphics. The biggest change I saw was in KDevelop. This isn't
"feature creep," its feature insanity. Everything is different. They have
just gone totally hog-wild trying to be everything to everyone. It claims to
support just about every programming language you can think of, but in my
opinion doesn't do a very good job with C++ any more as a result. All of the
project management dialogs are different, the menus are different, and when
I generated the simple console-mode "Hello World," project using the project
wizard, it wouldn't compile. I think that was what convinced me to go back
to 9.2. I've been using 9.2 for about a year now and it is the most stable
easy-install distro I have used. Of course, my only point of comparison is
RH7.2, which is what I started out with.
I've found an easy way to restore Linux after a reinstall is to make a
little shell script that concatenates all the config files I've modified
into a single file with a file-name at the start of each section, and keep
in on another machine. Then after the raw install I can login via Telnet/SSH
(from a Windows box) and just cut/paste each of the config files as needed.
I had Samba going within 10 minutes that way. After that a lot of the work
restoring my development web server is drag&drop.
As for the new grafix, they look spiffy, but as someone said in a recent
article about WinXP, they make the OS look like a Fisher-Price toy. I
switched back to the standard KDE icon set. Not exactly a rigorous review,
but there you have it.
Once interesting point that took a little head-scratching: The Mandrake web
site doesn't show any links to mirrors for earlier versions, unless you want
to download from Brazil. But if you poke around a little the existing
mirrors still have 9.2 and a bunch of others. I guess they figure 9.2 is
good enough for Brazilians. Que pasa?
--
Phil Mattison
Ohmikron Corp.
480-722-9595 ext 1
602-820-9452 mobile
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