OSNews: Linux Mandrake 9.0-Dolphin: The Review

“Installation is very similar to what it used to be, not much
has changed since the last time I tried version 8.0 last year and
9.0-Cooker last summer. It is pretty easy to install Mandrake, but
I encountered problems (I used the expert mode, as Mandrake is
installed on a PC with 8 more operating systems and I needed
flexibility). Except that the actual UI in some of the installation
modules is not great (e.g. the terribly un-intuitive partitioning
tool, dated layout and UI), I had three main problems.

“Click for a larger version When the installation started it
asked me what mouse I have, and it had automatically picked up the
PS/2 model. But it did not pick up the wheel mouse option, because
all my mice have a wheel. Clicking in the right option, it would
make my mouse jumping like crazy all over the screen making the
installation impossible to continue. I don’t see the point of
providing such a mouse panel in the installation if Mandrake and
Red Hat (yes, Red Hat has the same problem in their Gnome2 admin
mouse panel, I tried 3 different mice, all have the same effect)
and all the other distros are not able to fix the damned
re-initialization code of the mice on the fly. I tried with three
of my PS/2 mice I had around: 1 Logitech Cordless mouseman optical,
a no-name optical and a normal Keytronic. Same effect.

“(UPDATE: Please don’t send me emails that this can be tweaked
afterwards. I very well know about how to allow wheel operations on
my mice, back in the day I used to do it by directly editing my
XF86Config file. This was not the point of my paragraph about the
mice. The point is that the driver does something *unexpected* for
the user, and from the usability point of view, is just not
right…)”

Complete
Story