Two Looks at Mandrake 8.2: Intel and PPC

[ Thanks to tom and
Marc Bintener for these links.
]

The Register: Mandrake 8.2 First Look

By Thomas C Greene

“The installation is about as easy as it’s humanly possible to
make it. DrakX’s hardware detection was flawless (though you’re
warned in the manual to de select ‘plug-and-play OS’ in the BIOS
settings first. Your mileage may vary if you choose to ignore that
bit of advice. I followed it, and Mandrake virtually installed
itself.)

“I used the DVD which contains all the packages on a single
disk, available in the Pro edition only, so I was able to leave the
machine and read while most of it was going on, thankfully.

“For my file system I chose XFS, but when I formatted my
partitions I got a little popup message telling me I needed to
re-boot. That seemed very odd, but the installer rather insisted —
checking OK forces the re-boot so you really don’t have a choice.
When I got back to where I’d left off, the partitions weren’t
formatted, or at least weren’t known to be formatted. So I went
through it again, and sure enough, I was told I’d have to re-boot.
Another of those famous Linux Catch-22’s. This could have gone on
for eternity…”

Complete
Story

iMacLinux: Review: Mandrake PPC 8.2

By Oliver Reisch

“As Mandrake never ported version 8.1 of their Linux
distribution to the PPC platform, the latest available version till
now was Mandrake PPC 8.0. While the latter certainly was a nice
distribution, yet it started being really outdated and even had
trouble installing on recent Apple hardware. So many people
certainly wonder now whether Mandrake PPC 8.2 has been worth
waiting for so long. Well, without giving anything away yet, it WAS
worth waiting.

“Just like Mandrake PPC 8.0, the 8.2 release comes on 2 CDs,
which you can download for free as ISO images on one of their
mirrors and then burn to CD. Alternatively, they can also be bought
from the Mandrake store. I decided to go with the download
version…”

Complete Story