Introduction:

It was in San Jose, at the Linux Central booth when I first started this odd habit. I had been using SuSE pretty exclusively up until right before I left for the show. (Hey, you find what you're comfortable with and you stick to it.) On a whim, I had checked out Mandrake 7.0; I was shocked to see the speed and ease of the installation. So, here I was, at the Linux Central booth, staring at the distributions laid out on the table. I decided that day that I would buy a copy of every distro that they had (they have nice $2.00 copies.) and check out the other distros that I hadn't played with yet. As an impulse, I picked up a couple of extra copies of Mandrake. No particular reason; I just did. . .

Within several weeks, my Mandrake disks were gone. What would happen is that I would run into someone who was a Windows user and that was interested in Linux and wouldn't know where to start. I'd give them a Mandrake disk. The way I figured it, Linux wasn't quite ready for the common man's desktop, but the Mandrake installation was so easy that at least these new convertees would be able to get Linux installed and functional. They could poke around the OS and maybe, just maybe, they'd be interested enough to learn something about it.

By the next show I went to, I was handing out Mandrake disks at a rate that would put the Gideon's society to shame. (I haven't taken to leaving disks in hotel bedstands... yet.) In any case, I was considerable interested to see what Mandrake 8.0 would offer.

Mandrake 8.0 Features:

The billing for the Mandrake 8.0 distro headlines the updated Kernel (2.4.3), updated X-Server (Xfree86 4.0.3) and RPM 4.0.

Included also is KDE 2.1.1 and GNOME 1.4. The latter promises Nautilus 1.01, Eazel's new "fun and easy to use" file manager and Evolution .9 (Preview), an email, calendar and addressbook.

Another interesting thing billed on Mandrake's site is the Mandrake Control Center:

"The new Mandrake Control Center is a central location with a complete set of tools for configuring and maintaining a Linux-Mandrake system- all from one convenient location on the desktop."

Hardware:

Normally, I'll be lazy and do my first install of a new OS in a VMware Virtual Machine, but Mandrake 8.0 didn't really seem to like that much. The installation seemed to go alright, but the Operating System seemed to have issues upon reboot. Also, note that the installation crawled horrifically on anything less than 128 megs of RAM. On to a real machine...

Dell Optiplex GX100

• Pentium 3, 600 Mhz,
• 128 mg RAM.
• 13.2 gig hard drive,
• 3com 3c905c NIC,
• Intel 810 cgc video adapter,
• Esoniq ES1371

Installation:

The installation does the standard "What keyboard are you using?" and "This is GPL, you know that, right?" screens and then on to the type of installation. This is the first difference between 8.0 and 7.2 that I notice. You now have the options of "Recommended" or "Expert"

Where there used to be a 3rd option "Custom" in the past. No biggie. We chose "Recommended". Next up, "What sort of mouse?" Yeah, yeah, generic questions... keeping with the theory of the simple installation for Windows Users, we're going to go straight generic on this install. We will allow the system to configure the hard drive as it would like- choose to allow the installation to use free disk space. Package Group Selection is next.

Although this may be a bit disconcerting for a non-Linux user, I find the options here to be a bit refreshing. Personally, I tend to do individual package selection for most things, but it's nice to see more package options than "Workstation", "Server" and "Custom". From here the file copy begins, set root password, add a new user- all the basic install stuff.

The network configuration interface was included in Mandrake 7.2, and it's quite welcome here. I personally would rather do this sort of thing manually, but with DSL and Cable modems becoming so much more common, it's good to see it's accounted for here, especially for the new Linux user. This simplicity is not even yet available in the Windows world. (Where I guess it is assumed that your DSL setup comes with a disk.) On a personal note, I was happy to see the the DSL even came with the WinPoET support. They've really done a great job on covering the bases on this one.

The installation goes on; my network installation is DHCP, so that's easy, but even for hardcoding an IP address, it's not cryptic at all. The installation confirms basic information once again (such as keyboard and mouse. Is it me, or do most Linux installations ask about what keyboard you have about 5 times?).

The Xconfig stuff is exactly the same, dispite being a new version. This is one area that could probably be a little simpler for Windows users who never have to manually specify this sort of thing during a Windows install. The installation could just take the liberty of configuring whatever it detects and let the user deal with tweaking it later. With the X configuration done, it's time for the boot sector and boot disk creation, then for a reboot and a look at the new Mandrake 8.0!

Mandrake 8.0:

A graphical lilo menu pops up immediately; it is nice, but fluff. Most of that changes are really not all that major with this distribution; it's a new kernel and a new Xfree86, but all that really means to Joe Linuxuser is more supported hardware. Under the hood it doesn't seem all that different.

The thing that is extremely good though, is Eazel's Nautilus the Mandrake Control Center and HardDrake seem to work a magic with each other. Add in the promise of Ximian's Evolution and you've got a product that's ready for prime time. The Nautilus interface is very nice and the HardDrake configuration is more dependable than it's Windows cousin. Evolution is reminiscent of the Windows Outlook client. I personally feel that this distribution is an excellent step toward mainstream desktop acceptance. Many of the tools for user management and disk configuration are very simular to their Windows NT counter parts; to that end, I think that Mandrake 8.0 could be a very attractive possibility for NT administrators who have been considering Linux. (They just need to make the Samba shares able to be set from clicking on the folder that you wish to share and NT can kiss the majority of it's market share good bye. A GUI User Manager that controls the Samba user info in synch with the system info would be nice, too.)

What it comes down to, in general, is that Mandrake 8.0- and Nautilus -are all about the interface. It's all about the GUI. I'm a command line sorta guy in general, but I was impressed.

What it comes down to, for me, is that I am still going to use SuSE on my servers where I can. (The right tool for the right job.) But I'm going to be handing out copies of Mandrake 8.0- starting with the Windows NT guys down the hall...