Mandrake 8.1

[Air]

I'm running Mandrake 8.1 as my desktop OS and it has completely unravelled on me to the point that it is no longer usable. 7.2 was very stable and I did not encounter any problems with it. Don't see any bug fixes that account for the problems I'm seeing. Anybody else encounter problems with 8.1?

[littleman]

I'm running 8.1 here. I have to agree with you that 7.2 was a lot less of a problem to install and work out the bugs. The first install I did I loaded up the hard drive with everything, that was a bad The second install was a lot better. I did the standards, plus apache, ftp, mysql, some extra games, and a couple of other desktops/window managers. The second install seemed a lot less buggy.

What type of problems are you having?

[Air]

It's not finding the USB ports, it thinks 127.0.0.1 is used by another host (??) therefore the network is toast, and the bootloader (which I suspect may be the root of the problem) no longer recognizes the FAT partition on another drive, where I have some files from a previous windows install that I wanted access to.

I've worked through some of the problems by manual editing files, and have it so I can boot up, but I may just re-install to fix it.

[toolman]

Thanks for the heads up. 7.2 runs fine and I was thinking just today that I might go ahead and load up that 8.1 sittin' over there....I'll wait.

[littleman]

Wow, I didn't have any problems that severe. I have it on a box with two drives, both partitioned up with some FAT. Are you using GRUB or Lilo? I bet it is your boot loader.

Tool, I still think it is worth the upgrade, many of the apps are improved, especially the desktop tools. Konqueror renders better and is less crash prone and Galeon is the best browser I've used on any OS.

[Air]

>Are you using GRUB or Lilo? I bet it is your boot loader.

Initially it was GRUB then switched to Lilo. I think it is the bootloader as well, the only other possibility is a new disk drive that is a couple of months old starting to go bad on me. Maybe I'll try a more thorough fsck.

>Tool, I still think it is worth the upgrade

Yeah, same here. Even if I am forced to re-install to fix it, I will go with 8.1, the problems I had initially with 8.1 were all related to installing too many packages. They don't co-exist very well, you're better to just pick the ones you need and then add some additional ones as you go. Going with the full package install guarantees problems.

<added>something I didn't mention, this isn't a new install, I'd been running 8.1 just fine for over a month</addeed>

[Air]

Reinstalled using "update", everything back to normal, for anyone else contemplating this; the nice thing about the linux file structure is that all application settings are preserved, nothing is lost, only the system files are re-installed, reboot and back in business.