REBOL Technologies

Mandrake Adventures Continued

Carl Sassenrath, CTO
REBOL Technologies
3-Jan-2005 4:35 GMT
Article #0084
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Here is a small note on my continued adventures of Mandrake Linux....

Since I'm actively using this platform now for REBOL development, I've gone ahead and fixed some of the problems I mentioned earlier.

In case any of you have similar problems, here are the solutions I found:

  1. On 60Hz display problem: This bug is in the X Windows driver and is caused by an incompatible Intel chipset driver. The 4.4 version of XFree fixes the problem. Nicely done. However, I should note that updating X Windows versions on a system like Linux is not something your grandma is going to be doing any day soon. IMO these kinds of tasks are what hold Linux back as a widely accepted desktop platform.
  2. Printer problem: The Linux software that auto detects printers (CUPS?) seems to have a problem when two TCP printers are online. It uses the wrong IP address for the second printer. The fix was easy: I manually entered the IP address of the second printer into its printer configuration.
  3. The GUI freezes went away when I moved to XFree 4.4.
  4. On the font quality problem, I found this good article about how to make Mandrake fonts look better.

The other problems still exist. The network freeze only happens every few hours. I am guessing that it might also be some kind of driver problem. If so, that's ironic because I've never seen Linux have any kind of ethernet driver problem in my 10 years of using it.

With regard to using Mandrake for development, as I've said before, the Mandrake folks really need to put more applications in the default installation. I've managed to download and build tools like GDB (which required that I download and build yet other library sources, etc.) but they really need to be there as the default. I realize that I am not their primary market (techies), but they need techies nevertheless on their side. The required apps (like SSH) are just not that large to warrant removing them from their standard distribution.

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