[luau] Mandrake 9.0 beta1

[Warren Togami]

Mandrake 9.0 beta1 has been released.  This is your chance to make sure that
Mandrake 9.0 will work on your hardware.  If a few months from now 9.0 final
doesn't work on your computer, it is your fault because you didn't test the
betas and file bug reports specific to your hardware.

Please subscribe to the Mandrake Cooker mailing list if you decide to join
the beta team.  Please also CC me on bug posts and reports so I can confirm
bugs.

ftp://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mirrors/mandrake/Mandrake-iso/i586/
Mirrored at the University of Hawaii at this URL.

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/90beta.php3
Official announcementinux 9.0 Beta
Given the choice of enjoying the summer in the beautiful south of California
or working on the Mandrake Linux distribution, the twisted MandrakeSoft
developers chose to stick around and present "Mandrake Linux 9.0 Beta 1."

As with any Beta, this one is probably loaded with nasty bugs which may
cause serious problems on production systems. Betas are only suitable for
installation on test systems -- you've been warned!

A "feature freeze" will happen soon, so for anyone willing to put down their
bottle of suntan lotion long enough to download & test the new Beta, you
will enjoy:

New desktops:

KDE 3.0.2 and GNOME 2.0 with

  a.. new icons on the KDE desktop
  b.. new user images
  c.. new wallpaper
Tools:

A new tool has been added to the 'drakxtools' family: The 'Drakbugreport'
client is included with the current beta, and the server version will be
ready for Beta 2. These tools allow users to easily report bugs for the
entire drakxtools family.

Many tools have been reworked (bugfixes, better ergonomics, added
functionality, etc), such as:

  a.. Diskdrake now supports SMB ACLs
  b.. urpmi has been rewritten to perform much faster
  c.. Harddrake now uses the same detection engine as DrakX and therefore
supports many more hardware devices
  d.. XFdrake has been rewritten to make configuring the X server a snap
  e.. DrakXTV now supports a larger selection of TV cards for you couch
potatoes
  f.. Draknet has been renamed 'Drakconnect'

Install:

The new Beta uses ISOlinux instead of Syslinux (a new way to boot from
CD-ROM). Please test as many different types of CDROM drives as possible and
report any problems.

Packages:

Of course you will find the latest & greatest versions of the main packages,
including:

  a.. kernel 2.4.19 RC1
  b.. *
  c.. XFree86 4.2, which supports many video cards previously only supported
in 3.3.6
  d.. glibc 2.2.5
  e.. Apache 1.3.26
  f.. Evolution 1.08
  g.. KDE 3.0.2
  h.. GNOME 2.0
  i.. Galeon 1.2.5
  j.. Mozilla 1.0.0
  k.. GCC 3.1.1
  l.. and much more

Reporting:

How to report bugs for Beta 9.0?

We'd appreciate feedback from the largest number of Beta testers, so there
are a number of ways to help make sure Mandrake Linux 9.0 is the best
release ever:

1) If you enjoy getting "hands-on" and are quite good with Linux (with
several years of experience), the best bet is for you to subscribe to the
Cooker mailing list so you can directly communicate with the MandrakeSoft
developers.

2) If you don't have time to get deeply involved but have a good level of
Linux knowledge, the best bet is to ask for a BugZilla account for posting
bug reports. To obtain a BugZilla account, send an email to
'request at qa.linux-mandrake.com' with "canpostabug" in the body of your
message. Note: you must first create a BugZilla account if you do not have
one yet.

3) If you are quite new to this whole Linux/UNIX(TM) thing, you can report
bugs by submitting them to MandrakeExpert -- just cite 'Mandrake Linux 9.0
beta1' as the product version.

We'd even appreciate comments & suggestions regarding the text that is
displayed during the graphical installer and in the various Mandrake tools;
so to all of you college graduates -- this is your time to shine.

We've prepared a few sample screenshots to make sure nobody downloads the
Beta just for the sake of "knowing what it looks like".. leave the bandwith
to REAL men (and women).
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/demos/Demo/Mandrake9.0/Beta/

Known issues with Beta 1:

The developers caught up on their sleep last weekend, therefore the
following problems weren't corrected before the Beta was released into the
wild:

* CDROM access as root does not work properly with supermount
Reason: devfsd does not create the /dev/hdX link as user pam access to
/dev/ide/*/*/*/*/cd to set user ownership makes devfsd create the link.

* Java support is broken.
Reason: The currently available Java is not compiled with GCC 3.1 and
therefore does not work with our packages.

* DRI does not work properly with i810 and X doesn't respawn correctly. To
fix this, do not activate 3D acceleration with i810 based systems.
Reason: The kernel module for i810 suffers some problems.

* CD switching during the installation causes some problems. When a new CD
is requested, clicking the "cancel" button may lead the installation process
into an infinite loop.

Download:

There is no point downloading the Beta unless you are ready to spend some
time writing bug reports. Don't blame us if the final version of 9.0 fails
on your PC because you didn't file an early bug report!