Notes on Mandrake 9.2

[Jonathan Hutchins]

I think this is something like "RC2".  It was a bit difficult to download the 
ISO's, but at the same time I was trying to grab the 9.1 ISO's and they were 
even harder - lots of sessions ended without a full image.

Installation went pretty well, with a couple of exceptions:

Lots of KDE components didn't re-install.  This appears to be because I got 
copies of KDE 3.1.9 stuff somewhere, and 9.2 includes 3.1.3.  Bad on the 
installer for removing things before it determined that the newer ones were 
allready there.

I'm not sure of this, because the Manrake extensions to RPM don't seem 
entirely clear on what's here and what isn't.  Running makewhatis did not 
clear out all of the files that had been deleted, and there may be some 
inconsistencies in the RPM database.  Mandrake's GUI that runs on top of 
their URPMI tools which is a combination of RPM and RedHat's UP2DATE concept 
checks on-line sources, and there are the usual problems finding the right 
directory on the right mirror and finding it up again the next day.

The only other problem appears to be with the SMB filesystem.  The Samba 
packages install things like smbmnt2 and smbfs2, and for some reason during 
the install they did not create symlinks to the old program names, so I could 
not mount the shares from the NT server until I manually linked 
/sbin/mount.smb2 to /sbin/mount.smb.

Other than that, I do seem to be going through and installing missing packages 
a lot.  This is partly returning to this particular machine after using a 
laptop version of 9.1 for a while.

KMail is still annoying but functional - it will not allow you to turn off the 
"preview" pane, which marks messages as read.  Moving around in the various 
panes by keyboard is still arcane and inconsistent.  The default composer, 
however highlights misspelled words though, which is nice.  KMail will not 
filter new messages to IMAP folders, but only to local folders.  You can 
still move messages to IMAP folders manually, but you shouldn't have to.

If anything else significant comes up, I'll try to make note.