Review: Mandrake PPC 8.2

As Mandrake never ported version 8.1 of their Linux distribution to the PPC platform, the latest available version till now was Mandrake PPC 8.0. While the latter certainly was a nice distribution, yet it started being really outdated and even had trouble installing on recent Apple hardware. So many people certainly wonder now whether Mandrake PPC 8.2 has been worth waiting for so long. Well, without giving anything away yet, it WAS worth waiting.

Just like Mandrake PPC 8.0, the 8.2 release comes on 2 CDs, which you can download for free as ISO images on one of their mirrors and then burn to CD. Alternatively, they can also be bought from the Mandrake store. I decided to go with the download version.

Once the CDs were done, I put CD1 into my iBook's drive and rebooted it, holding down the C key. After a few seconds, the Mandrake CD booted and wanted to know what install kernel to use. I went with install-aty128fb, which showed to be the good choice. After a few more seconds, I was able to choose the CDs as install media and shortly afterwards, the graphical Mandrake installer came up.

Mandrake Linux is strongly geared at the Desktop / New user crowd, so it's no surprise the Mandrake installer is pretty neat and complete. Once you have selected your install language and either one of recommended or expert install modus, the adventure can begin. The whole install process does not look very different from other distributions, such as SuSE or YDL, however you feel immediately that the Mandrake installer is way more polished and really tries to make your life easier. It guides you through the usual steps like selecting your keyboard layout, your mouse type, install disk, partition setup, package install, user setup, etc.

However, all those steps are done with a lot of care and "finesse". For instance the Mouse setup dialog has a special entry for Apple's One Button mice. I personally use a PC wheel mouse on my iBook and that was no problem either. Using a picture of a mouse on screen, I had graphical feed back to easily check whether all the buttons and the wheel were working properly.

There were more user friendly features. For instance, my LAN network connection got recognized automatically, same goes for my internal modem. I could setup both during installation. As a side note, if you setup your modem connection with your provider's settings, make sure to reply "no" when it asks you to auto connect at boot time. If for some reason the Internet connection fails, it may block your boot progress. It's appearently a known bug that also affects the x86 version of Mandrake 8.2.

Next, the installer also correctly found and recognized my USB printer. A nice addon was that it automatically selected hpjis as printing filter, which is an optimized printing driver for HP printers (I have a HP 840 C). These are the little details you often miss in other distributions.

Finally, the installer tried itself on the boot loader settings and once again, it came up with a winning setup. It automagically found my MacOS and MacOS X installs and added those entries to the boot menu.

Settings for the XFree UI server also came up without any glitches. That way, I was able to reboot into my new Mandrake PPC 8.2 install after a mere 15 to 20 minutes.

The positive adventure went on, once Linux had fully booted up and launched the KDE desktop interface. The usual things that give you trouble on Linux all seemed to work fine, automagically! I was greeted with nice sound, my modem worked fine and I was ready to browse the web. Also advanced features like hardware 3D acceleration and sleep support worked out of the box.

One glitch I had noticed in beta1 of Mandrake 8.2 has been fixed too. Indeed, with the beta, it was impossible to type special characters like an @ on any non US keyboards. With the final version, the keyboard seems to work perfectly, although the layout for the special keys is not quite the same as on MacOS, but rather uses a PC style layout. For instance the @ can be obtained pressing alt-2 (like in Windows) and not using alt-g (MacOS) on my Swiss French keyboard. This might be something a few people need to get used to. But if you ever used a PC keyboard, you'll be immediately familiar.

The Mandrake Control Center has also been nicely reworked since the 8.0 release and includes a few new useful graphical setup tools. For instance it didn't take me more than a few seconds to get my server's NFS partitions mounted properly into my Mandrake install.

All in all, I think Mandrake has done it, the first PPC distribution that installed perfectly and automagically on my iBook. I didn't have to manually correct one single setting. And I think that's quite amazing, as it eventually makes a Linux install as effortless as a MacOS or Windows install.

Therefore, I believe there can't be any better distribution for unexperienced PPC Linux users than Mandrake PPC. It's worth every cent you spend on it.

Some useful links:

- Mandrake PPC Home
- Download Mandrake PPC 8.2
- Mandrake 8.2 Install instructions
- Mandrake 8.2 FAQ