[lug] Today is Mandrake Day

[Michael Sage]

Hello all,

Last night I decided to dispose of Solaris 8 on my fastest PC at home
and replace it with Mandrake 7.2. Nothing but trouble. I got discouraged
enough to give up and install FreeBSD 4.2 (smooth and beautiful), but
today I'm inclined to try again, since I really want a Linux system on
this particular box.

Basically, here's the problem: during install, if I choose "recommended"
software packages, the install fails and reports a long list of "unable
to install <such-n-such>". If I choose "complete", the package
installation seems to go fine, but the last step, configuring X, fails
brutally. It loops with "unable to find SVGA server" and then tries
again, fails, etc. If I kill the install program at this point, I can
boot to runlevel 3, but the system spits out a flood of "floppy read"
errors, continuously (and nothing I'm doing is trying to read the floppy
drive, and install was totally CD).

Has anyone seen these things, too? I'd hate to think that the good folks
at Mandrake spent more time making their install program *look* pretty
instead of *work* properly.

TIA,

Michael

--
Michael Sage
michaelsage at mysun.com