Productivity:
OO.org 1.1 is present along with KOffice 1.3 beta. Loading time of OO.org has improved a lot since 1.0 but it is still not fast enough. And I think whatever speed gain
I saw was because of the new kernel and new XFree86 etc. Filters have also improved for MS Office documents but a lot remains to be done. I opened a simple word document with a few bullet points and all the bullets (in this case, small round dark circles) had big square grey boxes around them. It looked plain ugly. It can ofcourse be fixed but defaults should make sense. KOffice is still very buggy. KWord froze up 2-3 times on opening the same file and just won't get refreshed. Personally, I think these guys should merge with OO.org. There are 7 text editors present, one for each day of the week I guess. Incidentally, I am typing this review in KWrite while playing around with this release.
The menu layout is pretty intuitive for office applications atleast. Instead of grouping them by brand, they are now grouped by functionality. So all the word processors go under 'Wordprocessors'. GNOME dictionary turned out to be very helpful in checking some word meanings but it needs internet connection. It would be much better if there is an offline dictionary included, somethink like Wordweb for Windows.
Internet:
Plenty of stuff here. Galeon is also present in addition to Mozilla and Konqueror. And Mozilla still retains its ugly classic theme as default. This point has been talked about so much in online communities but nothing seems to convince the package developers to change it. Flash plugin is not present and neither is Java. What is the point in putting ton of new features in each version if it can't do the basic stuff right? Konqueror was horrible at reproducing the fonts as intended by the web page. I went to www.osnews.com and the page looked terrible in Konqueror. But the same web page looks gorgeous in Mozilla. Maybe there are some font settings that can be changed but default in Konqueror is just hit or miss.
I used gaim to connect to Yahoo chat server and everything worked right the first time. There is an application called 'Screem' to build web sites. Its something similar to Yahoo site builder though not that powerful or that intuitive. I could not find site templates which is the first thing it should have had.
In terms of internet security, the system has a firewall called Shorewall. I chose the standard level of security accepting the default settings. The Zone alarm firewall test on Windows XP shows all the ports to be in stealth mode. Means that it eats up all the incoming ICMP packets and it appears that there is no PC at this IP address. I decided to see how does Shorewall fare. Went to the site 'http://scan.sygate.com' and gave a port scan. It showed all the ports to be in 'closed' state only. That means that someone could still see that there is a PC at this IP address. It is secure but I won't have worried had it been in 'stealth' mode. I then changed the security level to 'paranoid' and sure enough, the port were shown to be 'Blocked' which means they are in stealth mode. I felt better but now I could not access my shared drives mounted under /mnt. Oh well..
Did a Nmap scan also on the PC and it showed only port 6000 to be open which was being used by X11.
General usability:
One of my pet peeves is the default application bindings in Linux distros for the common type of files and Mandrake doesn't fare any better than others. eg double-clicking on an iso image file brings up an application selection dialog. Now the most common use of an iso file is to burn it on to a CD and K3b should have been configured to do so by default. Xandros does this right. Another example is .dat files. There are used in VCDs. Now the only thing I can do with a dat file is to view it. So Mplayer should have got fired up and played the movie. Since this is just a preview release, maybe the things will change in future. Moreover with all the distros having more or less the same standard set of packages, these are the only areas where a distro can differentiate itself from others. I am sure we'll be seeing a lot of usability enhancements in 2004.
The system seems stable enough for daily use. The only two things that were acting up were xmms and KOffice. Everything else seems to be working fine. I would like to say here that the speed of the system reduced a bit after using it for 2-3 days. Maybe because of all those log files getting written.
Conclusion:
This is going to be a big release for Mandrake especially considering their financial situation. It won't be wrong to say that this is the release that can make them or break them. Hope they get this one right. Enough has been written about KDE 3.2 beta and how it still needs a lot of polish. As for me, I'll be giving Fedora core 2 a spin and then decide for myself. If Fedora offers same levels of performance, I don't mind installing a few multimedia packages and getting on with my work.
About the author
My daytime job is of a mainframe programmer, working on OS/390 in real text mode, 80x25. And funnily enough, I don't miss the GUI there. I've been tinkering with Linux since Redhat 6.1 and have installed and tried most of the distros. I use Redhat 9.0 for my daily chores though.
- "Mandrake 10 preview, Page 1"
- "Mandrake 10 preview, Page 2"
