[NTLUG:Discuss] A 'Halfway' Distribution

[Paul Ingendorf]

Now you learn the pain of putting together a distro.  Some of the software
you decide should go into your distro changes.  Mandrake doesn't push KDE
development and I wouldn't blame them for the disapearance of a utility
within a package they don't have much control over.  As for kover you can
find it by using the wonderful rpmfind.net

http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=kover

It also appears that this has never "come with" Mandrake it is in the
contrib dir on all the potential releases on rpmfind.  I can't say I would
blame them if they didn't include it directly given the question, how many
people really use it?  Your the first one I've ever heard of.  I have ~700
CDs and I've never had a problem finding what I want on any of them.

Good luck on your hunt.

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at ntlug.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at ntlug.org]On
Behalf Of Mike
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2003 8:36 AM
To: NTLUG Discussion List
Subject: Re: [NTLUG:Discuss] A 'Halfway' Distribution


It's really a matter of opinion for me. Mandrake is designed
for linux newbies, and I'm starting to feel restricted in
it. There is nothing wrong with 9.0, it's just a sum of
teeny things that makes me feel there has to be other
distro's better suited to me. I still strongly recommend it
for people with no linux experience, and those forced to
deal with a windows interface on a daily basis. Mandrake
still does the best job of putting stuff in locations that
make sense to windows users. Corel WAS better than
Mandrake, but they (now @ http://www.xandros.net ) want
99.00 and don't offer a downloadable ISO.  I do a lot of
speculative buying, but I'm not rich enough to spend that
much just to try something.

There were just too many little things missing in mandrake
9.0 for me vs. mandrake 8.0   Alot you won't notice right
away or care about: stuff like the 4 screensavers vs 30+ in
mandrake 8 is annoying, but not really an issue.  However,
kpm (process manager) is replaced by a less informative K
System Guard. I care about this one because system guard
doesn't support all the break and kill signals that kpm
does, it doesn't have the system health meters, and the
updates come a little quicker than I can click-to-kill, so
I've been playing hide n seek with runaway yahoo messengers
(annoying AND affects system integrity.) The overall feel
of the subtle changes is similar to the stuff that
disappeared or got harder to do between windows 95 and
windows 98, only mandrake can't pretend it has a monopoly
to allow it to force feed the masses.

The straw that broke the camel's back was the missing Kover
program. I know its just a jewel case creator, and there
are other programs with more features.  This one is just
what I've been using for 10 or more loads to keep my
bookshelves of disks semi-organized.  For getting text down
the spine of a CD case, this program is the simplest. I've
got several hundred CD's, mostly variants of linux, but
also a huge classical music collection, and about 50% of
the games made for Dreamcast.  Keeping these organized IS a
big deal for me, and I'm falling behind because I haven't
found a replacement for kover. Most of the programs lately
have automated searches of CD title databases, but stuff in
those databases doesn't apply to 99% of what I stick in
jewel cases. All of the kover replacements i've tried
require mousing around and multiple clicks. With kover, you
can complete each label with the keyboard only (tabbing
works.)

I know I could go hunt down a binary that won't crash on
mandrake 9,  or get the source and compile my own.  If a
short search doesn't find a good replacement, I probably
will.  The purpose of a distribution is to prevent you
having to deal with so many minor details, and this time
Mandrake left a lot of details for me to deal with.


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