It was a long week. Productive, but long.

My short story "Testify" is getting ready to go out into the world, maybe find a home somewhere.

I've got a new OS. Mandrake Community 10 is out for all. Community is not a final version, nor is it a beta or release candidate. It's just a working, stable version that needs to be polished. This way instead of releasing 10 and then in a few months having to release 10.1 that has some bug fixes and requested changes (sometimes new ideas such as an innovative menu system doesn't go over well and has to be changed), Community comes out and later in the year, a Final version comes out.

Things are different, some good and some not so good. The not so good first. I had the same menu problem I had with 9.2 in KDE (my preferred windows manager{the interface}). It wasn't hard to fix. I just thought Mandrake had fixed it.

There is no native DVD support. That's not Mandrake's fault. But still, I'd like to see a distro take the lead and legally push for it. I bought the DVD legally. I should be able to play the DVD legally on my computer.

I couldn't change skins in Xine (my preferred video program that, once enabled, plays DVDs). I think this is more of a Xine problem than Mandrake. I downloaded a newer release candidate version of Xine and installed it. I was able then to change skins.

No skins available for Mplayer (my preferred generic video program). I had to download skins for it. Again, probably not a Mandrake issue, just Mplayer's.

Karamba had issues. I use Superkaramba, which I think of as Karamba with extras. They're basically the same. I had to modify something in its source code and then compile it to fix it. Karamba always stayed on top of everything. This means if I moved a window over it, I couldn't see some of the window. Karamba and Superkaramba are third party programs that have nothing to do with Mandrake.

This isn't a bug, but I'd love Mandrake to think of dual monitor folks. Their screensavers rarely work right. More likely than not, this a Gnome and KDE issue. KDE plays pretty nice with dual monitors. I just wish they're screensavers did.

Now for the good. Speed. Mandrake 10 is fast. It is much faster (to me) than 9.2. The speed practically negates the bad.

My web browser (Firebird) and mail client (Thunderbird) work beautifully and with some speed.

True Type fonts are turned on by default it seems. That's a huge plus.

Sound is turned on by default. I didn't have go turn the volume up on anything. It's all set right for me. In all previous versions of Mandrake I've tried, the sound was always turned down by default.

There are a few extras and improvements in the way you can configure your desktop, the look, feel, and sound. You now can easily install KDE splash screens. They're defined as splash themes. One of them mysteriously looks Redmond (M$).

There are a lot of little touches that make everything nice. A few of them really do make you think the folks at Mandrake are listening to end users. Imagine that.

This is by no means a review of Mandrake 10. This is merely a "what's up with me" post. Head over to www.distrowatch.org and check out their Mandrake section for a listing of reviews. While there, check out other distro. It's all good.

  ¶ 4:13 PM