Mandrake Move Review

http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/mandrakemove

This review is part of the ArchLUG KwikiReviews series.

Mandrake Move - Comments and observations

By Jay Truesdale 12/15/2003

Mandrake v9.2 has been released along with MandrakeMove -- a new product based on Mandrake Linux 9.2 that provides a complete personal desktop operating system on a bootable CD. Personal data and configuration settings may be stored on a dedicated USB Key. The USB key is a RAM based USB device (also referred to as a "Flash Memory Drive"), not to be confused with one of those "dongles" that need to be present for some commercial software to work. This enables you to run Linux on any reasonably recent PC without having to install anything on the host PC and to take your configured Linux with you. If you have a big enough USB key device you should be able to store your work there along with the configuration information.

Mandrake Move is available from the Mandrake store with either a 128 MB or 256 MB USB key included. There is no useful documentation on the Mandrake Move Beta CD. Once the CD has booted, you have access to the Mandrake Linux Starter Guide and Command Line Manuals in either HTML or PDF formats. The KDE documentation is also included. Hidden away in the "All Applications" menu selection is additional documentation, HOW-TOs and the KDE Help Center. The boxed set also includes additional commercial software such as NVidia drivers, Acrobat Reader, Real Player, Flash Player, and Mandrake Move documentation, but they don't say if the Mandrake Move documentation is hard copy or electronic.

This review was done using a beta downloaded from the Internet - the ability to save configuration information to a USB key has been disabled. In my opinion, this is a short-sighted decision by Mandrake. I'd really like to be able to test the ability of storing my configuration on the USB key before I purchase the full version with the USB key support. It would be desirable to know things like: Will any key work with Mandrake Move? How much space on the USB key is used to store configuration information?

After booting from the Mandrake Move CD, there are a number of option that you can specify at boot time with a kernel parameter, such as erasing the USB key and expert mode. I was not able to get any of these options to work but this may be due to my own ignorance or it may be a limitation of the Beta CD. The on-line help available at this point is one screen of text. In my perusal of the on-line documentation I did not see anything specific to Mandrake Move, nor did I find any discussion of specifying boot parameters. Maybe this infomation is included in the full version?

The first system I tested with is an old Toshiba laptop with 192 MB of RAM and a 24x CDROM drive. Booting took approximately 3:35 and 25 MB of free RAM was reported after booting. Even though Mandrake Move properly detected the video chip, it decided to run at to run at 640 x 480. The system configuration tools that ship with Mandrake Move are not very usable at 640 x 480 as there are buttons that are off of the screen. I could not resize the window to get scroll bars, nor could I shift the window so that I could see what I needed to see. After booting Mandrake Move on another system and viewing the position of the off-screen buttons, I was able to blindly tab to the OK button and activate it using the Enter key. I was finally able to reconfigure the video to use 1024 x 768.

I have an Orinoco Gold PCMCIA wireless card that was not able to be detected or configured by Mandrake Move even though there was a selection for this particular card in the network configuration. I later noted that in the KDE Control Center / Information / PCMCIA panel that no PCMCIA controller was detected, "your mileage will vary." This seems odd as Red Hat 9 and Suse 9 all find the PCMCIA controller.

Mandrake Move spun down the hard disk in the laptop which was a nice feature - mine makes too much noise. I was able to use apm to suspend the laptop (this laptop only supports "suspend to RAM") which made restarting a lot faster.

I composed much of this review using Open Office Writer, storing the review on the USB key, and it worked reasonably well. I was not able to out-type OO, but occasionally the CD-ROM was accessed which stopped text from appearing until the access was finished. No typing was ever lost, but it was disconcerning to not have your text appear in a timely manner. Saves to the USB key were very fast. The spell checker worked fine, even in "AutoSpellCheck" mode. Turning off the AutoSpellCheck feature helped to reduce the CD-ROM accesses.

The second system I tried with Mandrake Move, has 512 MB RAM, an Athlon 1.3 Ghz, an Adaptec AHA-2940 SCSI card with HP scanner attached, an Adaptec Firewire card, a 250 MB USB Zip drive, an ATI Radeon 7000 video card, a Siemens Speed Stream PCI 10/100 Ethernet card and a Plextor 16/10/40A CD/RW drive. It took about 1:17 to boot to the licensing and other prompts and then another 36 seconds until the desktop was displayed for a total boot time of about 1:53. One would expect that the full product would boot up without stopping to prompt the user for passwords, etc. as these should all be stored on the USB Key. After booting, there was still free RAM (327MB) reported as available. After launching Konqueror and Open Office Writer, 135 MB was reported as available.

I was able to configure the video for 1280 x 1024, my monitor was detected correctly. The Zip drive was detected and an icon placed on the desktop for it. When a USB key drive was plugged it, it was also detected and an icon for it appeared on the desktop (this did not happen on the laptop - I have no idea why not).

The network card was detected and configured correctly via DHCP. I was able to browse the Internet and my local network.

According to the "HardwareDrake" almost all of the hardware was detected correctly, but not everything was configured. For example, I have an APC UPS that is connected via USB, it was detected correctly, but Mandrake Move did not load any software for it (which is OK).

The third system that I tested with had a 350Mhz Pentium 2, 256 MB RAM, a couple of hard disks, 1 5.25" and 1 3.5" floppy drives, a CD drive, an HP CD Writer 9710i CD-RW drive (16/10/40), an IDE LS-120 drive, on-board IDE, a Promise IDE controller, a Firewire card and an "all in one" HP printer/scanner. All of the hardware appeared to be detected correctly but no attempt was made to use all of the hardware. I was able to print a printer test page in color. The Video card and monitor were detected correctly and I was able to change the resolution. There was no way that I could see to print the hardware configuration from the "HardwareDrake" tool, which I found odd as Windoze can do it. After booting there was about 50MB of unused RAM reported.

Added 12/11/2003 @4:07 PM: The fourth system I tested with Mandrake Move is an old Pentium class machine: AMD K6 300 Mhz, 96 MB ram, 50x CD-ROM drive, on-board USB, Number 9 Motion 771 video (S3 968) w/4MB display memory, a Mylex (now LSI Logic) BT-958 SCSI controller, a Belkin 3-button USB mouse and a Net Gear FA-311 10/100 Ethernet card. At boot time I got a warning that a minimum of 120 MB of RAM was required and if I choose to continue I could suffer system crashes and lock ups. To my surprise, the system found, and used, the USB mouse. Things ran slowly but they ran. I browsed the Internet, ran Open Office Writer, ran Kedit and later plugged in a USB key and everything seemed to work OK with no crashes or lockups. Launching any application took a while, but once loaded, performance was acceptable. I discovered that the X configuration tool has a test button for testing your X configuration which is a cool thing.

General Comments and Observations

The "start" menu has most of the software that users of a distribution such as this would probably want to use. The "All Applications" selection off the main menu has other items that are not in the main menu's categories. For example there are HOW-TOs that are not on the main menu's documentation selection. Other useful software found there included Kedit, KHexEdit, Kwrite, Kcalc and monitoring tools such as KDE System Guard and printer queue monitoring. I found this a bit odd, were they trying to limit the size of the menus? Presumably if you have the full version of Mandrake Move you could put any of these programs on the tool bar for easy access. There are no mouse over pop ups on the start menu, if you want to know what a particular entry really is, you have to launch the program to find out. Once you learn what the icons are for this is OK, but it makes the learning curve a bit steeper. There appears to me to be enough software on the CD to make Mandrake Move a useful tool. Applications include Open Office, dia, KAddressBook, GnuCash, MrProject, Stickynotes, Korganizer, Kalarm, a few games, and audio and video players. Internet related tools include Knode (news groups), Konqueror (browser), Chat programs, KPPP, Quanta HTML editor, Kmail, Kbear FTP (is this program hard to use?) and Gnome Meeting.

The Mandrake Control Center is used to configure your system. Many of the configuration tools are named "*drake", like "MouseDrake" and "ScannerDrake". Personally I find this annoying. I guess they have to be called something, but why not just label things to reflect what they do like "Configure Mouse" and "Configure Scanner?"

Mandrake Move has enough software to be useful for those moving from PC to PC or perhaps switching between working at home and another location on another PC. There are no programming tools included in Mandrake Move, so the target user base is limited to those using standard office style tools. Without being able to save configuration data to the USB key in the Beta version of Mandrake Move, it is impossible to say how well this feature works. Maybe it works well, maybe it does not. As with most computer applications and especially in the case of Mandrake Move, a fast CD-ROM, more processor speed and more RAM are good things to have. The more you have the better your experience with Mandrake Move will be.

Jay's review was accepted unanimously by his peers on MandrakeMoveReviewAcceptance!

As a thank you from the ArchLUG, Jay will be receiving a *fully licensed copy of MandrakeMove* (w/ a 128KB key drive).