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Mandrake 7.0 quick notes (while installing on the other machine)
On Sat, 15 Jan 2000, Ira Abramov wrote:
> the install is now completely graphical, didn't offer me a text fallback
heh, it has three choosable color schemes... skins even before the
system boots :-)
I prefer the way Caldera installs in the BG whie it asks you the network
info and defines users. when you're done, it lets you play tetris until
it finishes the copy (and occasionally gets stuck :-(
oh yeah, under keyboard layout there;s now "Israeli" and "Israeli
(phonetic)", anyone knoes what the latter means?
now here's an interesting bit... it doesn't come with crypto software
ofcourse, but once you finish setting up the LAN addresses (well, for
this you need a PTP line like me :-) it offers to connect you to one of
10 FTP sites in Europe to DL mutt+pgp, pgp itsels, gpg, sone pgp tools,
openSSH, openSSL, LynxSSL, mod_ssl and a few other tools. that's a very
interesting feature for a distribution, you have to admit, nd a pretty
strong and obvious kick in the groin for the US laws :-)
as for the "security levels" during install, I have to still read about
it in the manual, part of the stuff it offers you ("paranoid" or
"cracker welcome" extreme modes) is only available if you ask for an
expert install. the paranoid mode even installs a different kernel image
with various patches to avoid stack overflow holes and the
like. (note: below are links to that spot in the manual)
in the option screens for selecting the individual packages it's a bit
messy (it IS intended only for expert mode afterall, I suppose), where
the tree of subjects is too wide and only two levels deep (as package
sorting goes in RPMs), and the interface is rater annoying. if you touch
a package name just to know what it's about, it already (de)selets it,
along with dependencies if necessary.what if you think you do want it
back? you reselect it but you don't know if the stuff that depends on it
is not gone too. also if you hit a category name instead of the little +
to expand branches, you end up selecting or unselecting everything in
the category, with no undo option, quite frustrating. on that part of
the DrakX (the GUI install's name, all written in GTk-perl) they loose a
mark from me.
aha... you get a choice of sendmail or postfix... (I think Qmail will
not show up here for a while until DJB changes his mind)
all along the install, the stages are listed on the left side of the
screen like a button menu, almost any stage you passed can be returned
to. I switch to the text console and get the report windows (like in Red
Hat) and I was quite surprised to notice they are using the frame buffer
instead of straight text mode... gotta try that one day (anyone knows
what are the benefits if any?)
umm, another thing "custom" and "recommended" modes won't give you but
"expert" will is a choice of lilo configs... it seems that if you don't
choose expert mode, lilo will always default to the MBR, when I wanted
it at the beginning of the boot partition...
ok... booting...
kernel 2.2.14, raid included. pressing "I" for interactive loading of
services during boot. a tool called kudzu is looking for new hardware at
each boot, KDM comes up (I asked it to load right into X).
ok, it found and mounted the two FAT32 partitions (I'm doing all these
tests on my test machine, not my main one :-), and mounts them fixed in
/etc/fstab with me asking for it... and the fstab itself is an ugly
mess! no tabs, just single spaces :(
RPMdrake is a KDE app (supposedly to compete with GnoRPM). when I fired
it up it said it needed root privileges and asked for a password, giving
me a tickbox as an option to save the password. not very unix-security
friendly at forst, but I find it to be a very pleasing solution for most
purposes on a workstation. (what, you mean you login to X as
root?! shame on you!)
now I run the DrakXconf panel. again root password needed. I can run
their hardware config tool Lothar (shadows of system panel in windows,
most of it is just info, with few links for configurations), and there
is an X config tool (yes, change screen resolution, card model and
refresh rates while X is running, and test it!, for some of the settings
though you will have to log out and let KDM restart the X server)
ok, now I dug into the user's guide a bit to learn about the security
levels. quite an interesting time saver, I wonder if people out thre
will not trust it a bit too much. the Mandrake 7.0 user's guide is not
online at their site apperently, so I put it here:
http://ren.scso.com/linux/mdkuserguide/000.html
and MSEC descriptions is at
http://ren.scso.com/linux/mdkuserguide/017.html#157
for the install guide, with nice screenshots, try this:
http://ren.scso.com/linux/mdkinstallguide/000.html
kinda rediculous... since it's not up on their site yet, the only way
you can read the guide is to install the system first (unless you bought
the official distro with the printed book...)
oh! carefull not to pick the / of the guides' directory iteslf unless
you REALLY intend to! the index.html file is quite long! (the entire
guides in one file... netscape brought my machines to its knees trying
to render it...)
ah yes... and I'm quite impressed with openSSH with the little tests I
did so far. looks very compatible with ssh1, both as client and as
server it interacts very nicely with my other machine (which has regular
ssh on it)
in short: it looks great, you should give it a go if you want to freshen
up your old Red Hat or are a newbie looking for the right first
installation...
--
Ira Abramov ; whois:IA58 ; www.scso.com ; all around Linux enthusiast
"Note that if I can get you to \"su and say\" something just by asking,
you have a very serious security problem on your system and you should
look into it."
(By Paul Vixie, vixie-cron 3.0.1 installation notes)
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