First, thank you all very much for your answers. I can't believe the response... a lot of great ideas in less than 24 hours. If anyone else has ideas, please let me know, as the project is far from over. The developers' mailing list at Mandrake is buzzing with audio talk now. :-) Here are the major complaints about Mandrake 9.0 in general, with comments. Where applicable, I will forward the suggestions or problems to the appropriate developers at Mandrake. 1. Supermount problems in 9.0 This is well known. This month a few people have been patching up supermount for 9.1. As for 9.0, most people find the problems tolerable, but you can easily disable supermount on afflicted drives by editing 'supermount' out of your /etc/mtab and /etc/fstab files. 2. Desire for unpatched kernel Mandrake has always included an unpatched version of the kernel. It is called kernel-linus rather than kernel, and is not installed by default. You can install it with # urpmi kernel-linus 3. Problems with alsa sound quality on certain devices If these are alsa-specific problems (occur on other distros), please report them to alsa-project.org. If they are Mandrake specific, it would be nice if you could test the 9.1beta2 release to see if we have fixed it yet. If not, please report to http://qa.mandrakesoft.com. 4. Drakx (our installer) too simplistic With most new distros tending toward MORE simplistic installers, I have a hard time understanding this. Try expert mode first. If that's still too simple for you, you're welcome to make suggestions at mailto:cooker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx our developers' mailing list. We have added a rudimentary sound card and sound system (alsa/oss) configurator in the Mandrake Control Panel, so you can change sound system and card quite easily at any time. 5a. Drakx doesn't detect/configure USB audio Pixel, the mastermind behind our installer was very surprised by this. He says if you send him your /proc/bus/usb/devices list, he will fix the problem. The exception is the Extigy. Currently it's not detected, and they're not sure if we can include the drivers for it. 6. Drakx installs too much by default I assume this is to help new users get a semi-complete distro in one step. As you mentioned, the alternative is to select no "categories" of packages, and select packages individually. We offer both methods. 7. No low latency patch Currently we have a mini-low latency patch in our main kernel. I 'think' we are waiting for the rest to be officially incorporated into the main kernel, but I'm not sure. I'll ask. A fully patched low-latency kernel has been available on the Mandrake Club website for 8.2 and 9.0 for some time now though. Not sure if it will be default in 9.1 or not. I hope so. 8. Libraries and header files are in separate RPMs and must be installed separately We do this because the average user doesn't need header files and they take up extra space. It is not true that they must be installed separately though. If you urpmi the -devel package, the library package will be installed automatically, but not vice versa. 9. Can't run jack unless root I don't know much about this, or whether it's true or not in 9.1. I've asked some people to look into it. Could someone tell me what commands they would like to execute but can't? Now for requested applications. To my surprise, most of these we do not include. I will do my best to get most of them included in 9.1. Some others we already include, or can't include. I'll comment below. Requested that we include already: snd mplayer Requested that we can't include: cinelerra (includes mp3 encoder) lame (ditto) both may be available at plf.zarb.org, a site run by outlaws :-) realplay (proprietary, available at www.mandrakeclub.com) Requested that we don't plan to include: broadcast 2000 (obsolete, hard to maintian) Requested that I know Tobbe is working on currently: ardour qjackconnect csound cecelia rtsynth swami muse pd ceres vkeyb all are available for Mandrake 9.0 at: http://rpm.nyvalls.se/sound9.0.html but are completely unsupported They will be in 9.1 for sure. Requested that I will personally look into: kaconnect amsynth spiral* (won't compile with gcc 3.2.1, will need to ask author to fix) freqtweak jmax seq24 Finally for favorite apps. I wanted to know what apps we should focus on, as well as estimate how well we are doing at including popular apps. Favorite apps we include: 56% of votes Favorite apps we don't include (yet): 38% of votes Favorite apps we can't/won't include: 6% of votes So it looks like we're not doing too bad! Looks like 9.1 could include 94% of your favorite apps. I really want to thank you all again for your help. Mandrake 9.1 should be released in April. Until then feel free to ask questions, pose suggestions, and submit bug reports. I will be on this list indefinitely I hope, as I'm a heavy Audacity user. :-) Austin -- Austin Acton Hon.B.Sc. Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto MandrakeClub Volunteer (www.mandrakeclub.com) homepage: www.groundstate.ca
