A funny thing to put just above the post on the Madrid disaster, but this is a tech blog as well as a war blog – it’s a general personal blog. So here goes.<\/p>\n
Mandrake has just released the “Community version” of version 10 of its (GNU\/) Linux distro and released ISOs to the Community. Many of the FTP mirrors were full as the Mandrake website warned, and those that weren’t were painfully slow – ftp.sunsite.co.uk was as fast as my home broadband on a much wider connection. But I found a mirror in Ireland from which the download rate was 1.4 Mb per second, so I manage to download it pretty quickly.
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\nThe installation went pretty smoothly; it took rather a long time to repartition part of my hard drive and it prompted me to insert a non-existent disk 4 at the end. I’m not sure what I’ve not been able to install as a result. But apart from that it was uneventful, the look and feel is nice, and as a nice touch it installed KDevelop on the taskbar – something I’ve never seen before on any other distro.<\/p>\n
I’m quite looking forward to the official release. I’ve not used it long enough to know whether the problems I had with 9.2 (such as going into never-ending swaps which I could only get out of by rebooting) have been fixed with this edition. The default font with Emacs is too small, and this will be a big problem for anyone who uses 1280×1024 resolution on a 17-inch monitor, as I used to do. On my laptop it’s not such a problem.<\/p>\n