Releases/Mandrake/10.0/Notes
From Mandriva Community Wiki
Various notes about new features and updates tips for the 10.0 release.
Contents |
[edit] General Stuff
[edit] Installer
[edit] Disk Images
Use hd_grub.img instead of (deprecated) hd.img if installing from hard drive copy of distribution tree. You can configure the boot with the script at http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/hd_grub.cgi.
Installing from the network now needs two floppies (because the kernel is getting too large). More information on this, along with notices on how to install directly over the network using TFTP or PXE, and the purpose of the new convenient boot.iso, are available in the README file from the /images directory of the installation volume.
And as usual, if installing with the default kernel (now a 2.6.x) yields problems on your hardware, you may try booting off an older kernel: floppies available from /images/alternatives or by typing F1 then alt1 booting off the cdrom.
[edit] Hangs on hardware detection
You may experience hangs on hardware detection, due to incompatibility between your hardware and the Linux kernel; they happen most of the time when loading USB, FireWire, PCMCIA or SCSI drivers. In such a situation, reboot the computer, hit F1 at boot and type linux noauto.
[edit] Network adapter never receives DHCP answer
If your network adapter never receives the answer from the DHCP server, or in case of static IP, can't connect, for obscure reasons, you may try to hit F1 at boot and type linux noapic.
[edit] Upgrading
urpmi can now do a distribution upgrade simply by adding urpmi sources for the 10.0 dist tree or cd's and then running 'urpmi urpmi' then 'urpmi --auto-select' and finally 'urpmi kernel' to install the new kernel. See KDE notes for tips on having a smooth upgrade experience with KDE installed.
[edit] Bug Reporting
There is an Anthill bug reporting database for stable releases at http://bugs.mandrakelinux.com/. Please note that there is a very strict policy regarding bugs posted there. Any reports that look like support requests will be closed and the reporter will be referred to MandrakeExpert. Reports for feature enhancements will be ignored; those should be posted to Bugzilla or discussed on the cooker mailing list.
[edit] Kernel 2.6
A 2.6 kernel is now available and will be installed as the default. If a 2.4 series kernel is desired, this must be selected during installation during the package selection phase.
If you have problems the 2.6 installation kernel, type F1 at the installation first screen and alt1, this will boot the installation with a 2.4 kernel and select it as system default.
[edit] udev vs devfs
despite being deprecated in the 2.6 kernel, devfs is still the default in 10.0.
[edit] Supermount
Supermount is now disabled by default, although still available, and a new service called magicdev is installed. See the section below on Dynamic CD Support for information on how to use this convenient new feature.
[edit] SCSI emulation for ATAPI devices
SCSI emulation is no longer necessary for ATAPI compliant CD and DVD burners in the 2.6 kernel. Any boot parameters for IDE devices to turn on SCSI emulation (hdx=ide-scsi) will be ignored by the kernel.
[edit] module-init-tools
The module-init-tools package serves the same purpose for the 2.6.x kernel that modutils served for 2.4.x. For those new to the 2.6 kernel, the file modules.conf, which was used to load modules and define their parameters at boot has changed is now called modprobe.conf. See 'man modprobe.conf' for more detailed information.
[edit] NPTL
Mandrake now includes the _Native POSIX Threads Library_ for maximum threading performance. See the nptl-design whitepaper at the following url for more information http://people.redhat.com/drepper/nptl-design.pdf
[edit] Hardware issues
[edit] Sound
On new installation, ALSA should works out of the box without the need to unmute sound volume. On update, one may loose sound if alsa driver has renamed some mixer elements, thus resulting in a bogus /etc/asound.state. In order to get a new asound.state, one has just to run the following command as root:
service sound stop; service alsa stop; rm -f /etc/asound.state; service sound start; service alsa start
see Docs/Hardware#Sound_Cards for further information.
[edit] CD burning
The ide-scsi emulation into the kernel is now deprecated and must not be used to burn on IDE burners. You must now use the ATA interface (preferably over ATAPI which does not support DMA and forbid any high speed burning). With cdrecord (or any burning frontends, check that you have selected the ATA interface for your burner. With cdrecord, you can do a cdrecord -scanbus devATA= to perform a scan on your IDE buses, and cdrecord -dev/dev/hdc -v image.iso= to burn an ISO image on your burner (replace /dev/hdc with the appropriate device for your burner)
[edit] Userland Stuff
[edit] Desktop Environment
[edit] Menu Structure
Based on feedback received from users and the result of a poll on MandrakeClub where over 90% of respondents preferred a new menu structure, the menus have been reorganized. On first login after an upgrade, the user menus may be out of sync with the new menu system, if so this can be resolved by running 'update-menus -v'.
[edit] Dynamic CD support
Under GNOME and KDE, when a CD or DVD is inserted in the reader an application is launched according to the CD/DVD type (CD audio reader, DVD reader, mount DATA CD, burn blank CD). You can change the launched tool and whether a particular kind of media initiates the autolaunch behavior using gnome-cd-properties. The package that this is included in is called magicdev, and it conflicts with supermount. If you would prefer to use supermount, you must run 'supermount -i enable' and remove the magicdev package.
[edit] Root Desktop
The default desktop for the root user is sparse and nearly unusable on purpose. Mandrake is trying to discourage people from the very unsafe practice of running a gui as root. Most applications that need root permissions have menu entries to start them as root, and any application that needs to be run as root can be started in a user's desktop environment by opening a terminal, using su to become root and launching the app from the command line. Running the entire gui desktop environemnt as root is completely unecessary and very dangerous. If you regularly run certain commands as root, you may also want to investigate using sudo instead.
[edit] Third-party software
Legacy third-party software (such as Flash Player) may rely on deprecated libraries (which are provided for compatability reasons but not installed by default), but fail to check for (or require) these libraries. This can be solved by either installing the required package manually if you have already installed the software ('urpmi libstdc++2.10'), or you can install packages which have correct "Requires". For the Flash Player, MandrakeClub users should be able to run 'urpmi FlashPlayer' after setting up the Club Commercial urpmi medium, others can try this package. Users of boxed sets should not have any problems, as usual.
[edit] DrakXTools
[edit] Mandrake Control Center
The user interface of the Mandrake Control Center has been improved. It is designed to have more of a web look and feel while making tasks easier to find and complete.
It's now theme compliant and dynamically adapt to theme changes. What's more, it's now more accessible (handle accessiblity theme, keyboard navigation).
[edit] DrakBoot
Themes are back.
[edit] DrakConnect
Split up of tasks into seperate wizards and screens
Because of user feedback, the dhcp client can now be selected in the advanced settings if the default of dhclient is not desired. Other choices available are dhcpcd and .
zeroconf - tmdns (multicast dns responder) and and zcip (ip address autoconfiguration) are installed as part of Mandrake's implementation of zeroconf. The goal is to allow machines on small networks with no infrastructure support to find and share network services. Although one of the main goals of zeroconf is to not interfere with existing large networks with infrastructure support, occassionally, this default implementation can cause problems with local name resolution and ip configuration.
[edit] DrakFax
New Tool
[edit] DrakCronAt
Drakcronat has been removed from the DrakXTools suite.
[edit] What other tools have major enhancements
[edit] KDE 3.2
The KDE Project has reorganized applications for the 3.2 release. An example is that kmail is part of kdepim now instead of kdenetwork. This could cause upgrades from 9.x that have KDE 3.1.x installed to not go smoothly. The best way to do an upgrade from 9.x will be to completely remove KDE from the target system, run the upgrade using your preferred method (urpmi --auto-select or upgrade installation) and then install KDE from the 10.0 media. If you do not do this, you will find that some KDE 3.2 applications will not be installed and some KDE 3.1.x applications will be left on the system.
It is also a good idea to make backup copies of each user's ~/.kde directory before doing the upgrade. This is because in the past, changes to KDE configuration files have caused problems when trying to run the new apps with the old configuration. It may be helpful if you are having problems after the upgrade to rename or remove the old ~/.kde directory and let it recreate automatically. Then move any data like kmail accounts and kaddressbook data back by hand.
[edit] GNOME 2.4
[edit] Theme not being applied properly
If changing theme in GNOME using GNOME Control Center theme dialog (gnome-theme-manager) doesn't change theme immediatly, make sure ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file doesn't exist. This file is used to override theme info from GNOME Control Center (this is by design of GTK+). More info is available from 
Bug #9227.
[edit] XFree86
XFree 3.3.6 has been placed in contrib to create more room on the iso images for other things. If you still need XFree86 version 3.3.6, you must add it post installation by adding a contrib mirror as a urpmi source.
Despite the imminent release of XFree86 version 4.4 and Mandriva's prior aggressiveness with including new releases of major software packages, the version of XFree86 shipped is 4.3. The reason for this is the change that was made to the licensing of the XFree86 project beginning with verion 4.4 rc3. This new license contains an advertising clause that made it impossible to modify all the relevant documentation in time to meet the release schedule for 10.0 and is also considered by many to be incompatible with the GPL. Being conservative and including only the 4.3 release.
You may see an error message in your system logs "atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0x7a on isa0060/serio0)" These entries can be safely ignored. Refer to the Bugzilla Bug #7293 for more information.
[edit] Server Stuff
[edit] Postgresql 7.4
Postgresql update should migrate your database to work with 7.4. If this is not the case, you may need to revert to the old postgresql version, perform a dump of your database, clear your postgresql directory, install the new postgresql version and reimport your saved data. You can use for that matter the mdk_update_dump mdk_update_restore scripts located into /usr/share/pgsql/mdk/.
[edit] Samba-3.0.2
Mandrake10 ships with samba-3.0.2a, however samba2-2.2.8a (which can be installed in parallel) is available in contribs for people migrating more complex installations. Please note that the tdb file format (which stores printer driver settings, winbind uid mappings and the like) has changed, so please make backups of your tdb files (in /var/cache/samba and the file /etc/samba/secrets.tdb) prior to upgrading if you may revert to samba-2.2.8a for any reason.
[edit] Openldap / db4.2
Mandrake10 ships with Openldap-2.1.25 compiled against an internal copy of db-4.2. Between db-4.1 and db-4.2 there has been a change in the format of the transaction logs (which are used by the bdb database backend). Although provisions have been made for the upgrade, if you have any databases using the bdb backend, please stop your LDAP service, run db_recover in the directory use for each bdb database, then move or archive the log files listed by running db_archive, immediately prior to upgrading. Note that the db-utils for db-4.2 are provided in the openldap-servers package, but are prefixed with slapd_ (ie slapd_db_recover).
[edit] Postfix
Mandrake10 ships with postfix 2.1 (snapshot). The postfix package has been split putting map types that require external libraries in their own package. Uptodate information about Mandrake specific issues can be found in the /usr/share/doc/postfix-2.1.0/README.MDK file
[edit] Shorewall, Kernel 2.6 and IP masquerading
When updating from an older release, you might find iptables complaning about an invalid argument when shorewall applies the rules for the masquerading section. To resolve this, make sure that the service iptables is started (check if you have any old rules in /etc/sysconfig/iptables and remove them) before shorewall is started:
# chkconfig --add iptables # service iptables start
[edit] Development Stuff
[edit] GCC
GCC 3.3.2 is included with release 10.0. 2.96 is still included for compatibility reasons and can be installed if necessary. For more info on issues with 3.3.2 see the gnu.org website.
[edit] Autoconf
Default autoconf is still 2.13. 2.59 is available and can be installed side-by-side with 2.13 ('urpmi autoconf2.5'). Then invoking 'autoconf' will detect which version is better according to the contents of 'configure.in' and other files; if this detection would fail, you can use environment variable WANT_AUTOCONF_2_5 set to 1, to force use of the 2.5x version. Use WANT_AUTOCONF_2_1 to force using 2.13. See info page for more information. *Never* invoke 'autoconf-2.5x' directly, this won't work.
