Mandrake 10.2 Beta

Well I downloaded release candidate 2 (RC2) of Mandrake 10.2 and installed it on my main work machine. It took only about 60 minutes to install and configure the basic setup of this distribution. It took me another 2 hours to tweak and download various packages/updates. My observations:

• It didn't have XFCE, not a problem I downloaded the RPM files and installed without a problem. For those of you who don't use Linux, XFCE is a light-weight desktop environment. With my current setup my system will use about 60 megs at startup. I like the environment as it stays out of my way when I work.
• It didn't have XMMS. This is a major pain as I run GKRELLM to monitor the system and the plugin package expects XMMS to be on the system and won't load until I do. This is a problem as I can't find XMMS for 10.2 RC 2 at this time. Hopefully Mandrake will change this as I really like XMMS.
• I found amaroK and it appears to have most of the functionality of XMMS. Most importantly it allows me to play web music (yay).
• Thunderbird (email) was not installed, again this is not a problem as I can download and install the RPM.
• GTK-Gnutella was not installed.
  

So far the RC2 distro seems to be solid and I have not had a problem yet with this machine. I like Mandrake as it is easy for me to install, configure and support. The only thing that I have noticed is that the number of CDs have been growing and the bloat factor has been increasing. Now to work on Webmin and configure my security sessions back to their normal paranoid levels.