Mandrake Linux 10.1

I decided to finally do what I had planned to do a year ago: set up a dual WinXP/Linux dual boot on my Acer Travelmate 800 laptop. I had put it off up until now because of the lack of Intel Pro Wireless 2100 (aka the Centrino wireless) support. When I saw Mandrake 10.1 now had "full support" for Centrino I just had to try it.

Now I'm wondering if false advertising can be charged for something I got for free. Apparently "full support" in the Mandrake world means, "It will detect your wireless, it will identify your wireless, but will not let you set up connections." Perfect! So I ended up having to do what I COULD have done with any non-Centrino supporting distribution: install third-party drivers.

Oh, but the fun didn't end there. After the drivers were installed properly and a connection was established I thought everything was okie-dokie. WRONG! For some reason the wireless connection will not initialize properly at boot-up, so I have to go in as root and reconfigure the connection EVERY TIME I BOOT UP LINUX. Bravo!

To its credit, Mandrake seemed to detect and properly configure everything else on my Acer Travelmate 800. Even the ATI display worked nicely right away even at 1400x1050 resolution.

Before trying Mandrake 10.1 I tried the latest version of Knoppix, which is a Linux distribution that runs off of a bootable CD. I found it was a lot less painful to set up than Mandrake. Wireless worked right away, as promised. The frustrating thing was that my display would not work at anything higher than 1024x768! You would think with all thise open-source stuff these programmers would be collaborating to get things working consistently across distributions. Now it looks like I have to choose a distro based on which of the two I value most: proper display or wireless, which is pretty sad since my hardware for both is extremely common.

I'm not giving up on Linux completely, however. When I get the time I will probably fiddle around with it some more. But right now, at least in my view, it is not ready for prime time. Until the next time I get desperately bored, I'll see you in Windows XP Pro.

EDIT (1:02 PM):
I think I am going to give Knoppix another try. I found some tweaks that MIGHT get the display to work properly. Wish me luck!