Good impressions so far.
The ATI Radeon 3450 video card was recognised and set up automatically but the scrolling rate was poor. I then exited to a command line prompt and configured an xorg.conf from there. This improved the video scrolling performance substantially but still not as good as say that from Wary 5.1.2 This latest xorg.conf looked a bit dodgy as well with two "Devices" sections included.
For other reasons I then installed the dev_x.sfs. Strangely enough on rebooting the system this seemed to sort out the video performance. There must be something included in the dev_x that sorted out the video.
The next thing I did was to install the Ubuntu font pet I built some time ago. My tired old eyes need this! Together with Iguleder's antialiased fonts fix, this improved the video experience yet again.
Now for WLAN. My first WLAN card that I used would not configure due to missing firmware by the looks of it. It uses the RT2870sta module. Error log looks like this:
My other WLAN stich uses the Ralink rt73usb chipset and this was detected and set up O.K.Information about this interface:
Interface: wlan0 Driver: rt2800usb Bus: usb MacAddress: 00:0C:F6:75:AB:8B
Description: Ralink RT2800 USB Wireless LAN driver.
STEP1a: ifconfig wlan0 up
ifconfig: SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory
*********************************************************
LAST 10 LINES of /var/log/messages:
Jul 4 18:54:18 puppypc daemon.info dhcpcd[7132]: forked to background, child pid 8147
Jul 4 19:03:21 puppypc user.info kernel: usb 2-1.3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
Jul 4 19:03:22 puppypc user.info kernel: cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
Jul 4 19:03:22 puppypc user.debug kernel: phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel'
Jul 4 19:03:22 puppypc user.debug kernel: Registered led device: rt2800usb-phy0::radio
Jul 4 19:03:22 puppypc user.debug kernel: Registered led device: rt2800usb-phy0::assoc
Jul 4 19:03:22 puppypc user.debug kernel: Registered led device: rt2800usb-phy0::quality
Jul 4 19:03:22 puppypc user.info kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver rt2800usb
Jul 4 19:03:30 puppypc user.info kernel: rt2800usb 2-1.3:1.0: firmware: requesting rt2870.bin
Jul 4 19:03:30 puppypc user.err kernel: phy0 -> rt2x00lib_request_firmware: Error - Failed to request Firmware.
I tried installing gnupg and Firefox using the PPM. The Mageia Firefox binary was nowhere to be found on the system after the download and install. Neither was gnupg executable. I had previously updated the repos from within the PPM.
I then uninstalled these and used a current Firefox 7a Nightly. This seems to run extremely well here.
All in all, a great start for DrakePup. The developers can make good use of this as a base I'll bet.
A kernel recompile will probably solve the video teething troubles. I remember having video trouble with an Ubuntu version that uses this 2.6.34 kernel some time ago.
No Distrowatch announcement yet? It ought to be there!