Released on the 8th of November, Mandrake 10.1 PowerPC version has been running on one of our test machine since then. It is time to write down some notes. Do not take this one as a review, these are just the opinions of a simple user.
Ease of use and nice look, as I titled: these are the most remarkable qualities of this distribution. I found that many things have improved since I last installed Mandrake on a Mac, but there is some work still to be done to make the user experience almost perfect.

I am talking about the installer, with its easy and nice GUI, first of all. The problem seems to come when you have a graphic card not supported by the kernel shipped with the distribution. The only way I found to boot from the installation media was to append the "video=ofonly" string to the kernel image name at the yaboot prompt. It is not surprising: most of the distribution I installed on this machine came with kernels hanging at boot cause of the bad supported nVidia graphic device (the ofonly option tells the kernel to use the Open Firmware frame buffer generic support for the device instead of the specific one).
This usually does not result in a big problem, as one can always use a text-based or ncurses installer, but in this case I was surprised of how bad the text-installer was. I am sure that best efforts went into the creation of the GUI installer, which I saw at work on both x86 and PPC machines and which is, in truth, really really nice. But some extra work for unlucky people like me who have the misfortune to have an unsupported graphic device would be needed, in my opinion. Try to compare Mandrake's ncurses installer to the Debian's one (I mean the new d-i) and you will understand what I mean. I find it more complex than is necessary, the disk partition step is the clearest example. The yaboot bootloader installation went fine: a mac os x partition was recognized and automatically added to other boot options at restart. I love the GUI installer, but I hated the text one.

This said and considered, one would expect, once having rebooted and logged, that something in the X.org installation is broken and that it will take you some time to configure it. Wrong, at least in my case. I just ran xorgconfig, setup everything according to my hardware configuration and I got a working 1280x1024 graphical desktop running KDE (which appears to be the default desktop environment at install time). Although I am a Gnome supporter, I think the KDE setup coming with Mandrake is really nice, clean and complete. I mean you feel perfectly comfortable using it since the first boot. Many graphical and well done configuration tools will help you setup the Mandrake distribution: adding new devices and software just take you few clicks. Scanner and printer installation were succesful, the built in PowerMac audio device was already detected in the right way by the installer and since the first boot it worked perfectly.

What I liked of the Mandrake's KDE default installation is the big number of multimedia applications ready to work: audacity, gimp, kaffeine and amarok players and many more, satisfying the needs of a desktop user. And, obviously, all the office applications you can desire are ready to be used, Openoffice suite components and KDE specific programs.

The GUI of all these applications integrates perfectly with the shipped KDE desktop. This is obvious for those of them that are part of the KDE qt-based distribution, but not for the gtk2-based ones. In practice I am not noticing remarkable incoherencies among the two environments.

Package installation can be managed using graphical tools that allow the user to browse, install, uninstall RPMs and adding sources to get and update them. Packages dependencies are automagically resolved and all of the software I installed worked with no configuration effort at all. K3B was one of them: it autodetected my cd/dvd burner and after only question (maximum cd writing speed) it just works with no flaws.

On the internet side there are lots of good applications already installed too. Among them Mozilla, Konqueror, the Kopete messanger, Kontact mail client, the nice Quanta+ html editor. Konqueror deserves some words. It has passed a lon time since I last used it on this same machine but with another distribution. I found it a lot snappier and responsive, with a simple and usable interface. An talking about usability it is important to mention the presence of a good set of accessibility tools.

It is a pleasure to see this version of Mandrake Linux. There have been times, few years ago, when Mandrake Linux business was not doing well and it almost seemed that there would have never been a new release. Testing it makes me happy two times: it is nice, easy to use and, above all, it is still here with this new 10.1 version.

I made some screenshots of the installation, enjoy them.