Mandrake 2008

The shift to a new system gave me an opportunity to retry the failed Mandrake 2008 installation. This time the graphics drivers were cooperative.
Man 8 offers almost similar features as PC Linux, probably the latter is based on the former. The one sore point was that Man 8 insisted on a 6 letter password for the root, and would not allow the root to login from the GUI. Besides this, it is PC Linux in a different colour scheme.
One experiment that I wanted to tryout on the Man 8 installation was installing Wine. Since the installation on PC Linux had failed, I was hoping that Man's popularity would make a difference. It did.
The application management routine in Man 08 is quite good, allowing easy adding and removing repositories offline and online. Since Wine did not show up in the initial search, I added an online repository, and proceeded to install Wine.
After the first download and installation, about 50 MB was downloaded, the menu entries of Wine made their appearance, but launching it did not result in anything. On revisiting the applications selected for installation, I found that lib wine package, which were the libraries on which the Wine executable depended upon, were not installed. Though I do recall that on selecting Wine a few dependent packages tagged along, probably this particular one was not one of them. So the second time, I selected the lib package and a few other apps were tagged on as a result, and then proceeded to download and install these as well. In all the total download size came to about 90 MB, compared to the 300 MB which I had to download while installing wine in PCL.
Post installation, since the glibc package had been updated, a restart was needed. After restart, Wine was running as expected. After installation, a new context menu entry makes an appearance everytime an exe file is selected - Run with Wine. Selecting this will launch Wine, and in it the particular application, without any further action from the user. The screenshot is of Irfanview running in a Wine window.