Let the wars begin! Redhat6.2 or Mandrake7.1?

[bigshooter]

I can't decide between the two. I am slightly familiar with Unix basics, but i want something easy to start out with, and i will move up to the other distros later, like slackware. Is Mandrake to newbeized? Is Redhat really more customizable than Mandrake? And when is the new Kernel supposed to come out. I remember people talking about how cool it was supposed to be, but haven't heard anything about it for a while.

 

[Cyph3r]

Try both..then you decide..

 

[Damaged]

How about RedHat 5.0? Very broken RH distro. What fun it was to fix that one! Go for that!

Seriously though. I'd say RH if you have some *NIX experience. You want to move up to Slackware? Hmm, the logic escapes me on that one. No offense to any Slack users, but it's not a move up, it's just different. It's a BSD based distro versus a SysV based distro. Like Solaris vs. *BSD. That's all, just different. Okay, okay! There's the rpm thing as well.

 

[SUOrangeman]

If you want the latest and greatest support, go for Mandrake 7.1.

-SUO

 

[bubba]

I just installed Mandrake 7.1 on my work machine... Had some weirdness. For instance one of the Xpm libs wasnt installed, and one of the files that startx uses was set to root only privs. I wonder if there are little things wrong with it...

Anyone else find any weirdness?

 

[Sebastian]

Mandrake is all good and well. So is Redhat. Personally I like redhat. Maybe because i am the sort of text and console sort of person. While mandrake does boost a large amount of drivers and such I like to do it myself. I never use a stock kernel and I like to have the latest stuff. Mandrake although updated alot doens't really go to the very edge. So...

Anyhow just a few cents.

 

[warcleric]

Dont waste your time with either, do yourself a big favor and learn Debian right off the bat.

 

[jsm]

If you are really new and you want to learn, go with Slackware right away and install that and then try to get it up to par with Mandrake. ie: install XFree86 4 and the latest and greatest version of Gnome with Sawmill. That will surely be a challenge for you.. you'll either sink or swim.

If that is not something you are interested in, try going with Mandrake 7.1. It is more bleeding edge, but it's ease of install and it's plethora of package options is great for the newbie.

 

[Quinto]

Just don't touch Corel Linux. It is evil, they tried to make it so easy to install that any slightly non-standard system config confuses the hell outta the Corel Linux Install. On top of that, it's too babyish. Just installed it to see what it was like.

 

[nite]

slackware baby!

 

[cyderpunk]

How about SuSE?!!
Installed flawless on my systems...
erm, any you get some funky stickers!!! ;-)

 

[Damaged]

SuSE is a great distro. Great driver support, easy install. All in all a nice distro.

However, being "weened" on RH distros YAST just got in the way of what I already knew how to do. Nice distro though.