thinking of installing Mandrake Linux

[Schadenfroh]

1. i have heard that the latest version of mandrake sucks, is it true?
2. Which distro crunches SETI work units the fastest?
3. How do i install a SATA drive with mandrake, just like windows? will i need a diskette or will it have the drivers?

 

[Nothinman]

1. Depends on your opinion.
2. Any difference will be in the single digit percentages, mostly determined by what you have installed and running and not what distro you chose.
3. Depends on the controller, chances are it'll work fine like any other IDE drive but the only way to find out for sure is to download and try it.

 

[Schadenfroh]

btw, i rember when i used mandrake 8, it could resize and read my NTFS partitions, can 10 still do that? and i use a SI3112a, one of the most popular SATA controllers there is so, i guess it has it. mandrake a fast distro? i need one that can resize NTFS partitions.

 

[Nothinman]

Probably, I can't personally say because I avoid NTFS whenever posible and I'm not a Mandrake user either.

 

[Flatline]

Mandrake 10 Official (not Community) is actually pretty nice. Most SATA controllers work out of the box; my board here is an Asus P4P800 and everything works flawlessly.
Resizing NTFS partitions does still work, but of course I recommend backing up any data before doing it just in case.
I try out lots of distros, but I tend to keep going back to Debian and Slackware (my slack install on this box has been the only constant in my bootloader for a while now). As far as the "noob" distros, I prefer Mandrake 10 Official to the others (SUSE, Fedora, etc.) but I couldn't give a compelling reason other than the general "feel" of the distro. For noobs, the Mandrake Control Center is a godsend and urpmi takes care of dependencies automagically; of course, the install process is just as easy as SUSE or Fedora as well. 10 Official feels faster than SUSE or Fedora to me, but that is a non-quantitative and subjective opinion. It's not quite as snappy as my Slackware install, but it's hard to beat a well-tuned Slack box on speed.