Thinking or switching to Mandrake...

[cycleman77]

I currently have a dual boot machine with Windows XP and RH 9. I have been teaching myself RH for a couple years, but really haven't had enough time to go indepth with it. All I really know is the basics.

I was thinking of getting rid of RH and installing Mandrake. I read that Mandrake is easier to use and is more compatible with Windows software.
Is this true? Should I go for Mandrake? Which version should I get?

On a serpate note, how long do you think it will be untill people can drop Windows completely? Or is Windows too deeply engraved in our society for that to ever happen?

-Thanks

 

[NathanBWF]

I ran Mandrake (9.1 or 9.2, can't remember which) for a little while on a spare system I had lying around. I really liked it...and it was very simple to setup and use especially for a Linux noob such as myself. I also ran Redhat for about the same period of time and really liked it aswell. I couldn't really tell you which one was better, but if you are thinking of switching to Mandrake I definately wouldn't try to talk you out of it.

As far as getting rid of Windows, I know for myself that isn't an option because there are too many things that I run constantly that don't run on Linux (games mostly ) ...but if I still had a spare machine I'd throw Redhat or Mandrake on there in a second.

 

[OffTopic1]

MandrakeUsers.org

FedoraForum.org

LinuxQuestions.org

RH & Mandrake are very similar to each others, and both have limited Windows support through Wine, and other commercial software. What ever Windows can do, Linux can do it too; however many games isn't built or port to Linux, but that too is changing.

 

[Cheetah8799]

Redhat is not going to support version 9 much longer. I suggest either Mandrake or SUSE if you want a good stable distro. Avoid Fedora unless you want to be a stuck using Redhat's beta stuff...

 

[Nothinman]

Avoid Fedora unless you want to be a stuck using Redhat's beta stuff...

You're going to avoid Fedora because you think it's a beta but run Mandrake? That's laughable. Fedora gets more QA done with the current limited support from RedHat than Mandrake has ever had done.

 

[Childs]

Check out SuSe while you're at it. I've installed Fedora Core 1/2, Mandrake 10 CE, Debian 3, KnoppMyth, and SuSE 9 in the last week looking for a good distro for a htpc, and SuSE looks to be the most promising. Of the distros listed, Debian has the worst installer, so n00bs stay away.

 

[Nothinman]

Debian's installer is awesome, it's simple and works well. It doesn't do any hardware detection (although the new d-i beta which will be released with sarge does) but that was never a major concern.

 

[Childs]

Its terrible if an Nforce based board, and it puts you in a catch 22 because you need go get the nforce drivers, but no networking means you need another PC. USB mice and keyboards need manual module loading. Out of the major Linux distros Debian has the worst installer. IMO of course.

 

[Olias]

If you really want to learn Linux then print out the Gentoo Linux/x86 Handbook and you will be in full control.

BTW, I'm using the gentoo-dev-sources (kernel-2.6.3) on an nForce2 board and I compiled in support for sound and NIC w/o any problems.

Gentoo... it's all about choice.

 

[Nothinman]

Gentoo...it's all about waiting.

 

[amdskip]

Fedora rocks so far. I'm trying to force myself into using it more and more.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: amdskip
Fedora rocks so far. I'm trying to force myself into using it more and more.

Fedora is basicly RH 10.

Unless you have a bunch of custom files installed or a bunch of 3rd party rpms installed upgrading to fedora shouldn't be a issue.

Go here and check out how to install Apt-get for your OS.

Once you installed it and did a update and upgrade go ahead and change the source files over from redhat 9.0 to fedora core 1 repositories. Then do a update, and then a dist-upgrade.

That will upgrade your OS to fedora core1.

Backup your stuff first though. If it messes up or has conflicts then it can render your system basicly unusable. Also becarefull upgrading your kernel, you don't want to have it eliminate the entry for Windows in you grub/lilo conifguration.

If it doesn't work then worst case senerio you would just have to reinstall, but you were planning to do that anyways.

The package manager is one thing that I didn't like about mandrake. Urpmi seems good enough, but the packages sucked. Fedora mirrors don't have a whole lot of packages, but they do have all the core ones and you can risk mixing a couple other repositories into it to get other programs you may want. Aslo a program called "synaptic" can give you a graphical interface for it.

Once you get fedora all going (weither it was a upgrade or fresh install) you can use the package manager to do the dirty work of installing any new program you want. Also as long as you upgrade once every month or so, then you get the latest and greatest security fixes, then upgrading to newer versions of Fedora should be a snap as they come out.

Of course if you want the best package management with 10's of thousands of programs aviable you just have to go debian.

 

[Olias]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Gentoo...it's all about waiting.

No. It's all about reading. If you spent 15 minutes reading, you would see that there are pre-compiled binares just like most popular distros.

<snipped>
The Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP), is a snapshot of prebuilt packages users can install during the installation of Gentoo to speed up the installation process. The GRP consists out of all packages required to have a fully functional Gentoo installation. They are not only sufficient to have a base installation up to speed in no time, but all lengthier builds (such as KDE, XFree, GNOME, OpenOffice, Mozilla, ...) are available as GRP packages too.

At this moment they provide GRP packages for the following architectures:

* The x86 architecture (x86, i686, pentium3, pentium4, athlon-xp) and the special purpose Gentoo Hardened profile
* The amd64 architecture (amd64)
* The sparc architecture (sparc64)
* The ppc architecture (ppc, G3, G4)
<end>

Then if you want the most up-to-date Gentoo system you can type emerge -uD world and go to bed. Admittedly, this will take 4-8 hours on a fast system but when you wake-up you will be current.

 

[Nothinman]

No. It's all about reading. If you spent 15 minutes reading, you would see that there are pre-compiled binares just like most popular distros.

I've seen that, but you still end up compiling most things after the initial installation anyway which is pointless and annoying.

 

[drag]

Gentoo is good about incorporating new features and such, but is annonying in a lot of ways.

Take devfs for instance. It's annoying, I don't like it, it's flawed, but gentoo tries to shove it down my throat. Portage is annoying, when a build fails it makes it virtually impossible to install any other programs, sometimes you end up compiling a bunch of stuff over and over again to get the right features to enable you to get anything done.


I like Gentoo, but it's not like the best thing for most people. And the speed advantages are mostly bogus anyways. It's all about new features and customization. Which is easier in gentoo because of portage and the attitude of the developers, but is completely possible in any other distro.

Quality control sucks, and that is a big pain. But it's just the price you pay for bleeding edge.

Compiling stuff isn't a big deal if you have a 2.0ghz proccessor, but if you have a older machine it can get realy tiresome realy quick.

 

[Olias]

What about a installer like Debian

 

[n0cmonkey]

I'm going to install Gentoo on my sparcserver 20! It's got 2 processors!

 

[drag]

For the hell of it I installed Gentoo on a old laptop once. 200mhz MMX.

Compiled on the weekend.

Ran out of disk space on the 3rd day, those XFree86 patches are a b!tch.

Scrapped it, installed debian.

Took 45 minutes.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: drag
For the hell of it I installed Gentoo on a old laptop once. 200mhz MMX.

Compiled on the weekend.

Ran out of disk space on the 3rd day, those XFree86 patches are a b!tch.

Scrapped it, installed debian.

Took 45 minutes.

NFS

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: drag
For the hell of it I installed Gentoo on a old laptop once. 200mhz MMX.

Compiled on the weekend.

Ran out of disk space on the 3rd day, those XFree86 patches are a b!tch.

Scrapped it, installed debian.

Took 45 minutes.

NFS

Ya I started to do that, but then I realised that it was to much work for no benifit.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: drag

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: drag
For the hell of it I installed Gentoo on a old laptop once. 200mhz MMX.

Compiled on the weekend.

Ran out of disk space on the 3rd day, those XFree86 patches are a b!tch.

Scrapped it, installed debian.

Took 45 minutes.

NFS

Ya I started to do that, but then I realised that it was to much work for no benifit.

The only work really involved is trying to figure out why mountd spits out senseless errors