I recommend that those who find Madrake difficult or confusing to
install try Caldera OpenLinux. I know that different people have
different experiences, but I found it simple and smooth.
Of course, it doesn't support all the choices Mandrake gives you and
it's not optimized, and if it doesn't work on your computer you'll have
a hard time working around it. But if it works at all it's very
smooth. Sort of like Windows, in other words, but it's still Linux and
you can install (some) packages for the stuff it doesn't ship with.
On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, you wrote:
| On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
| > I just want to reemphasize that I wasn't intending to flame anyone. But my
| > point remains. When linux was a totally ad-hoc thing, there was an excuse
| > for this kind of thing. Now, with companies like mandrake building and
| > shipping distros, I sometimes wonder if there is even a pretense at quality
| > control. I don't think mandrake is any worse than redhat, caldera or
| > whoever, and I don't expect bottomless, free maintenance, but I do expect
| > something close to stable. I haven't tried 7.02, but from what I heard,
| > the initial 7.0 was absolutely terrible, in terms of quality. I know there
| > are limited man-hours to do a new release, but if I had a choice, I'd opt
| > for some larger chunk to be spent on QA as opposed to neat new features. I
| > haven't played with other distros before, so I have no idea how they stack
| > up against mandrake on this issue.
|
|
| I am inclined to agree to a point. I had problems with suse (nothing would
| compile without some obscure version of a file I had never heard of e.g.
| /usr/include/ stuff or libc.so.splash), so I switched to Mandrake - largely on
| the advertised benefits. So far it has been a total disaster, although I know a
| little, and the disaster is not of my doing either. A cd was faulty, I am
| getting screwed up root partitions (e2fsck throws me out with the -p option and
| then throws up 50 errors) the install goes crazy - losing the database, and so
| forth. Mandrake doesn't seem to cut the mustard unless nothing fazes you, in
| which case you don't need a distribution anyhow. I have picked packages at
| least six tiomes without getting it right. When I went to RTFM, the FM is only
| 'how to shine', not 'how to fix'.
|
| Suse by comparison was as simple as windoze '95 to install.
|
|
| --
| Regards,
|
| Declan Moriarty.
--
"Brian, the man from babbleon-on" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brian T. Schellenberger http://www.babbleon.org
Support http://www.eff.org. Boycott amazon.com.
Support http://www.programming-freedom.org. Support decss defendents.
