If you are installing linux on a clean hard drive, Disk Drake may be okay.
If you are installing linux on a system with windows on it, like a lot of
people will be, and are trying to create a linux partition out of unused
space on the drive, sorry, Mandrake, but someone needs to work on this.
I have found that various versions of Disk Drake will create partition
errors, anything from minor errors that don't seem to affect the drive to
real goofball errors on some cooker versions. Whatever you do, don't create
a linux "primary" partition using Disk Drake. Disk Drake doesn't resize the
extended Dos partition that the dos fdisk originally set up. Instead, it
creates linux partitions in the extended Dos partition. This kind of
bothers me. Shouldn't the linux partition be created as totally separate
from the Dos partition? "Extended" seems to be the default choice in Disk
Drake. If you try to create a "primary" linux partition in the extended Dos
partition, you'll end up with a truly goofed-up partition table. I fixed
this with a third party program called Partition Commander but was freaked
for a short while, thinking I'd lost everything. It is safer to use
something like Partition Commander to set up the linux partitions, and then
install linux. You can change the default file system in the linux
partition to reiserfs when you install linux.
If you install linux as a secondary os on a laptop, careful, because you
might not even be able to boot from a floppy if things go wrong. There is
no bios setup in the Sony VAIO laptop I have, it seems to be a stupid
windows program! Grub got stuck and wouldn't boot anything, just displayed
a "grub" on the screen, even though I'd set the stupid windows Bios
configuration to boot CD-floppy-hard disk in that order. The only way to
fix this was to stick in the linux installation cd and reinstall or upgrade
without selecting files so you can redo grub or whatever.
I really think the Mandrake versions of linux are great -- the only ones
that were ever easy to install and use -- and I hate to have to rely on
third party software to fix things, but that's just the way it is.
Partition Commander is pretty cheap (I picked one up for about $30).
