For anyone interested:
Over this past weekend, I was in a scary mood, and decided to check out
Redhat 7.2 Enigma. Mostly curiosity. I ran Redhat for many years before
switching to MDK, and i was curious about how their lattest release was
looking.
For what it's worth, my impressions were:
The installation was extremely smooth, and trouble free.
However, the installation did not offer a way to configure some key
services (like NIS (which I do use), or printing, as two very visible
examples). In short, the installtion had the feeling of being incomplete
compared to Mandrake.
Once it was up & running another shortcoming appeared:
MDK offers the option of using XFree86 v3.xxx + 3D acceleration for
cards not supported by v4 (mine is such a card: ATI 3D Rage (Mach 64)
It's a 3D card, but the acceleration is not supported by v4). So you
were stuck with unaccelerated 3D.
I was able to configure NIS by hand, so that wasn't a problem.
Printing became another issue. There seemd to be no support for my
printer (Epson photo 785EPX USB).
Other than the above issues, I found the overall system performance of
Enigma to be very good, and although I didn't collect statistics to
support this, it "felt" to me to perform generally better than MDK 8.1
(just an opinion).
In the end though, I re-loaded MDK 8.1, I couldn't live with:
No 3D acceleration (I didn't want to mess with patching in XFree86 3.x)
No support for my photo printer.
Also, Redhat just seemed to be short some pieces. Nothing I made an
inventory of, it just seemed lacking for desktop use, and probably more
adept to server usage. I was in fact impressed enough with the progress
that Redhat has made that I may re-load my server over to Redhat again,
and stay with Mandrake for my desktop machines.
Again, these are just impressions. I just thought I'd pass them along.
I've since reloaded Mandrake on my desktop, and will stick with it for
now. ;)
--
Ric Tibbetts
Linux registration number: 55684
If you want to help advertise Linux - point your friends to
http://counter.li.org/
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
