I bought a CDRW last October and I couldn't get it to work under either
Win98 or Win2K. I downloaded the driver from the manufacturer. But it
still doesn't work.
"Ironically," I have no problems with either Mandrake 8.2 or Red Hat
7.3. And that was one of the main reasons that I decided to finally
move everything to Linux.
I don't know why we have to stick to the "old" distributions like
Caldera 2.3 or Mandrake 8.0. I deeply believe that, since we do not do
the coding, one way of paying our dues to the open source community is
to test their software.
Thanks to Warren's efforts in maintaining our local mirror, I was able
to d/l and install Mandrake 9.0 beta2 late last night in less than one
hour. And I saw very noticeable improvements in performance (especially
in web browsing). There are of course some kinks in MDK 9.0 beta 2,
mostly in system configuration, which Mandrake typically leaves it alone
until everything else (i.e., application programs) is in good shape.
Of course it is too much to ask everyone to try a beta. But, from my
own experience, most Linux distros have improved drastically with each
upgrade version.
