I firmlly believe that no one should comment on distributions they
haven't tried and know little about. I've alternated between Mandrake
and redhat every year for the last several years. I use Mandrake
because its better, and Redhat every time Warren claims its better
because of some kernel improvement or fedora, etc. I firmly believe
average people would like Mandrake a lot better. But then again, it
depends a ton on what you're using it for. If you want a very unixy
system reminiscent of 1965, there are better solutions (ie. solaris,
openBSD (and yes, I've used both of these)), But if you want a home
user system with movie programs, tv programs, and office programs that
actually work together, you might want to look at Mandrake. It had
urpmi way before redhat had apt-rpm. The installer has always been
better. It decides what changes you make to packages will effect
dependencies for other packages in realtime. It detects your video card
properly and will use vesafb if its unsupported. Redhat<8 will hardlock
in the installer on certain geForce cards (mobile and nforce).
Mandrake is nearly 100% compatible with redhat rpms. In the worst case,
you may need to find a .src.rpm and rebuild it. Because of this, it has
plenty of programs available. Probably not as many as debian, but if
you can think of something its missing, let me know.
Now if you're upset about the webadmin system of administration, that's
one of many optional packages to do system administration. I'm doubtful
that many people use it. Linuxconf is available, along with the gnome
and kde control panels. All of these get their settings from files in
/etc and dont' really cache these settings, so you can seemlessly use
both these and edit /etc files. I don't know what someone might want
from an administration tool, but the mandrake control center is top
notch. It has gui menus for so much that redhat does not. The printer
control panel detects your printer, then automatically can install rpms
for relevant things like cups or lpr. Then it updates programs like
mozilla to use that new printer. I was amazed that I still haven't
found a graphical default runlevel editor for redhat (although I do know
how to do it manually).
Once you get used to single boot diskette based network installs for
redhat, mandrake, and debian, its hard to go back to downloading
gigabytes of CDs unless you already own the CDs or are installing many
machines.
-Eric Hattemer
Tom_Gordon/RISE/[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Mandrake is just a shittier version of Red Hat. I've not used the
drake-fly distro because of it's insistence that web-based GUI are
acceptable means for system administration. Did you know Mandrake was
once just a modified version of Red Hat Linux?
