Perhaps it was the weather but I decided to re-configure our new server
with the newest Mandrake release.

For starters, Roxio has nothing to fear from current Linux applications.
Of course, my being a nitwit kind of helps things along. I burned all
three CDs and tried to boot before I realized that all I had done was to
copy the ISO files from HD to CD. It made perfect copies though :-)

So I re-burned the three CDs and was ready to rock and roll. The
distribution looked nice and the initial screens looked kind of nifty.
Things degraded rapidly from there.

For starters, I had a considerable amount of data backed up to a Reiser
partition. Apparently the 2-4-22 kernel wasn't compiled with even Reiser
module support. OK.

The first time around, I received some very cryptic error messages
similar to Yiddish, which is 14th century German written with the Hebrew
alphabet. Mandrake is comprised of English words written in German
syntax and grammar. I'm not Xenophobic; I just didn't understand where
they were telling me I f*cked up.

OK, round 2. Whatever I did got the system up and running. OK, now to
download a fresh 2.4.22 kernel and recompile with Reiser support so that
I can get to all my data. OK. I did a wget and I'm off and running. It
went fine until I got to "make_install." Then I got another
incomprehensible message in Mandrakese. Needless to say, the steps for
installing kernels (reliably time after time) to a Redhat distribution
don't quite work with MDK. Go figure. On-line help? Not really. At least
none that really helps.

The bottom line is that I have a new appreciation for the fact that
Redhat may be slow to offer the latest versions of software and kernels
BUT RH works. I learned my lesson the VERY hard way.

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