Colin McKinnon wrote:
> At 01:45 09/09/01 +0100, Gordie Stirling wrote:
>
>> I have tried mandrake 8.0, and found it dead easy to setup and get
>> working,
>> even persuaded some of my MS only colleagues to change, and they had no
>> problems with install either.
>
>
> "Which distro?" is a very often asked question, and there are a LOT of
> answers. By far the most sensible one I've heard was from Lawrence
> Sweeney who said that it should be the distro that your friend uses
> (Lawrence must have read that somewhere ;).
>
> IME, Mandrake _can_ be very easy to do an initial install with; like
> certain other commercial systems, it's easy until it goes wrong and
> then its VERY difficult to fix. Also doing stuff like kernel upgrades
> can be a nuisance, and I've had lots of problems getting XFree86
> installed off the the 7.x disks we had for the installday.
I can't say i've had problems with mandrake as far as kernel or X goes,
but when you do break it, it can be a pain to fix, especially if you
are used to using the gui wizards which now seg fault because the .conf
got scrambled. Not a common occorrance however.
>
> Suse seems to be very popular with people at the Slug meets. I have to
> look after some RedHat boxes so I've stuck with that distro for
> compatibility.
>
> Meanwhile Debian, with its package support and online updating, while
> having something of a hairy-chested reputation, is getting a lot more
> user friendly.
Debian is good for systems with low specifications for people who only
need a minimum system, it is ideal (IMHO) for servers, routers etc
because it gives you a lot of control over everything from the start,
although this is just the same control as any other distro if you take
away the wizards, and automatic config utilities etc.
>
>> >you recommend I install which isn't extremely complicated but still
>> gives
>> me
>> >power to do what I want with it.
>> >
>
>
> There's the crux - what you want to do with it. You don't say what
> spec of hardware you are running on (both Suse and Mandrake can give
> problems when installing on a 32Meg box).
Mandrake (i think) goes into a text mode installation of you have
under a certain amount of ram/processor which is slightly less pretty
to the eye, and involves a little more skill navigating between menu's
although the general layout of things is similar to the UI. Only thing
with running Mandrake on a low spec machine is a lot of the cool s tuff
it comes with will be slow to use, drakconf and I assume this is
similar with YaST2 for SuSE is painful on a machine with 16mb ram.
>
> I suppose the best bet is to make sure you set up /home in its own
> partition and keep a detailed log of your configuration and account
> info, so if you decide to change at a later date it will be a lot less
> painful.
I think its fair to say that finding a distro you like just takes a bit
of time and a few reinstalls, i've been using Linux for almost 6 years
and i'm still looking for the 'best' distro, although Mandrake is pretty
close for my home user requirements.
HTH
David
>
> HTH
>
> Colin
>
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