On Sun, 2001-10-07 at 10:40, zscoundrel wrote:

> I started with Red Hat and then tried Mandrake...

You must've had one of the first commercial releases or something.  I've
only ever heard about Mandrake being promoted as a Pentium-optimized
distribution (originally of RedHat).  It would be possible to recompile
the kernel for a 486, but kindof beside the point and you'd need a
working machine to do it with, chicken-and-egg sort of thing.

Distributions have been working on auto-installers for a couple of years
now, they've gone from "sometimes this works for some people" to "this
usually ends up with a usable workstation", which is Mandrake's current
state.

There are still oddball hardware combinations that won't work,
particularly older video stuff, but I've heard that most of the post 7
version distros will usually end up running X with a fairly default
install.

I would recommend anyone trying a new distribution start with either a
downloaded .iso or a Cheapbytes or similar discount disk, and certainly
not try to convert a production machine to the new distro.  Either
install it to a new partition in multi-boot mode or find a spare
machine.

(I started with a v.1 release of RedHat, and it was a real compost heap,
believe me.  No docs, nothing worked.)