Mandrake vs. RedHat

[zscoundrel]

You are probably correct, it was a couple of years ago.  I don't want to 
get a distro flame war going.  I have heard some good things about 
Mandrake.  I just figured that since they were mostly RH compatible, I 
would stick to Red Hat.  (I like the Red Fedora Logo too!)    Also, I 
was way too 'newby' then to attempt a recompile at that point - and no 
'Elmer' handy to help me throught the tough spots.  Besides, it would 
have taken hours on that silly 486dx66 with 40mb RAM and my wife was not 
about to let me get "that" software near her 'doze machine!  (grin)

I just felt so used that I decided they didn't really need my business 
and went back to Red Hat.  I did attempt to load a SuSe distro one time 
that came free with something or other, but it was an older version of 
the kernal and just different enough to give me that 'fish-out-of-water' 
feeling occasionally so I loaded RH over it again the next time a kernal 
upgrade was released. 

Perhaps I can talk my boss into a severance package so I can take a few 
weeks to play with several distros and get good enough to make a career 
change.  The place I work keeps talking about putting Linux on the 
monster IBM main-frame, but each time they do, I don't find out about it 
until they de-active the region for some other project.  Think the 
systems guys are afraid to be one-upped if we decide to move some 
production apps to Linux.

Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> 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.)
> 
> 
> 

-- 
At 20, I was liberal, because I had nothing to lose and so much to gain.
by 40, I was conservative, because I had so much to lose and so little to gain.
Isn't it amazing what 20 years of hard work and experience will do for ones' point of view?