Mandrake?

[Iron_Cross]

What is everyone's opinion on Mandrake (9.1 and 9.0 specifically)? I've heard opinions on nearly every other major distro but this one. How is mandrake from a newbie perspective? Thanks for any info :)

[Tekmaven]

Mandrake is the way to go if you are a newbie. I use it - its installed as the full time OS on one of my PCs. It has a great control center for configuring apps.

What specifically do you want to know?

[CyberJ]

An other one to consider is Red Hat 9.0, they have inproved the package managment alot and is very simple to configure. I still think that Debain still has the best package managment of all distros.

[Dani]

Debian's nice cuz they have apt-get
I posted somewhere else about how there's an apt-get that has been ported to work with .rpms instead of .debs

[Tekmaven]

I disagree with CyberJ. Although I haven't used it a lot - Gentoo has a great package manager.

I love typing Emerge <whatever> and it just downloads it, and the dependencies :-).

[Dani]

That's the same thing apt-get does :)

[Iron_Cross]

Thanks.
I am looking to get into linux more, and am wondering about a good newbie distro. Heard RedHat 7.3 or 8.0 would be a nice choice. And when I looked around Mandrake appealed to me. I'm wanting a distro that is newbie friendly, but also has some power packed in it. Since I'm on dial up ( :( ) I have to buy all my distro's and am not looking to download 50 different distros just to find a good one.
Eventually I hope be using a distro that is good for development, how's mandrake in that aspect?
Thanks. :)

[Z28James]

Gentoo's portage is way better than apt-get in my opinion. Alot more you can do with it than download binary packages :P

And to answer your question...it depends on what direction you want to go...id use mandrake but dont let it become a crutch for ya...move on to something like debian..and then after you are comfy there....install a real distro like gentoo :P

[TallCool1]

At the risk of sounding a bit like a broken record, have you given Knoppix a thought or try? Just as Mandrake is basically Red Hat with KDE as the default environment, so Knoppix is Debian with KDE, an easier install, and more leading-edge software (It's based on the testing/unstable branches -- but don't let that put you off). You can experiment to your heart's content in a CD-bootable full Linux evironment "sandbox" with a configuration file saved to an arbitrary hard drive, then install it if you like it. While the install is a little rough around the edges, because of auto-configuation it only takes about 20 minutes (the script is on the CD) and it's easy to smooth out those edges -- and polish the whole thing to a bright gleam -- with the information and interactive help available at Knoppix.net (see below); there's a whole forum devoted to HDD install, for example.

What it amounted to, for me, was the editing of a couple of script files (fstab and bootmisc.sh), copying some desktop icons, and downloading some non-free files -- nearly all of which was extensively documented. Being mostly out of work, the free part was very attractive, as well; if not for the fact that I teach Windows to seniors, I probably wouldn't bother to dual-boot much any more (I'm running about 80% Linux now, and I'm still learning). To say that I'm pleased with the install is putting it mildly. I'm much happier than I was with my SuSE Professional install of a year ago, though part of that is that Linux has really come a long way in that time, as well.

It comes with a full development environment, OpenOffice.org, The GIMP, Mozilla, and all the other stuff you would expect to see in a basic-plus install, even in its CD-bootable mode.

[Iron_Cross]

I've glanced at Knoppix, but i haven't given it a huge ammount of thought. But from what you just said, I'm deffinately going to give it a run through. It's sounding like something I should look into.
Thanks!

[vrecan]

personally I am a slackware guy I run slackware 9 on my ftp+web+mysql server and love it immensely! It was originally a redhat 7.3 server *personally I cant stand 8/9* and I tried just about every distro out there before landing on slackware. It now has an app a lot like app-get in swaret and seems to run a lot faster on my machine plus on my old p2 400 machine.

[Dani]

That's cool - yeah 7.3 is my favorite version of RedHat although I tried 8 and am currently using 9.

[Forse]

Mandrake 9....load of "%!"##%"%