Yep, Mandrake 6.5 Linux for Windows here. It did not support my video chipset. Wound up needing to reboot into safe mode to run linux.bat.
Suse 6.4 did not support my Winmodem or onboard sound. Otherwise it was great.

it's interesting to think back on that, turbo linux was the first successful install i had, i think it was 1998. before then i heard of it but didn't pay much attention. then for some reason i wanted to try it out. i did try red hat at the same time and ended up nailing my hard disk partition and didn't recover... oh well. what i liked about turbo is that it successfully detected my internet and logged me in. had to give up on it do to weaknesses i seen in it's graphical interface and ofcourse it was like bgi quality (as in borland graphical interface).

so a few years later, i became curious again and went looking for a turbo linux install and came across mandrake 9.0. said to hell with it and tried that. not bad, very nice improvement all around, especially in the graphics department (hello gnome, kde), then came 9.1 and i wanted in on that... 9.2 sucked so i tried 10.0, that SUCKED even more so i said to hell with it, lets go slackware 9.1 and yeah ha, i'm slackware 10.0 today.

got tired of mandrake trying to hold my hand all the time. gave vector linux a whirl and redhat 9.0 and was very impressed but really liked the closeness that slackware gave me... something about an entire distro being done by one person brought back some of the magic that only linus torvalds could provide...

in any event, linux makes for a very very nice experience....

best kept secret on the internet

- perry

I still feel like a newbie to Linux but I remember when I probably asked questions like "what distro is right for me?". It's hard when you're starting out because I really had no idea where to start. There aren't really any "classes" out there for people to learn the basics of linux. Plus I think it can be daunting for people to erase an entire OS (usually windows) and start from scratch. It takes a lot of guts and can be frustrating in the beginning if you really have no idea what is going on.

??? there probably aren't that many classes, but my community college offers an into unix/linux class.

You also don't really have to erase your entire HD. Mandrake, along with most "User-Friendly" distros come with wonderful hard-drive partitioning tools so that you can dual boot...

Also, I was thinking about offering a Linux/Operating Systems class at my High School, but first, the Administration must approve it, and I don't think enough of the kids would sign up for it.

I remember when I first used Linux back in early 2001, it was SuSe 8.2 (notice the old way to spell it?) It worked like a champ!!! I had a Compaq computer, and broadband, so a cheap NIC was all I needed to get online, After installing Linux, I gave up after a while, problems convincing the wife. About a year later I tryed again, but this time on my own computer. I installed Mandrake 9.2 along side Win XP, and I fell in love!!! Everything worked like a champ. But later on I soon fell out of love for mandrake, and went searching for another distro, tt wasn't untill last year when I found that other distro I was searching for; thats when I installed Debian Sarge, and I'll tell you what, I LOVE IT. I have also got Damn Small .4.10 on my crapy old computer, and I just installed Mandrake 10.1CE on the wifes computer, slowly truning here from the dark side.

But yes I was very excited to use Linux for the first time.

^^Hehehe my 100th post

I just switched, cause I needed something an OS that was fast + would not crash. (for some reason.. windows was REALLY slow)
I would + wanted to try osx instead of linux... but linux is free... + i dont have a mac
So after about 2 months of "struggling", i configured mandrake and now everything works perfectly

i think now, a lot more users like me r switching over simply because they r tired with windows

I'll have to check it out some more. Maybe there are some classes around that I could take. The college I go to doesn't have any though which kind of surprised me.

my first linux is a redhat 7 with X,
the only thing that shock me was the taskbar,it was really BIG during that time.
Now,i'm using redhat 9
but still using ipchains instead of iptables,i couldn't find "back" that kind of energy to reconfigure anything unless the enhancement is dramatic.
good thing about linux is that when it works,it stays.
as for which OS is better,i'm still using DOS.

Not trying to start a flame war or anything (i've used and loved Mandrake...) but I recently convereted to Arch, and it is tons faster than Mandrake was (but Arch kinda throws you into the deep end with configin things yourself and is i686 optimized). But yeah.. I switched cause a friend kept bugging me to switch.... and now, no more windows.

I half agree with that.

One of the things I've found "exciting" as a Linux newbie is precisely the ability to choose between GUI and CLI approaches, rather than being forced to do everything through the GUI like in Windows. I'd say I do 90% of file handling, configuration etc via bash - barely if ever use Nautilus - but there are times when having GUI tools available is really handy.

eg you can't beat "apt-get" on the command line for installing individual packages or doing a dist-upgrade. But Synaptic is better for searching and browsing for packages.

Another great discovery for me (without wishing to start a War of Religion on the subject of text editors!) has been Emacs. Quite apart from using it at home, I now have Emacs for Windows permanently open on my desktop at work and use it incessantly as a DOS shell, calculator, notepad, text editor etc.

What is less exciting is some of the pain in the neck stuff like getting multimedia things working. But that provides intellectual challenge and a sense of achievement that you never get using Window$.