I find x-cdroast good for burning CD's. I never get any coasters with that.

Mandy 8.1 is superb, I especially like the in built support for the Alcatel Speedtouch USB ADSL modem. I was on 7.2 and there are a lot of improvements on that. Overall it is very easy to use

Iain

I'm thinking about giving it a shot. Everyone (espcially the newbies) seems to love it.

XCDRoast is fairly easy to use. If you've done the automagic install, your burner should be set up, ready for use. A word of warning though, if you're burning files, rather than an ISO image, the layout can be a little confusing:

I had a load of downloaded files (programs, updates, etc) on "/mnt/win_e/To be burned to CD/Linux Stuff" (I include the quotes, because otherwise it looks weird with the backslashes) that I wanted to burn, so I did. Now, the CD's filesystem is exactly the same, so when you access, say the Quake files, they're under "/mnt/cdrom/mnt/win_e/To be burned to CD/Linux Stuff/games/Quake". It's a little annoying, but it doesn't really matter. I suppose the layout is only confusing for people who are only used to the Drag'n'Dropness of Nero or EZCD.

I'm not in Linux at the moment but I think (and I may be wrong) that there is an option to stop this happening in there somewhere. Will have a look next time I am in.

Iain

I just got Mandrake 8.1 installed and configured last night. It's pretty cool. I personally liked RedHat better but Mandrake seemed to make an easier install. I didn't feel like I did much configuring at all. Which is good for the newbie in me.

hehe, you bought Mandrake LINUX. I downloaded it for free. Well I was using cable modem and Netants for the download manager. Took me about 3 to 4 hours to download three ISO.

I downloaded mine at my University (in England). I think we have t T3 connection, but it took me 45mins for each CD. Then a further hour to zip each of them up to span 3 250Mb zip disks. I was actually thinking of buying a distro soon (come on, they're not expensive) but I'm still not sure. What's on the other CDs?

Good to see some who have had good luck with LM 8.1. I have been trying to get it running on a pent200 generic and have not been successfull as of yet. The installer does no always install with the parameters I set(such as monitor resolution) it assigns to high and my card runs out of memory and I never have gotten the mouse to work post install. It is a common serial mouse on com1 and works through install and even tests correctly during install but as soon as I boot up it is dead!
Confused, disturbed, but bulldog stubborn!

Been using mandrake since ver 7.0, have had 7.1, 7.2, 8.0 and I am now using 8.1
Have successfully installed it on the following machines, IBM pl300(pentium 200), pentium 4 1700mhz (has geforce2 mx 400) runs quake3, unreal tournament, rtcw. And the machine I am currently using Athlon 1200.
8.1 has finally allowed me to get rid of windows, had xp. But infinite loop problems with gf card meant games like those mentioned above kept crashing the machine.
I still consider myself to be a newbie when it comes to linux, and that is why I have stuck with mandrake as it seems to be the best for those new to linux. My first linux experience was with suse 6.2(took me 2 weeks to evrything working).
any way thats my take on mandrake

I put RH 6.0 on that Pent. 200 that would not run Mandy 8.1 and it runs fine. Just my antique is too old for 8.1. I plan to peice together a PII soon and maybe it will run on that. I am not brave enoungh to try it on this Duron 750. Has anyone tried it on a K7SEM board with AMD processor? (the K7SEM is an ECS integrated board) Which board is under your Athlon Chip mr. Maddog

My motherboard is an ASUS a7v133 with ata100/raid option, I also run scsi drives in my machine as well.
Hardrake shows a lot of unknown stuff, associated with the motherboard chipset, but everything works fine.
One day might have a go at recompiling the kernel (have tried before and failed miserably)
8.1 works well with most of the asus boards and epox boards, and even mobo's that have intergrated sound/vid

Mandrake 8.1 seems to be the way to go for a very non-techie, very newbie...
But has anybody expanded on 8.1 for more commercial purposes? e.g. running databases for products, order entry, customers etc. Are we talking mySQL? What front end? And how much have I got to learn to get the thing operational?
Questions, questions...

I am running Red Hat 7.2. Should I be running Mandrake 8.1? What's the difference between the two? Does Mandrake have RPM's?

I believe Mandy has something that allows you to use rpms. Im almost certain. Sorry cant be more specific.

Mandrake comes by default to be able to install using rpm.