Fellow Linux users, been reading the comments on RH and Mandrake. We are running Xandros, Lindows 3.0 and RH 9 at the moment. We are thinking about trying Mandrake9.1. Can any of you recommend Mandy, and if so, how would you rate it next to RH? Would you rate it nicer or easier to use? Would you say if we are using RH we wouldnt need to try Mandy? Some feedback would be appreciated.

destry

well, i'm sure you'll get different feedbacks since alot likes Mandrake than Red Hat and vice versa.... i personally like Red Hat... my suggestion is for you to try Mandrake and decide for yourself....

I don't think theres much difference between Red Hat and Mandrake, I think Mandrake is easier to use though...

Thanks for the reply jt. If Mandrake is easier to use we may give it a try. We like to explore and learn Linux, however we need a Linux distro that is easy enough for us to use daily for migration from M$.

Right now for daily use we have Lindows 3.0 soon to be 4.0. It has really helped us to migrate and to learn, from a GUI perspective, the Linux system.
Lindows is very easy to use and configures almost all hardware including most graphics and sound cards and almost all conexant modems!

Our next favorite distro is Xandros. It has a nice GUI and a very stable kernal. But the new software will not run on it due to its older stable kernal version. When 2.0 comes out we are going to see if it has progressed enough for dailey use for us newbies.

destry

no prob...

good luck....

I recently upgraded a system from RH7.3 to RH9.0 thinking that it would boost performance.

I was sadly mistaken. Not only does webmin run like a dog, SSH access it sloppingly slow when logging in.

System is a Celeron 500 with 256 ram ... It should run like clockwork. Admittingly 7.3 ran fairly smoothly, but after this experience I think I will have a crack at Slackware - its gotta be better than what Ive got now which is nothing short of a pile of S***

cheers.. Nex

I think that RedHat 9 already puts your IP address in the host file so Webmin should work itself out. I have noticed the dog slow SSH login though. It was the same when I tried FreeBSD 5.1, but RH 8.0 worked very nicely. I'm thinking the SSH login prob is a setup problem with SSH not RedHat.

Well I proceeded to grab the latest slackware distro and install it.

Im quite happy with the oh say 300% increase in performance.

Im not looking back.

cheers
Nex

As a follow-up the SSH issue is caused by inproperly setup DNS. Name look-ups should only look at the host file unless you have real DNS working. Take DNS out of the look-up order all together. Otherwise it waits for DNS response even when it's turned off.

It's ashame that the RedHats "ease-of-use" comes from defaulting to having way too many services running and a large generic kernel. Once you learn what is causing the issues, I still prefer RedHat because printer setup is now an after-thought and apt-get is running a perfect 100% in security updates. So perfect in fact that I feel comfortable enough to run it via a cron job. Now how simple is that?

Looking a the original post title, does anyone still run Mandrake or has it fallen off the face fo the earth yet? I never hear anything about it anymore.

If your happy with RH thats fine.

I was using it in a server situation and I'm more than happy i tried a different distro. Its easier to turn services on than turn them off.

fyi : dns was not been handled by RH but by a win2k server - the network parameters were configured correctly, in fact identical to the slackware distro i later installed.

Why would SSH behave so differently in exactly the same situations?

Also webmin access is blazingly fast with Slack compared to waiting 4 minutes for a page to load under RH

Like you, I too am glad you found a distribution that you like. I'm not trying to stir the pot, but each of these problems you mention were fixed when I adjusted my DNS settings. Your situation may be different, but this is just my experience.

Slackware definitely has it's place and I do enjoy using it. I just like assisting those people who need help so they don't think that another "mainstream" distro is any different than anything else. Other than some small philisophical differences, they are more or less equal using pretty much the same code. With either a little tweaking, or a major rework, I just like letting people know that any distro, even Redhat, can do anything you want. My preference is to do a little more tweaking at the start of a roll-out than make daily administration as easy as possible. You happened to mention Webmin. I use it at work and at home also. I can without a doubt say that it is MUCH easier to admin a Redhat based server with Webmin than anything else. That too scores some bonus point with me. Again, this is just my experience and not by any means the "bible according to ghight".

i just wanna say that i don't think that RH9 is not for newbies i installed it just 4 days ago never used it before and i was able to make everything work even phpmyadmin on it you guys are just trying to look cool saying is not for newbies.
plus about the speed yes is slow but i have a p3 733Mhz and 128MB of ram with an hard drive that is a piece of c*** and it still goes faster that windows and it doesn't take 1 1/2 min to boot up i can't say wich one is best cause honestly i didn't try the other ones but i'm pretty happy with red hat as in for stability i had a few problems that i had to reboot the sys, but can tell you one thing belive it or not i also tried the evalutation work of win2003 server and for 2 months and never crashed one still linux is better do,

haven't read this whole thread, but for me RH9 was definitely faster than MDK 9 or 9.1. i guess a lot has to do with the hardware and configuration.