Interesting to learn a bit of history!

I may just decide to install Mandriva 2006 (or something like that - got a dvd with a mag a couple of weeks ago) to have another look. Actually Mandrake 7 was the first linux distro I tried and I remember liking it a lot. The trouble is I'm just getting comfortable with Fedora and the excellent infrmation available to get everything to work and the last time I tried Mandrake I was a bit put off by the fact that most of what I was looking for could only be had for a price... maybe it has changed.

On the other hand, since you mentioned kde-redhat, I suppose these are the same guys that set up the repos of the same name... Maybe I'm better off trying to use their repos - there must be a way to install their packages without getting mixed up with the base packages. That way I can keep using my syste in the meantime. And it's gonna take some time on a 56k dial in connection

Does anyone know what FC5 will bring. Maybe I should wait for that and .... whatever. Sometimes I just wish I had half a dozen boxes to mess around with and install stuff, but I really need to keep my system accessible and a 56k connection doesn't allow for much downloading so I'm a bit shy of trying new and potentially incomplete distros.

Mandriva has always been free just like Fedora. I have seen a lot of people with the misconception that you should pay something to use Mandriva. Mandriva releases commercial and club only versions of their distro as well as a free version that ontains only opensource software. Unlike Fedora you can play mp3 out of the box. Adding other multimedia capabilities can be done through third party repos just like the yum repos available for Fedora. If you are using dialup, the process can be really slow.

The kde-redhat guys are the ones who maintain a repo for FC and RHEL.

When you tried to add a new panel what did you do?

Right-Click Panel -> add to panel -> panel -> panel

For me that adds a blank proper panel to the bottom of my screen, then I can remove the stuff I don't want from the top Panel, and add them to the bottome one.

Maybe there's a version difference between us (I use KDE 3.4.2).

here's a screenie:
Desky

Thanks for the reply. I'm in the (slow and lengthy : 56k) process of updating kde with the kde-redhat repo. Will post as soon as it's all set up.

OK, I finished updating KDE through the kde-redhat repo and, voilá, I managed to set up the desktop bars et al. exactly the way I wanted to.

So far I have been really happy with fedora - because it simply worked and because every question I had was easily answered, mostly by one or two great and simpy websites (fedorafaq and stanton-finley). But I'm beginning to see the point of switching to another distro if I ever hope to get anything like a satisfactory result from KDE. Before logging into KDE I used Alacarte to disable a huge number of 'K-apps' that cluttered my gnome menu. Imagine my surprise when I found those same apps missing from my KDE pannel!

I also installed a packege called something like redhat artwork from the kde-redhat repo, but I suppose it must have included some desktop images and or screensavers, because I still have the same and rather uninteresting selection of themes available.

Not sure where to go from here. I guess another distro would be the most logical sollution (either that or simply using gnome), but I am realkly devided between mandriva and Debian. The advantage I see for using Debian is that there are an infinity of specialised distros (sound, gaming, business) that (supposedly) all use the debian repos to provide any package they don't include, although debians Gnome and KDE versions may be a bit old...

P.S. The update also included a number of otrher packages and after a reboot I have lost internet access for browser, email and yum as explained in this thread

I was never a fan of RPM based distros, but it's really a matter of personal choice. I like Slack, and slack-like derrivitives. Simplicity is the key for me, I don't like a lot of GUI.

Mandriva has a lot of great configuration tools, whereas Debian is a little more do it yourself (also has the HUGE apt repositiories). Mandriva has never been a big plus for me (despite me using it for about 8 months when I started using Linux), but some Debian based distros aren't the best for me either.

You really need to analyize what you want out of your linux distro, and find the distro that does that.

I am mainly a Mandriva user, but I think Suse 10 is a lot more polished than Mandriva 2006 so I would urge you to try it. As for packages, Mandriva has a sizeable amount of packages in its official and third party repos. They have a repo called contrib which has thousands of packages from third party contributors. There are also third party repos such as PLF, MandrivaClubNL, MDE RPMS etc so you have access to a similar selection of packages as that of Debian and derivatives. Debian is okay, but I like bleeding edge packages so its no good for me. I know some people will say you can use testing or unstable, but most packages in testing are still older than what bleeding edge distros like Suse and Fedora ship with. Unstable can be too unstable when there is heavy development.