Hi everyone, I've been sucked into the world of Linux as of a week ago and have a question:

I currently have RedHat 9 installed on my system and have an interest into reformatting my Linux partitions so that I can install Linux Mandrake 9.2.

What is the cleanest way to format my existing partitions and install Mandrake?

Install Mandrake and format your existing partitions.

-- Sorry. Bad day. Seriously - just start the Mandrake install process. It'll wipe the partitions and reformat for you, if that's what you want it to do. Nothing special needs to be done.

Okay....Came up with another question:

The latest version of Mandrake according to linuxiso.org is Mandrake 9.2 RC2.....What does this RC2 stand for? is it a beta release? Should I stay away from this one and opt for version 9.1 instead?

9.2 has been releaced as a final. So it's no longer RC2. If you can find the ISO's for it, d/l all 3, burn them and install. You'll like it more then RH being new to the game. It's a lot easier to get used to.

Does anyone know where I can find the ISO's for Mandrake 9.2...Linuxiso.org only has the 9.2 RC2's

Yeah, I have looked here but I don't see any 9.2 ISO images in any of the mirrors.

Beware! - Check to see if the LG issue has been solved - Mandrake 9.2 has been know to fry LG Drives (CDRW) due to some LG drives not living up to ATAPI standards...

No problem here, don't own an LG drive.

I started with Mandrake 9.0 , then went to 9.1 and about 2 weeks ago I tried 9.2 for about a week, and went back to 9.1. They changed a few things in 9.2 that I didn't like.

Can you tell me where you got the 9.2 ISO's? And were they big enough to fit on 3 CD ROMS (I've heard some ISO's are bigger than 700mb therefore I'm assuming can't fit into a 700MB CD).

It looks like you have to join their club to download ISOs (not free), but what you could do is this (assuming you have a decent internet connection: go to any of the mirrors, and navigate to the images folder, download the network.img. (take note of the ftp site, and the base directory of the mandrake distro.)
Then go to the utils folder, and download the rawwrite, use rawwrite to write the network image to a floppy, and boot up with the floppy.

Then you enter the info as needed for the ip and such, and then you're set to install over the network. (Be prepared to leave it on overnight)

.A friend of mine ordered them from the internet,and yes they are on 3 CD's,he also got a fourth cd that has some extra RPM's on it ,like wine and a few others, what they refer to as a bounus cd.I think he gave $15 for them.

I wonder if they put those kernel sources on the 4th CD. Enough people complained about that is for sure. Can't even install the NVIDIA drivers, not sure about ATI.

I put 9.2 on for about a week. I then re-installed 9.1. I doubt I will go back.

Where did you get those CDs again? I may want to see what is on there.

Thanks

Later

I'll see if I can find out where he got the cd's from and I'll check for the kernel source. I did the same thing, tried 9.2 for a week and went back to 9.1 .