Hi.
I was thinking of installing FC2 on my system. Before I had Mandrake 9.2 then 10.0. Had some problems with 10.0, freezing when I open certain applications. I was wondering how different is FC2 from Mandrake? I'm not a complete newb to linux, but I'm not an expert either.
P.S. It will be a dual boot with XP Pro.
Thx.

i havent heard anything about test 3, but test 2 was kinda buggy. fedora and mandrake are essentially the same. fedora is a little better and is more for enthusiasts and mandrake is for noobs. basicly, if youve used mandrake for a week, then you can use fedora.

however, i would still suggest you use somehting even better than both distros, debian. its only because of the apt package manager, makes installing and updating programs a lot easier.

suse is another good option for noobs. it looks good, thats at least one plus it has, among others.

overall, id recommend suse and fedora over mdk, and if you want to dig a little deeper, id recommend, in this order, debian, slackware, gentoo.

if you want to install debian but want an easy to install distro try mepis. its based opn debian and it has all the plusses and few of the minuses. i switched from fedora core 1 to mandrake to suse and hten to mepis. its my favourite by far.

My first linux distro was red-hat 8, then i moved to redhat 9, i also tried mandrake 9.2 and 10, which by the way i didn't like mandrake 10 i think it looks just like windows. Nowadays i'm running slackware 10, i first started with slackware 9.1 which was really easy to install. I would recommend you to give slackware a try, is not that hard to use it, and you learn a lot more. To me slackware is the fastest out of the three distributions mention above. Also there is a lot of helpul fellas at the slackware forum here in Linuxquestions. I'm sure you won't regret giving slackware a try.

Thank you for replies.
I have couple questions about Slackware. Can you boot from CD, I visited their site and they are talking about creatting a boot disk, and root disks for installation. Also is there any other tool that comes with the installation to set up partitions. I can use fdisk to setup partitions, but I rather have something else to do it, prefferably with gui interface.
Also is there any software compatibility issues with it. I'm assuming since it uses Packages that all the softare that works with Mandrake, Red Hat would work with it, and the rest I can just compile from source code. Just want to be sure.

Thx.

The installation CD's are definitely bootable.

cfdisk uses a curses interface ...

You'll be fine, just don't rush our and try using
RPM's with Slack ;)


Cheers,
Tink

Yes you can boot from the CD, by the way you only need disc 1 and disc 2 if you plan on installing kde or gnome. If you want to give slack a try, you can also download slax which is a distro that boots off a cd. Slax is based on slackware.
Like Tinkester said there is cfdisk which i personally find easier to use than fdisk, eventhough is almost the same thing. If there is a specific software you want to installed you can always go to http://linuxpackages.net/ and search for it. if you find it just install it either using pkgtool, or installpkg. By the way don't install .rpm files, if you need to install and .rpm file you can convert it to a .tgz file by doing then just install the package using either pkgtool or installpkg

For a newbie, i would have to recomend Xandros, PCLinuxOS,lycoris, and i hate to say it, Linspire, all are easy to use easy to install, and ass can install programs easily ,Linspre,Xandros and PCLinuxOS are free and u can try each of them out, Linspire though u have to pay to install programs u might want but the others programs are free, u also wont have to worrie about depencies when installing packages as with other distros, till u get used to a Linux system, i would go with one of these.

Xandros free?

http://www.xandros.com/about/downloads.html

Admitted, I didn't look at what "open circulation"
includes, but Standard certainly isn't free ...


Cheers,
Tink

OCE is actually better than the standard version except for the CD burning, which is odd cuz i dont understand why u would charge for and inferior product, but if MS can get away with it then so be it, but i heard there were ways of speeding up the cd burning speed.

I don't think I would try those installations, they sound too newbish. If Slackware proves too dificult I'll just go back to Mandrake.
I'm very curious why shouldn't I use RPM's? Although I used it only once to install ATI drivers, I didn't have any problems installing it on Mandrake.
Other programs, xampp, bluefish, xmms, I used had tar.gz files.

If anything give PCLinuxOS a try its a live cd so all u have to do is boot it, if u like it u can install it, it comes with everything you need, Flash, Java, AVI playback, Quicktime Playback,u name its got it, it has apt and synaptic already installed, plus its got a great repository with over 3000 packeges, plus its one of the best looking desktops ive seen, almost rivaling SUSE!

I just dont like RPM"s because of dependencies, u download a packege and install it, oh wait u need another packege, download that and install it, oh wait u need another packege, Thats why I use distros that have apt and synaptic gets rid of dependencies.

In Mandrake there is a wonderful thing called urpmi, which resolves all dependancies ... food for thought.

But I think Slackware is faster and less bloated, just not completely "Noob-friendly"

Baldrick

Ive tried mandrake and though i kinda like mandrake 10 it just doesnt appeal to me, not that theres anything wrong with it, just not my cup of tea.