A good friend of mine , after listening to me rant, is going to install linux on a partition of his hard drive. I've used RH 7.5 , 8 and 9 but now that RH is not going to support them any more is Mandrake the way to go? I'm looking for something with free iso download files. Thanks .. K

theres the fedora project as an offshoot of rh:

http://fedora.redhat.com

i think its best to stay with redhat 9 for now, and wait for the next progress of fedora

Yea, I would put RH9 on his system. That way you can help him out. And you both can learn together.

I have Fedora installed on a test system... mmm it seems slow. I don't like the graphical boot... makes it slower. I am thinking about switching to Slackware 9.1. It is nice... but it is different.

Well, if Mandrake is based off Red Hat, and Mandrake is well supported, why not move to that?

mmmm.... I don't know. I guess because I like gnome and Mandrake is a KDE pusher. Does not really matter I guess. Mandrake is slower than slack right...?? not sure

You can still use gnome in Mandrake. Just choose it during the install.

MMM.... I may try it. I am just not sure.

Try Gentoo if you have fast internet connection. Once you get it working you will not want to go back to any other distro.

Gentoo?? I really want something that comes with some apps. I looked at Mandrake 9.2 powerpack... wow, loads of apps.

GAH!!! Gentoo does not have apps????!!!! What are you talking about? Gentoo right now has about 40,000 different ebuilds installable on-demand. it also takes rpm's and easily compiles almost anything from source.
Installation takes some time though, but thats the only problem with it.

Judging from what has been posted thus far,

You don't appear to know what you want (no malice/bad feeling intended by that).

But, mandrake was originally redhat with kde, but it hasn't been like that for a long time (If you want gnome, then just select that and don't bother with KDE during install). If you want ease of use, then either mandrake or SuSE (if you don't particulaly like the way redhat is going - though if you want the latest SuSE, then you're gonna have to buy it - the download version is 1 or 2 versions back).

I would say mandrake. Because if [they] are a little slow updating some of the available app's, then just follow the "plf" and use their "easy urpmi" and make sure that you include mirrors for plf and texstar, because one of them has usually got a more up to date version of whatever (you just have to remember to uninstall the older version - xmms in mandy 9.1 being a good example).

On the other hand, the suggestion of gentoo, well, a few of the people at my LUG use it, and they are professional programmers/developers/consultants, who freely admit, that it can be a total "SOB" to install, but once you've got it up and running, it's VVV powerful (and also happens to be one of the distro's where new app's appear first - well as far as I can find out).

Or maybe just surf the millions (well, lots anyway) "What distro should I use" threads.

Again, I hope this doesn't sound belligerant (it's not meant too), just to give you some "food for thought".

good luck with whatever you settle on.

regards

John

wow I did not know there was so much. I have been looking and I think I am going to go with Mandrake 9.2 powerpack. It come with Win4Lin, Crossover Office 2, and VmWare for starters. Unfortunately I still have some win apps (cruse you M$) that I have to use. One being Dreamweaver 4. I am content with RH9... but for my laptop I am really looking for something that has more installed apps so I can spend less time on compiling a package and more on the things I need to get done. Now on my server, server to be...., I will look at this differently. Since I have RH9 retail, I will probably just go with that.

Another good choice would be Slackware 9, or 9.1. I used Slack for quite awhile before deciding i wanted something like Gentoo. Everything on Slack has a fairly simple install,... there are minor little things you run into, but nothing that hasn't been asked here,... and if it hasn't been asked, i'm sure someone would help you with it. Not to mention, from personal experiance, Slack seems faster than Mandrake or Red Hat.... but that could just be my system. If ever in doubt, you could always browse the hundreds of Linux distros, and try all the ones that sound good Good luck finding a distro.