i'm new all about mandrake, i downloaded 3 Mandrakelinux 10.1 Community ISO images for i586 , my question is what is the difference between this 3cds to the PowerPack,Discovery 10.0, i know powerpack is 6cds.

please give me other idea on this

thanks

Well, Community is the free release for the public to download at no cost, and the other cd's you mentioned are usually boxed versions which you can only buy since they also contain extra cd's with commercial applications for Linux and a bunch of official drivers for hardware. Community doesn't have that

If you have 10GB free then i'd suggest freeing up 6 or 7GB of that for Linux.
By 'freeing up' I mean you need to resize the Windows partition so that you get 6/7GB of unpartitioned space on your harddrive, which you will need during Mandrake's setup. For resizing partitions safely I recommend using PowerQuest's Partition Magic, it can resize/move about anything without messing up your stuff. Be sure to defragment your drive from Windows before you start resizing anything.
From there, Mandrake can figure out the various partition sizes for you automatically, without messing up your Windows stuff. and after it's done installing you'll have a nice Linux/Windows dual boot box

As a final precaution: Always back up your important files before you resize/move partitions and before you install new operating systems. It doesn't -have- to go wrong, but you'll be happy with the backup -if- it goes wrong.

thanks, XOLO , but i would like to knowwhat are the parition needed like /usr etc, and its sixes

thanks, more power to u

Xolos' partly correct.

With Mandrake, the "community edition" is like a testing release, that's put out for final troubleshooting/testing/bugreporting, prior to the "official" release which is the finished version.

You can usually get mandrake installed by just putting the install discs in, it will offer to move/resize partitions. As a minimum it will install with just 1 partition. You don't actually need any more.

There are some benefits of using more though. If you have room on your hard drive(s), you can consider that if the 3 mandrake cd's you've got are full, then you're looking at something over 2 gig's. There's a few things to consider as well, like needing room for logs etc, as eventually you would fill any space that they have allocated to them.

Again if you have the room, and as Xolo suggested, access to something like partition magic (actually that's what I've always used) then say something like 200 or 300 megs for a /boot partition (that way you install so the boot stuff goes there and you can't mess it up by accident as you have to manually mount it to change stuff), then I always go with the conventional wisdom of using twice the installed ram (approximately) for the size of the /swap, though in fairness, this wisdom dates for when 32 megs of ram was a lot, and if you've got 512megs or something like that, you'd probably never use /swap space unless you're using a mega memory hungry app (video editing and the like). Then, allowing for the fact that the entire 3 discs of mandrake are in the region of 2.1 gigs, maybe about 5 gigs for the /root partition - which should allow you loads of room to install other stuff as well. then whatever size you want for a /home partition - if you've room for the same as your /root partition then you can't go far wrong.

Personally, I have the room so I use 1 gig for /boot and 1.5 gigs for /swap, then I have about 20 gigs for /root and 70 gigs for /home - my hard drive is 120 gig western digital - the space not taken up above is used by windows XP for my dual boot. As I say, I've got the space, but could work just as easily with much much less.

The other benefit of having seperate /root and /home partitions, is that once you've got it all set up and running, if you want to install a different distro (i.e. more up to day mandrake ones when they're released or something else), as long as you install all the same applications, then any customisation/personalisation you do are saved in the /home should still work with the new distro

regards

John

p.s. I also started with a download of mandrake (8.2), but as I was impressed with the distro, I didn't mind putting my hand in my pocket and buying the original "boxed set" discs from mandrake. 9.0 was the standard edition, then 9.1 was powerpack DVD and 10.0 also powerpack DVD. I didn't regret it either, as the nvidia driver is already configured, plus real player, speedtouch driver, and some other stuff as well. At about 50 euros, it's cheap and the hassle free install is excellent.

thanks bigjohn great helps to me.

da nada !