This sounds like a hardware issue. If I remember right (8 being a long time ago) support for older machines like pentiums was phased out. Users of more modern computers wont have a problem.

I've only used Mandrake but the research I didn into Suse looked really nice. There are a lot of nice tools. I've still refered my friends to Mandrake though because I know first hand that its install is very user friendly as is the distro as a whole. I use Gentoo now but I plan on trying Mandrake 10 on a spare hard drive since I'm sure it's going to have some really sweet features

Hope this helps

-- /\/ecro

So far it does......

Motown, Suse DOES have wine.
All you have to do is to start Yast, Install and Remove Software, type 'wine' in 'search', tick it, click on 'accept' and insert the CD or DVD you are asked for.

"Suse DOES have wine."
so it does! neat. I'll have to get my suse discs back.

Thanks

Well, I use Slackware now, but I have tried Mandrake and SuSE in the past.

SuSE was good but it seemed, to me, more bloated than Mandrake. It did do some neat things though, like give me an athlon-xp optimised kernel. Not being able to download the CDs was a pain... the net install was a bit confusing for me at the time.

Mandrake 9.2 was bad though. Very buggy. I started with 9.1 and I think that was a LOT better. I'd suggest you either install 9.1 or wait for Mandrake 10 which should be out in a couple weeks IIRC.

Mandrake's install was easier for me than the SuSE install. Just less confusing.

I liked Mandrake for getting used to Linux, if I went back to a more newbie-ish distro that's probably what I'd use.

I had a bad experience with Mandrake 9.2. Killed my CD ROM (it was a rebaged LG, unknown to me, even though i didn't use it to install)

The Totem media player crashes all of the time. Didn't recognize printer, soundcard, or internet (or ethernet card for that matter)

Red Hat found all of these with ease (RH9), so maybe consider Fedora as i found red hat nearly as easy as Mandrake

I too am trying for a newbie-ish distro for the rest of the family, and so far SuSE looks the best to me. If you can wait, though, i would check out Mandrake 10. Hopefully they will fix the problems that 9.2 had.

9.1 was excellent. 10 is getting pretty close to polished. The power of the 2.6 kernel and the speed and usefulness of kde 3.2 and gnome 2.4 are gonna really rock the "pre-rolled" world.

I haven't read any of the thread bar the title and I've never used Suse. But I have used Mandy 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2. KEEP CLEAR. It's a bad distro, very buggy I'd often get freezes and applications not working. If you try this as your first Linux distro, you'll be back to Windows within the hour

cg

In my opinon, Mandrake Has terrible package management. SuSE is a step up, but still gets annoying. I hear that there is a new control center in mandrake 10. Hopefully they have also re-written the rpm manager

It looks and acts the same. How do you have trouble with it? I have found it not too bad (and I also use Debian, so I know about good package management).

I haven't tried Suse, but I may some day.....waiting for Novell to kick it up a notch. Then we'll see.

Well Mandrake was my first disribution, so maybe i was just too nubzor back then. But i found that the Package management wasnt user friendly enough for me to be able to use properly. but it installs quickly. unlike YaST.

This is a very old thread, but I felt that I had something to add.
Back then I put Mandrake and SUSE almost on the same level.
But now I'd *never* replace SUSE for Mandrake. 10.1 is incredibly buggy.
Besides in the meantime SUSE has become a lot more generous under Novell (e.g. you can download a fully functional DVD iso, which works both with 32 and 64 bits), while Mandrake has become incredibly greedy.
And then I enjoy Debian and Derivatives a lot: the best at the moment is Kanotix 2005-01, IMHO.

If you want to give a "review", please be specific. Saying 10.1 is buggy is very subjective. What bugs? Which version? Were you using beta 2? RC 1? I use 10.1 Official and I have found it to be very stable. In fact, I'm testing 10.2 beta on my Compaq laptop and couldn't be more thrilled. Suse is a good distro, (except for the ugly lizard ) but I've always had better fortune with Mandrake getting ALL my hardware right from the start without a lot of fixing. Suse always misses something in the setup. AFA the "greed" of Mandrake, you have always been able to download the ISOs for free! You don't get first crack at them. Club members get first shot, which is fair. Everyone else has to wait a few weeks. But you can't in all fairness call Mandrake "greedy" for that. Novell is making some good marketing decisions (along with a couple of curious ones) at the moment to spread the use of Suse. But are they doing it for the "love of free and open" software? Let's just say I'll wait and see.

I agree with alessandro. I've never used a version of mandrake that wasn't buggy to the point of being useless. It's a real shame, too, cause mandrake had always packaged some of the best software together by default.

If you want specifics, 10.1 would crash during updates. Or while I had 2 or more programs active. Or while logging out. Or logging in...

One of the worst issues I have had with 10.1 is that after booting I get a blank screen, instead of Kdm. I read that others had the same problem too.
Also trying to configure my ADSL connection was an utter mess. With SUSE it was a child's play.