I just intalled Mandrake 10 a couple weeks ago and I went to the Mandrake site and I see Mandrake 10.1 Beta1 is available.

I thinking of installing it because I need to compile a new kernel for a newer alsa for my usb speakers and for force feedback.

I really don't want to compile a kernel in fear of messing crap up.

I am using 10.1 beta. It is fine. It comes with 2.6.8-0.rc2 (2.6.8.1 is available now on kernel.org). No issues with it as far as I am concerned. It is much better shape than the 10.0 beta 1 was.

It is really not that bad to compile your own kernel. Urpmi the kernel source and then use the .config from there as a base. It is really only a matter of going through the config to select/deselect things you need/don't want and then compiling it (takes a while) and then install. This is quite straight forward and there is a lot of help available online. Usually you leave the old kernel in place and just add lilo/grub options, so you can always go back to it. Mdk makes changes to the kernel.org version, so I would not recommend using the kernel.org sources and compiling from there, but people do it, so it is really up to you.

I'm using 10.1 beta1 as a second system and it seems to work as well as 10.0, in other words it's in really fantastic shape for a beta.

I've only noticed two things wrong. The kernel has problems when it reboots for the first time after the install. The fonts in Firebird don't look as nice as in 10.0, even though I set it up the same way. If it wasn't for the font thing I'd just delete 10.0 and use the beta.

You don't have to loose a good 10.0 install to try out 10.1.

If you have the space it's fairly easy to have two or more linux systems on a hard drive. You need to have other partitions available to do it though.

Another option would be to do a backup, and just restore over 10.1 if you don't care for it. One way to do this would be to download system rescue cd and use partimage to copy your 10.0 partition. If you don't have disk space or a dvd burner, the dar utility is a fairly easy way to split your backup into multiple cds.

Well, I downloaded it, burned it to cd's, and tried to intall it. Didn't work.

I chose upgrade and right after that it gives me a message saying I have no root partition?