Mandriva Administration for a Red Hat Guy
 

For the last 3 years I am working on Redhat and Suse Linux. Now I am getting a chance to administer mandarke box. I am not sure, how difficult or easy it would be for me to work on mandriva. I mean the commands that we use in redhat or suse is somewhat similar, can we use same commands in mandriva or if the environment (startup scripts etc) would be same or different.

and also If I try to give it a shot, how much time/practice I need to get a good command on it.

Kindly advise.

The best method for administering a Mandriva box depends on the system's configuration and use. If it is being used as a headless server the GUI tools will be useless, but for a desktop system, they can make system administration fairly simple (it is even possible to automate much of your Mandriva system's administration). MCC (Configure your computer in the menu system) is the system configuration tool launcher and can be used in either the GUI or from the command line although there are a greater number of tools available in the GUI.

I suggest you install Mandriva to a test system ,then explore the environment. You will find that there are many similarities with any other Linux distribution, and probably about as many differences. In my experience, the best way to get familiar with any distribution is to use it if at all possible.

Mandriva includes a wealth of documentation (some of which is not installed by default, so after installation, open the software package manager (Install & remove software in the menu system). At the top left click the packages with GUI drop down and select all, expand the Books category (left) and select (one at a time) Computer books and Howtos.

From the Computer books category, select each of the mandrake-doc packages specific to your native language - e.g.: (for the English language) mandriva-doc-Drakxtools-Guide-en, mandriva-doc-Introducing-en, and mandriva-doc-Mastering-Manual-en Note: mandriva-doc-common will be requested when you choose the first package in this series. It is the best practice to allow any package request the Software Installer makes in the interest of satisfying dependencies. Optionally, you may also want to install the mandriva-doc-installer-help package if you may be installing Mandriva on other computers in the future.

From the Howtos category, select the howto-html-en package.

Browse all the packages in both the above mentioned categories (as well as in the Otehr category and select any documentation package you think may be useful (only you know what software is installed on your system, and what documentation may be of help to you). When you are finished, click the Apply button (bottom - right) to install the selected packages. You will also have to click the yes button in the resulting confirmation dialog.

HTH,

Thanks ernie !

I was not expecting such a detailed explanation/details. Now I have clear thougts on what I need to do next.

Thanks again for your time....:)

Hi, i think you will find them very similar, but the path may be different for specific config files.

Like security. msec, a neat tracking changes admin tool.

Mlocate, slocate.... the locate package with "updatedb" command should enable you to find the files you need.

as you may already know.

if your system has kde4 you may find some kde3 packages in /opt/kde3

VirtualBox installs to /opt and /home/<USER>

source installs may be found /usr/local/bin for the binary and usr/local/ for the rest, like docs.

you can expect similar diversions in /etc/...

networking scripts... /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

With your experience I doubt you'll have too much trouble.

Regards Glenn

Mandrake (pre-Mandriva) originally was the KDE port of Red Hat Linux (pre-Fedora). That's still the main difference today. All Red Hat's tools are written using GTK (same as Gnome desktop) and all of Mandriva's tools are written using Qt (same as KDE desktop). The functionality is basically the same, however. You''ll just have to learn to use urpmi instead of yum, for example.

The main Mandriva tools, drakconf and the drakxtools are GTK applications.

Jim

Crito is partially correct. Mandrake Linux was originally based on RedHat (Mandrake was never owned by or formally associated with RedHat). As time moved forward. Mandrake evolved into its own unique distribution. Around the time Mandrake 10.1 - 10.2 were released Mandrake merged with Connectiva and renamed itself as Mandriva to reflect that merger (Mandrake 10.2 was the transitional release and was also known as Mandriva 2005 Limited Edition).

HTH,

The main GUI tools, including Mandrake Control Center, are written with Trolltech's Qt.

Ernie is partially correct, Mandrake was originally the KDE port of Red Hat Linux (but it was never owned by Red Hat).

Not true. See this page, for example:

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Policies/DrakXGui

Jim

Is that not what I said?

Actually, technically, I should have said the KDE fork. A port would be from one hardware platform to another, like Intel x86 to Apple PPC or DEC Alpha or something like that. Not to nit-pick myself, or anything like that. :rolleyes: