Hello Daniel,
Oh gosh, this is really an old thread. Ok, I really don't care about the new name, but I do care that they have reduced the lifetime of the releases from 18 months to one year.

The thing is, that since I began using Mandrake at v9.1, I have never performed a successful upgrade. Oh, it might appear to work at first, but then some library will be wrong, or I'll still be faced with 8 or 9 days of configuration work because of all the rpmsave's and rpmnew's.

I am considering switching to Debian in the coming month, not because I'm upset with Mandriva, but because Debian claims that all you have to do is install it once and that's it. After that the updates come without a major overhaul.

So, I can upgrade to Mandriva 2006, and then 2007 a year from now, or I can buy Debian once, and then donate to them as I am able.

It's going to be a small chore getting used to using .deb files rather than rpms, but I think it will be ok. I started with RedHat about version 5, then I left them after version 9, but Mandrake was still rpm and the hierarchy was not dissimilar.

Otherwise, all should be well, except that Debian apparently does not support ax-25, and I am an amateur radio operator (kc5yfl).

I see that you are using Suse, which I understand is also an rpm-based distribution. How do you like it?

Thanks for the post,

Michael Hearne

Mandrake 10.1 was really my leg up. I struggled for about three years trying to get into linux, while studying something completely different but I didnt know anyone and forum communities hadn't even occurred to me. I tried with Mandrake 9.0 and even bought Red Hat Enterprise for the tech support but just couldnt get online or solve a lot of small problems. My learning curve was steep but not nearly as steep as the increase in ease of use that I perceived in the Mandrake 10.1 system.

I started using SuSE after I found it to be the only system that would install on a strange little Compaq hardware set that tried to lock out Unix systems. It turned out to be a nice system and I still find it to be good. I have found there are some little differences between Mandrake and SuSE, in that SuSE seems not to make some little things easy to do. Maybe their rules are a little different, I dont know. But it is great how I can install it on a window user's machine and it saves me time having to get the (closed)plugins for firefox all set up. I am not sure how I feel about that in all, but it certainly is a bit quicker. Well, maybe if I . . .

Like you, I would like to get into Debian but I have often thought of it as a bit out of reach but a bit of a curiosity. I am just on Summer break so I am hoping to learn about setting security basics beyond just blindly trusting the off-the-disk firewall set-up. I would also like to get my head around some basic dhcp configurations for home networking. If I get time I might even take you same path and check out Debian . . . so much to do and getting money to eat is always in the way

There is always so much to explore like Ktoons, Hydrogen, Adour, and Quantra. I have been thinking a lot about getting on board one of the projects properly and working on documentation or some other user level stuff. Programming is really interesting but I think I will keep my time to contribute in other ways.

Thanks for asking,

The hardest part about converting a Windows machine is getting the modem to work (if you're on dialup).

I have three permanent machines on my home network, and from time to time a friend will plug in a notebook. So I dispensed with dhcp and just assigned static numbers.

I use shorewall, squid, bind and clamav, which seems to work pretty well. The windows machines do everything on port 3128, and are invisible to the net. I've even thought about not upgrading Norton for them, but that might be a bad idea.

If you are a student, there are more free educational programs than I can count, mostly college level stuff, covering all the sciences. I mostly like to play with the astronomical stuff, like Celestia and Stellarium.

See you,

Michael

I quite like the name Mandriva, but I agree that Mandrake was better. Much catchier, and as was pointed out earlier, what will happen to the "Drake" files?

Wow, this thing is still alive. Just thought I'd add in my update.

Although the name Mandriva has definitrly grown on me and I probably prefer it to Mandrake, it did scare me off onto Fedora and then Ubuntu, since I thought that it would get much more commercial and less free.