I thought those of you that may be considering the RC1 may find this remotely interesting.

I decided that since I do not have anything important on my home PC at the moment I would attempt to give RC1 a try.

I downloaded the 3 images in 9.2 and burned them on 650MB CD-RWs since the images are each 650MB or less. I ran an MD5 Checksum prior to burning the disks with KB3. KB3 ran a verification after the fgact and they all checked out ok.

The first thing I noticed after my reboot was that the installation program did not have upgrade as an option. I went ahead and opted for a full insallation. I noticed also that the installation brogram flickered a bit while running (something that I never noticed in 9.2). The program ran just as 9.2 up until the bootloader installation. I opted for Grub on the MBR and waited for it to complete. During that process it jumped back to the initial install "languages screen" It never took me to the summary section or properly completed.

I rebooted the system and was met with the familiar Grub bootloader.

I chose Mandrake Linux Enterprise and waited. A message displayed stating that there was no inittab file. I chose run level 3 and it froze. I repeated the process with each possible run level with the same result. I started with a floppy and looked on all HDs for the XF86Config file and found none. Same with INITTAB.

Strike 1.

I then decided to redo the entire process with full HD formatting

Same results on the install program but this time when I rebooted it did find the inittab file. It gave me a message that my machine had not shut down cleanly, forced a check then rebooted. Upon reboot, I was taken to runlevel 5 and KDE.

This is as far as I have gotten today. More to come....

Well, the second install went off without a hitch for the most part.

For some reason after I installed the NVIDIA drivers, X would not start. it could not find the driver so I went in and inspected my XF86Config-4 file and found it to be good to go. I had NVIDIA under driver and no Load DRI. I went back into the NVIDIA run program and ran it again for good measure. It of course had to build a driver based on the 2.6 Kernel source file again. After this I changed the inittab file back to 5 and rebooted. It came up in KDE3.2 just fine.

The first thing I noticed different in 10 was that my wheel mouse worked perfectly wothout any changes in the configs.

Secondly, PrinterDrake configured my HP OJ T45xi perfectly and it printed all 11 pages of my lecture just fine. In 9.2 I could never get it to work correctly. I had to print from my Win2k laptop (I cannot get any versionof Linux to work on it).

One item that i am unsure about is the update option in the rpm manager. I tried all of the mirrors and even input 3 manually and it never found any updates. This may be normal for an RC but I'm not sure.

I still don't like the speed of OpenOffice and had to manually download and install Abiword but that took all of 30 seconds.

I like the Kopete chat client in 10. It may have been in 9.2 but this is the first time I have ever seen it. It connected to Yahoo great.

I will take it through it's paces tomorrow as I work on some spreadsheets for a customer presentation.

The only, and yes I mean only dislike I have for Linux that I cannot blame on my own ignorance is that there does not seem to be a spreadsheet program available for Linux that has Pivot Table capabilities. I use these constantly. I may have to install Excel to get it. Oh well, 1 problem aint that bad.

Remember, this is from a total noob standpoint. I have been using Mandrake for one week now so the learning curve is still ramping.
If anyone cares..... more to come.