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Hey Koolkat.

This is of course impossible for anyone to judge on your behalf, but here's some thoughts to help you make your decision. Your profile says you run Suse and judging by 10 posts that you are a newbie. I have no idea if this is true (the newbie thing), but I'll assume it is ok?

My vote is a qualified "format, install MD9.2, then when final comes out, reformat, and install it". The qualifiication is "IF you have both the time to do this, and the desire to do this".

If you're new to linux in general, I usually recommend to people that they install all the "typical" or even "maximum" packages for a while to get a feel for what software they like and use... then after a few weeks re-install with only the packages you want.

I think you'll find that Mandrake is a really great distro, but if you're busy, just wait until the end of October for the final version.

I'm on 56k and broke. Thanks

If it's a question of money discs etc then don't install rc2. Wait for the final release.

There is a major bug in RC2 which means you have problems in loading packages, unless someone has an answer to recover from it
in my earlier post then wait until it is sorted.

I didn't/have any problems loading any packages in 9.2 and on 3 different machines. What problem are you talking about? I'd would wait for the final and hope they fixed all bugs that have been reported and they are aware of them(I've been dealing with the Mandrake team on these). I know of at least 2 that havn't been fixed yet.

BigVoice - Do you reformat and reistall every time a new version is released? Is this better than just updating the current version? I just installed 9.1 for the first time, and after configuring it to my liking, it would basically suck to start over. What do you recommend?

Yes I do reformat and reistall every time a new version is released (It take about 35-60Min to do a full install and reconfigure. What do you mean by "configuringco it to my liking"? Do you mean your home account? (Which dosn't changes during a re-install) Or system configuring?

I didn't realize that the home account is not affected by a re-install. I guess that makes sense since /home is the mount point for a separate partition. I've never tries a reinstall yet, but I assume there will be a way during the process to leave the /home partition alone.