What means dependency hell?
 

Okay, I was talking to some debian people and they said I would be in dependincy hell with Mandrake. What are they talking about and is that true?

Dependency hell is when you try to install a package and it fails because other files/packages it depends on are not installed. So you go to install those packages and find out that they in turn need other packages, etc, etc

Mandrake uses urpmi, which pretty much takes care of dependencies. There are lots of sites to help you set it up. Try this one: http://www.mandrakeusers.org/easyurpmi/

Ive been using mandrake for some time now. About 2 years I guess. With urpmi, I've never encountered any sort of dependency problem. I think people get into trouble when they try to manually install RPM after RPM. Use the software media manager to create a local RPM folder and then use urpmi to install those RPMs. You shouldn't have any trouble going that route. And don't worry about setting up urpmi, its very easy. Just head on over to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ Its all very easy.

Dependency hell is where you go to install programA.rpm. You issue rpm -Uvh programA.rpm and the error says programA depends on programB. So you install programB and find that it depends on having programC. So you try to install programC and find that programC depends on programA! :D And this is not an exaggeration, it's where dependency hell comes in.

There are 2 ways around it (assuming that you stickwith rpms and don't install a non-rpm distro in disgust):
issue rpm -Uvh programA.rpm programB.rpm programC.rpm or go with a package manager - apt4rpm, urpmi, YAST or YUM.