rahmed

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having used many other distributions before, i think VidaLinux has the capability to be a great Distro. It could be one of the most user friendly distro's i've used. It only needs one cd during the install, which saves the hassle of having to download three cd's for a distro like mandrake. The install screen is the anaconda installer, which makes the install easier for a newbie. All you have to do is answer a few questions and then you get to the partitions. The partition manager during the install is pretty simple to use. Even though I didn't use the automatic partitioner, I can assume that it would be pretty simple to use too. In the manual partitioner, it was extremely simple to delete and make new partitions compared to programs like fdisk and cfdisk. After that you just let the installer get going, which basically installs a gentoo stage 3. you then choose whether you want graphical login or text based. One of the good things that it installs is a 2.6.7 kernel. It also installs GRUB as the boot loader. I think you can change it too for those of you who dont like grub

When you boot up the system, you come to the GRUB boot loader. it then goes to gdm. One of the sour things i have with Vida is that it didnt ask you to have a non-root user in the install, and that is a very bad thing for a newbie. I logged into root and made a new user. I didn't add it to any groups because i've never had to before. I logged into my user, when i noticed the sound wasn't working. I opened up the terminal to su and then run alsaconf, but i couldn't su. i was supposed to add my self to the wheel, which i didn't do. This also would be tough for a newbie. i ran alsaconf, and then i had to setup my internet froma wireless card. again something was wrong. the kernel source never installed, and i couldnt use portage to do it because i didnt have internet. Things seemed to be taking a while. well, i finally had everything running.
Overall, vidalinux is a pretty good distro. the portage package system has lots of packages available to it, but it takes a while to actuallyget any programs from it becasue it compiles every one-and that would be a hassle for a newbie. But i had to remember that it was still in teh beta 2 stage, full of problems. vida is a promising distro, which, after some tweaking, could be a top newbie distro, among the ranks of mandrake and redhat.