What do you guys have against Mandrake anyways ?!?!?!?!!?


FC is terrible. I tried to install it and the CD's boot kernel did not have drivers for my scsi card in "/lib/modules/2.6.3-7mdk/kernel.drivers/atp8147.o" & so couldn't detect my HDD. Mandrake's kernel, on the other hand, could detect and config it automatically (it had the driver above) w no problems. The mandrake drakinstaller is a lot faster & easier to use than anaconda, and urpmi provides good dependency tracking of rpms (so does yast, though). People who make facetious statements like Mandrake is the "windows" of linux and the like don't realize that mandrake is still open source and still GPL'ed and free. As far as Slackware goes, it is a powerful and scalable and transparent distro and all, but bear this in mind:


During my undergraduate I used Slackware a lot (though I never did administrative stuff as the computers I used were departmental multiuser). The system administrators installed 25 clients with Slackware and mounted "/var" "/usr" and "/etc" & others off of an NFS server also running slackware. It took them 6 months (!) to get everything up and running as everything had to be compiled from scratch. This drove many of them mad. Though this was in 1998 and probably a lot has changed in Slackware (boot cd's were not so ubiquitous in my country back then and they had to use floppies) and it probably is not so bad anymore (I don't really follow Slackware development), but I'd say using Mandrake is the safest way to start with linux. I've been using Mandrake in my PC for a year now (since 2.4 to 2.6 and have never looked back).