Can someone tell me the difference between Mandrake 9.2, Fedore Core, and Red Hat are??

and also what the kernal is.

Well the diffrence between Redhat (im gonna assume 9) and Fedora Core 1 is that Fedora is the updated version. Think of it as Redhat 10 , basicly Redhat decided they dont wanna release anything but there server versions of the most popular OS. Now the diffrence between mandrake and redhat is just its setup and supposedly mandrake has the newest software wich can be a good thing and a bad thing but im not to sure on any of it since i have never used mandrake.

Now the kernel ,

well when you use an app. like for instance kword you put the command in and then the kernel tells your computer to init that said app

in other words its the brain
it runs the whole operation
it takes care of anything that you need to do , you never really communicate with the computer its self it takes care of it for you , unless you where a programmer of course

Mandrake is based on Red Hat, and the main difference is the ease of install.