Hello Friends,

After having a long 3 yr relation with Redhat, Fedora, Rhel & CentOS, I am thinking to try other flavours. I had only looked at them earlier. Though I see everyone praising ubuntu a lot, I think I will have to learn a lot before I can use. I use Linux as a desktop in my office and I don't want my work to be affected. I installed mandriva spring 2008.1 & its looking really cool to me and I think I can make a switch.

I would like to ask you guys what problems I may face, I like gnome, though I use some KDE applications also.

Cons in Fedora I have found yet:

1. I don't like the default fonts in firefox & thunderbird, those are sooo small!!(I dont know how to customize them I always used ctrl++ to zoom)
2. Always older version looks good & stable than the latest release.
3. Fedora doesn't like frequent hardware changes.
4. Working tough as a normal user, for root no problems.

However, the YUM thing I liked most in redhat based systems, whatever I needed I got it via yum.

Here are some questions from my 1st day observation of Mandriva Spring 2008.1

What is the good alternative to yum in Mandriva?
Can yum be installed on Mandriva?
If yes, are there online repositories available?
Where is the grub.conf?
What are the .desktop things??

Where to get a Linux Administrator's guide for Mandriva?



Thanks
--Dipu
---------------------------------
Windows? Reboot. Linux!! Be root!!

http://www.smartdipu.info (upcoming)

Simple answer, urpmi.

Why would you want to? I would say no. If it is for configuration, MCC is part of Mandriva.

Yes! This is one place to go to set them up.

http://mandrivausers.org/easyurpmi/index.php

Grub is configured using this file /boot/grub/menu.lst There is no grub.conf on my Mandriva 2008.1 system.

Don't think I can answer this one.

If you use MCC ( Mandriva Control Center ) There is a lot of help there.

There is also a lot of doc and online help on Mandrivausers.org.

Thanks Cammori,

Your reply was helpful, I am going to explore Mandriva more and more..

--Dipu
---------------------------------
Windows? Reboot. Linux!! Be root!!

http://www.smartdipu.info (upcoming)

As I will be using more, I will be asking more questions on Mandriva.

Here are current doubts:

1. My system doesn't save the time/date information, everytime I login, I find it changed, I can use a startup script, but is there any alternate solution?

2. I want to log into the system with my company's active directory username/password. I found the option(had never seen such option in fedora) in Mandriva control center and configured the same, but I don't find an option on the login screen to enter those credentials. Any ideas?

3. I see the option "snapshot". I doubt if I take snapshots, can those be used even if my system has encountered an booting problem? Or those are only for settings.


--Dipu
---------------------------------
Windows? reboot. Linux! Be root!!

http://www.smartdipu.info

The .desktop things are identifiers for KDE entities, including desktop icons, services, and programs. KDE depends very critically on those files; don't mess with them unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing.

properties - content

The options are there, but never worked for me in fedora. I find mandriva & ubuntu has perfect fonts.

Anyone for my time lagging problem? Everytime I reboot my machine, my date and time gets resetted to some default date. Please help. This problem I am facing with two machines with Mandriva 2008.1 spring installed.


--Dipu
----------------------------
Windows? reboot. Linux! be root!!


http://www.smartdipu.info

If you are a Mandriva user you might find OpenSuse 11.0 (or certainly 10.3) just about ideal as you won't have to change too much the way you used to do things.

OpenSUSE has advanced in leaps and bounds since NOVELL became involved and has the financial backing (Novell) to survive as a serious OS for the long term.

In a corporate environment long term stability is often better than the latest and greatest.

OpenSuse also has a HUGE user base so problems can be readily identified and fixed .

The whole package management system is much faster and logical these days and unless you are a real hobbyist you don't need to go down the debian or slackware type of route --nothing wrong with these either if that is what you want.

I'd seriously suggest having a look at OpenSUSE -- at east download the LiveCD and try it --you can also install from the live CD.

Cheers

-K