LinuxQuestions.org

LinuxQuestions.org (/questions/)
-   Linux - Newbie (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/)
-   -   Madrake ? or Fedora? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/madrake-or-fedora-162208/)

JerryMcFarts 03-25-2004 09:13 AM

Madrake ? or Fedora?
 
This is an opinion base question i understand this, but my question would be, since i don't have a linux OS on my computer, which OS is better? (Madrake 10 or Fedora 1?) And why? I hear they have the best support group but what are the differences of each? Why is one better than the other? They are both Community OS's, what does that exactly mean?

Thanks,
Bryon

:newbie:

bigjohn 03-25-2004 11:17 AM

I've only ever used Redhat (pre-fedora) once and it was a bit of a nuisance i.e. the install took for ever, and then stopped part of the way in.

Mandrake has always been successful for me.

What I would point out is that mandrake 10 community, well, the "community" bit is the latest in mandrake naming conventions. It means that it's a testing distro (mandrake 10 official is due out soon. that's not to say it's a problem. I'm running it with no problem at all (10 community, that is).

But I think that youd have a better chance at evaluation by trying "mandrakemove". It's a live CD based version of mandrake 9.2. Once you've booted from the CD, you can remove the CD to do whatever. The official versions (as in boxed set's) come with a USB storage key (of various sizes), so you can store/carry your personal preferences, settings and a certain amount of doc's /files.

It's similar to knoppix, though you have to leave the disc in with knoppix - a nuisance unless you've got 2 cd drives.

They're both good way's of trying a linux distro (and don't forget, mandrake is considered one of the "mainstream" distro's these day's, eventhough it was originally, a fork of redhat, (mandrake uses kde as the default, redhat (and presuming fedora) like gnome as the default window manager).

If it's something that you may not have considered, you may have a look around about which distro's are based on which package managers. Because of the ones that I've tried, so far, gentoo beat's everything hands down - their system is called "portage". The downside of gentoo is that if you don't have any linux experience, then it can be long winded to install. But onec in, the management is easy.

Mandrake, fedora/RH, SuSE are "RPM" based (that's redhat package manager). I haven't ever managed to use fedora/RH properly, but out of SuSE and mandrake, I very much prefer the mandrake version of the RPM installer (called urpmi). It seems a lot better than YAST (That's the SuSE version).

Debian based distro's (which includes knoppix), have a system called "apt". I feel that it's better than RPM. In that the way it handles package dependencies (though it's fair to say, if you tried mandrake, and always installed mandrake specific RPM packages, you probably wouldn't have any problems).

But it's up to you. Try different ones. I usually download them under windows and burn them using nero. Thusfar, it's always worked OK.

regards

John

p.s. So I don't get moaned at, you'll also find that Slackware is popular here, though I understand that it's not really a newbie distro (like gentoo and debian, unless you install knoppix to your hard drive and manage it as debian). But apart from what people have said here, personally, I haven't tried it.

Gates1026 03-25-2004 12:04 PM

Bigjohn made some excellent points. Everything he said you should definitely take into consideration. I just wanted to add a few quick personal experiences that I had with some of those common distros.

First off I started out with RedHat 8 which quickly became RedHat 9 within about 2 weeks after my install. I used that for about 5 months or so before switching to Fedora (wanted to stick with what I knew best). After using fedora for a few months I decided to give another distro a try and see what was out there. I tried out Slackware at home and just loved it. I then tried out Mandrake 9.2 at work and eventually tried knoppix but switched to slackware 9.1 at work also. Here are my words of advice for a beginner.......

I would definitely get my feet wet with a distro like Fedora or Mandrake for starters. They give you enough of the familiar windows like environment for you to learn about linux. Get yourself involved with update, install, and compiling your own packages. After you get your grips with networking and package installation for a few months, you could always switch distros to something a little more to your liking. Fedora and Mandrake are great for updates and installs, as both have fairly large user bases to help you out with any problems you might have along the way. When I switched from Fedora to Slackware, I felt like someone who was holding my hand just let go......there are hardly any GUI setup tools for things like networking. Most of you config is done through editing files and such, so I would not really reccomend going with that right off the bat.

I hope my opinion helps, and remember its just that, my lowly opinion :)

Good luck to you!

abby 03-25-2004 12:08 PM

think john's answered e'thin for u....

but i'll go a length to favor mandrake...
fedora does not support all device drivers(didn't work wid my graphic card) n is in no match for mandrake in driver support

and mandrake's rpm installer- urpmi is too good fr others

Pauli 03-25-2004 03:39 PM

Quote:

p.s. So I don't get moaned at, you'll also find that Slackware is popular here, though I understand that it's not really a newbie distro (like gentoo and debian, unless you install knoppix to your hard drive and manage it as debian). But apart from what people have said here, personally, I haven't tried it.
Buncha BS if you ask me. Slack is easy to install and use, those who claim it isnt dont know what they are talking about. It is simple to install and set up, just because it dosent have a pretty little graphical install people say it is bad. It isnt, it is fine for any newbie. it is a myth that it is hard.

JerryMcFarts 03-25-2004 07:48 PM

Thank You for all your responses. They were very helpful. My next move is to try "Madrakemove" and to test it out. I was wondering what exactly is a package manager?
I am still learning what RPMs are, I have a website "all about RPMs" and i haven't read it yet. so i will not bother with questions that i have not researched.

Just some short questions since I am not actually doing it this very moment:
1. If new versions come out for Madrake, how would i go about updating without losing my user data? (or ever switching OS, perhaps to Slackware)
2. How does KDE and gnome differ? I have heard that gnome is alittle slow and I have tried KDE with knoppix, so thats all i know.

Thanks for all the support I will be writing to the forum as much as I can to learn as much as I can. But I feel that best way for me to learn is to install it and start messing around ( on knoppix i have no idea what 80% of the programs do :þ ).

P.S. I apologize if i ask stupid questions with no input from what I have learned. I do this because I don't know if what I know is truely correct so I wait for people to confirm on what I have learned. (So much info has gone through my head in the last 2 weeks, i am truely a newbie :-)

P.S. Pauli please don't get emotional about this, its just forum so that we can learn new stuff. I like to learn and if you like slackware, discribe your experience with it, how you use it, and why you personally like Slackware. This way would be more effective in defining your point. bigjohn said "But apart from what people have said here, personally, I haven't tried it" so he isn't trying to knock it, he is just sharing the information that he has heard. Tell the world why you like it and undo that myth! Thanks :-)

bigjohn 03-26-2004 11:56 PM

Ho, mandrakemove, an excellent idea.

Erm, in regard to the upgrading thing, well as I understand it, as/when you upgrade a mandrake distro, as part of the install process, you are offered the choice of whether you want to upgrade mandrake version XX.X or install version XX.xx

Then you'd have to go for the upgrade option.

There's thing's that you can do by way of partitions etc. Like have a seperate /home partition. Then in theory, you should be able to upgrade or even re-install the OS and it shouldn't change any settings/preferences and stuff like that.

But, that's a method that I haven't tried yet. I'm presuming that you'd have to make sure things are pretty standard in whatever you choose for your system, otherwise there's the possibility that some app's might not start, and require a bit of tweeking. This is probably to do with newer versions of whatever being built with newer libraries, or later versions of whatever (thinking that kde for example is built using qt, so if a later version of kde is produced with a later version of qt and qtlibs then the upgrade would have to include these - I'm presuming they would.

It's one of the things where distro's like gentoo and debian (and Slackware - probably, but I can't say, because I haven't used it (bold emphasis for Pauli, because he obviously didn't read what I posted previously) but they ARE a little more complicated at the install stage, though some of these so called "power user" distro's do have excellent doc's - gentoo for example).

Anyway, that's often tied up with your other Q about package managers. These are the app's that "manage" the how's and where's, of installing packages/software/app's/etc.

The ones that come to mind, are RPM and APT (though gentoo uses one called portage, which I understand is similar to the package manager that used in FreeBSD and again, not sure about Slack because (all together now) "I haven't used it").

With APT (debians one) and gentoo's portage, you can tell it to do a dist upgrade/emerge -u world and they should (again in theory, but it seems to work pretty well) upgrade the whole distro - and yes it can be a time consuming operation - but I would imagine it's system dependent as to how long it actually takes.

As I understand it, one of the things that you may hear about RPM is sometimes known as "RPM Hell", this is where you end up in a spiral of dependency requirements. Though it would appear that this can often becaused by using non-specific rpm packages i.e. you shouldn't experience it if you install mandrake specific rpms for mandrake or SuSE specific rpm's for SuSE etc etc. It can be a problem, but not an insurmountable one.

The differences between KDE and gnome? Well, it might be for someone more knowledgable than me to explain that.

The main difference being that KDE is built using qt and gnome with gtk. There are visual differences, and I understand that gnome originally was a fork of KDE (but couldn't say for certain). There seem to be a lot more "decorative" things available for KDE, but I presume that's only because it's been around longer.

My suggestion would be, that when you do your install (it's especially easy with mandrake) you just install all the window managers (if you've got room), and then have a go at all of them to see which one you prefer. Again, when installing mandrake, when you get to the stage for package selection, you get a nice straightforward graphical window, with "check boxes". All you need to do is check all the stuff down the left column (though if you are installing mandy 10, don't include LSB, otherwise it will install a 2.4 kernel - the default 2.6 isn't LSB certified yet and IMO 2.6 is newer, and better) and then just the window managers at the bottom of the right - don't select any server stuff (the top part of the right hand column, you can always install that later). Then when you continue, it tells you that you've already choosen a few server things (cups, webmin, postfix, etc etc) I always tell it no. Though things have usually still worked OK.

Then, when you log in, you should find a dropdown at the login prompt that enables you to choose whichever window manager you want to use (as your mood dictates). The only downside is that doing updates takes a little longer, because it will update all the packages whether you happen to be using them or not.

If you find that even with the basic/standard install you end up with stuff you don't use (like with a windows install), you can uninstall/remove things a little easier, and you shouldn't get the dire warnings that you get with windows - if you note down what you install/remove on paper, if something starts playing up, i.e. not starting/not running properly you can just look back and if need be re-install whatever.

regards

John

p.s. I think I'm right in saying, that although knoppix and mandrakemove work in a similar way, being liveCD distro's, with mandrakemove, when you've got it running, you can remove the CD to be able to do other stuff with the drive (like listen to music CD's etc), I don't know if you can do this with knoppix (though I don't care, I've got a cdrw and a dvdrom, so I just use the dvdrom to boot the knoppix and then the cdrw to listen to music).

TCv1 03-27-2004 08:45 PM

I used to have Pink Tie 9 (Red Hat 9 clone from CheapBytes), but I found that after KDE 3.2 came out, it was hard to get it fully working. Plus a lot of my hardware I had to manually install. I just got Mandrake 10 Community and it detected all my hardware itself! I didn't have to hand-configure anything or do modprobes, etc. I also wanted to upgrade to the newer 2.6.x kernels. PT9/RH9 came with 2.4.20-6 and I compiled and ran 2.4.24-1 on it. But when I went to try compiling 2.6.0 kernel, I found I would have to update my modutilities and do stuff that was way beyond me at this point. At least MC10 has the 2.6.3 kernel and I can probably update it easier than I could with RH9.

As for upgrading, I would probably get the Mandrake 10 full eventually, and choose the upgrade option. I have already compiled and saved some apps I like to use that aren't included, but I don't want to go through all those installations again (though I probably wouldn't have to recompile) so upgrading would be easier. I do have the /home directory on a separate partition, though, so my own personal settings will be kept as is.

I would definitely recommend Mandrake so far. I've used several versions of Slackware and Red Hat in the past. When I tried Mandrake for the first time (MC10) I was impressed.

I've heard that other distros such as SuSE and Debian are supposed to be pretty good too. And I've read very good reviews on Knoppix. Those CD-based versions are probably good for trying things without messing things up. Another CD-based distro is Slax (Slackware based).

I'm one that likes to compile from source, after the dependency nightmares in RH9. :) So all new stuff I download is via source code. Then I compile, and tarball (with bzip) so I have the compiled version handy to make/install later (I don't know how to do rpms that well, you can tell) :) A distro that lets me do either their packages or source compiling is one I like best. I don't have a lot of $$ to "subscribe" to distro software subscriptions/updates so that's another reason I look for something that does allow source code compiling (that and I want to learn to program for the GNU/Linux environment).

Being on a tight budget, knowing I can get good working software for free is a plus. ;)

JerryMcFarts 03-28-2004 02:25 AM

OK :-) Thanks for all the help.

I decided to go with Fedora1 since when i install it, it checks the disks for me. Very Easy Install, besides the fact that i had to use partition magic in Windows to make a partition. I used EXT2 but i have no Idea what that means. (Its like NFTS i know but is it better than EXT3?) Well Getting onto the Internet was really like slow, took me awhile. Turns out i don't believe Fedora recognizes my onboard LAN so I hooked my LAN in through a PCI card. Well I am running a version 2.4 which i think people want me to run a 2.6. So i need to learn how to install that. But the thing I need help with is..

I partitioned my hard drive, but the KDE manager and/or Gnome wont recognize my C: Partition where i have some of my music and My wallpaper that I would like to be access too. I tried granting myself all permissions and I tried in prefrences to show any hidden files.. but still nothing.

Well I am exhausted took me 5 hours to partition install and get everything ready, making sure things are running well.

A success for a dual boot, MS XP running Fine and Linux Fedora1 running fine.. only thing is now i need to learn how to work this thing.

bigjohn 03-28-2004 07:14 AM

If you follow this link and scroll down to section 4.i there's a nice little precis about the different file system types.

After I read it (and yes I was installing gentoo at the time, hence how I found it), I decided that if I could work out how to do it, I would use ReiserFS - but things went a little "pear shaped" and I ended up using Ext3 (which as far as I could work out from the linked page is better than Ext2).

As far as looking for your music and wall paper, it is probably just a case of seeing if you have a windows section in /mnt/ e.g. I have to open konqueror (well just click the "home" icon) then search through file:/mnt/windows/WINDOWS to see all the various directories.

Then if you know where you saved your music, it should be straight forward to make a directory say something like /home/jerry/music and then just copy it over with drag and drop. You can also do it with CLI though I'd have thought it's easier to do it graphically to start with.

Also don't forget to make sure that the wallpaper(s) are in a "linux friendly" format, then copy them over to the kde/gnome directory (you'd probably have to be root to do that).

Oh, and your system probably doesn't recognise your "C drive" because linux doesn't use that same type of nomenclature (see above how I look at my windows stuff - and yes it's all formatted as NTFS, but mandrake can read that, don't know about fedora).

regards

John

p.s. and yes it can be a little draining/tiring/unnerving when you first get into linux - just keep at it, it gets easier the more you use it :D

JerryMcFarts 03-28-2004 12:45 PM

Thanks for the reply,
I am useing Konqueror, but when i go to /mnt the only other things in the directory is cdrom, cdrom1, and floppy. When i was running mandrakemove or knoppix I usually had those and hda and hdb. for both of my hard drives. Then i was like well maybe theya re hidden so i tried to unhide them and they still aren't there. plus the first hda is partitioned so i should see more than that (hda, hda1, and hdb perhaps). I am running under KDE if that helps. I just want to play my music that is on my other harddrives.

LiquidRezin 03-28-2004 06:18 PM

I've tried Both Fedora 1 and Mandrake 10 (which is what i'm using now) I found that Mandrake 10 had the 2.6 based kernel so it supported my soundcard right off the bat without me having to download anything. Fedora seemed ok, but I got sick of trying to get my soundcard to work properly. I downloaded ALSA and it still wouldn't work :) Also I found Fedora's warning on the taskbar about updates a little annoying, as well as that Redhat logo, ugh :) I'm sure there are ways to get rid of these problems, but the fact that Mandrake had a later kernel was one of the reasons I installed that. Best of luck to you.

bigjohn 03-30-2004 01:21 AM

Weird. But you also mention 2 hard drives. If you linux is on the second one, then maybe you need to mount the first or vice versa.

My dual boot is on one hard drive i.e.

hda1=winXP
hda2=/boot
hda3=/swap
hda4=extended
hda5=gentoo
hda6=mandrake

The extended bit for hda4 is because it's a primary partition that's extended into 2 logical for the 2 linux distro's.

But hence when I'm in one of the distro's, I can see into the windows partition via the /mnt/windows/
route I posted yesterday.
regards

John

p.s. You could always have a look in /etc/fstab to see if the win dows partition is listed there.

JerryMcFarts 04-01-2004 09:48 PM

I have been reading.. and I am having trouble with the mount concept. I maybe haven't mounted anything yet on my computer. I have a cdrom and a cdrom1 and a floppy in my /mnt folder but when i right click on it to eject there is no button for it.

I would like to mount so how would i go about doing that?

mount -t -v (what is verbose?) hda1 /mnt/hda1 ?

p.s. Also I used RedHat auto installer and installed the kernal update. but now when i start my computer up i ave 3 things to boot up into

Kernal xxxxxxxx ones an update
kernal xxxxxxxx others the old one.
Dos

JerryMcFarts 04-28-2004 01:04 AM

I reinstalled Fedora one.. ha ha I still don't really know how to mount. but i downloaded a ntfs read and installed it then I mounted my C: Drive TWICE!! HA HA and I couldn't get it un done so after getting angry i just re installed it. haha


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 01:27 PM.