Opinions on distros
 

Just writing to see if anyone has experience with Fedora Core 3 and Mandrake 10.1 on a laptop. I have been using Fedora Core 2 on my laptop successfully (with the exception of display settings) for several months. I am about to upgrade to the Fedora Core 3 but have heard a lot of nice things about the Mandrake 10.1 distro.

In someone's honest opinion, is one distro better than the other for a laptop or does it really matter? I have a Gateway 400vtx laptop dual booted with WinXP Pro and Fedora Core 2 right now. The only reason Windows is still on the system is that the company I work for has several applications that I have to access over the internet and can only be viewed by IE.

When I say that Fedora Core 2 has been used successfully, I mean everything (internet, wireless card, home network configuration) that I really need works great. Did not get K3B up and running but that was a permission issue with my writer (pretty sure) that I did not research fully and the issue with not getting the display to a 1024x768 resolution. Never got an answer on that and looked in several places. I lived with it.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

id say stick with fc3 since your used to it, and i dont really like the mandrake flavor

and doesnt mandrake 10 have a price tag

why charge for something thats free

allright, sorry, stopped myself from a rant


anyways, yes, i recommend fc3

Mandrake has great hardware detection and automation. It's not a bad distro at all although it doesn't default install a lot of software that you probably won't need. Fedora does too I suppose but to a lesser degree, give it a go if you want, I know Mandrake have a live cd version (MandrakeMove), see if you can get it free, not sure if it's a community release or not and give it a go :)

Thanks
 

I didn't expect to see answers so fast.

Adam...Yes I am used to Fedora (at least I am until I see what changes are in store wth the Core 3). Mandrake 10.1 is also a free download. Doing it right now but so far I have two votes for Fedora (You and DJ). I think that Fedora was about as easy an install as I have seen in my not so vast Linux experience and I had very few hardware problems. Most that I had were resolved with a quick Google and a couple of files installed. Hopefully Core 3 will have addressed the issue of my monitor resolution. I would like to get the 1024x768 setting. I'm 41 years old (at least I will be December 25th) but I'm not quite blind yet so I don't really need icons the size of silver dollars!!!.

DJ...Thank you for your quick answer. I do like to mess with the install settings some since I don't really want to install a bunch of stuff I don't need. Less apps means less security holes in my opinion.

you just happened to catch me on my bi-daily lq newbie forum check

and yes, for some reason, fc2 didnt allow my laptop to do 1024x768, but fc3 does, so it might solve your problem

and i used mandrake 9 and just wasnt happy with it and how it looked, i mean, im sure its a good OS, but i didnt like the look of KDE, i much prefer gnome, that might be the only reason (which at the time i had no clue of the existance of KDE or GNOME, just that it looked different)

I haven't installed any Linux distro on a laptop for some time but last week I was using SuSE 9.1 and decided it was time for a change. So I installed FC3 and frankly was not impressed. It looked nice and everything but the final straw was when everything stopped mounting despite it's presence in /etc/fstab & mtab. I didn't feel like taking the time to fix it so I installed Mandrake 10.1 and I love it. I've not had a single problem so far. The only bad thing is there are 3 cds available for the free download but there are actually 4 cds out there. KDE 3.3 is on the 4th so you will be stuck with 3.2 until you upgrade it.

All in all, I would recommend Mandrake highly.

I'm not a fan of KDE either, currently using Arch Linux with GNOME 2.8 and I'm happy. Just want a decent burning program for it, nothing beats k3b and using cdrtools directly sucks :p

Cool
 

If Core 3 can fix my display resolution (my biggest problem) then I'm sold.

As for the KDE vs. Gnome vs. other UIs, I didn't know that Mandrake had four cd's. I stopped the download after that reply. I can use KDE as well as Gnome. I haven't advanced far enough yet to try the others and really see what I like. For now I think it's enough to find a distro that:

a) Works
b) I can get familiar with
c) Does the job I need it to do (which is nothing spectacular)

As I've stated in other posts, the one problem I have with migrating totally to Linux is my need to have IE to access some web pages for my job (the most important being the page that allows me to input my time so I get paid!!!!) I know IE will work in Linux but as it says right under my name, I'm a :newbie: and haven't gotten to get it working yet. The issues I've had with K3B, finding a good DVD player (allowing me to view movies) and a good media player are things I can eventually tackle.

Again, I want to thank every one for their time and comments.

IE will work under WINE or a varient but it's not the best. And Totem is the default media player in FC (was in core 1 at least) and it great, it's what I use and I love it :D

Re: Cool
 

What happens when you access the pages with another browser?

You can set Opera to identify itself as IE, I have used this at a bank site that insisted on IE and it worked fine.

mark

ps <beware of plug>

This:
Makes it sound like Fedora might not be the right distro, remember that although it is cool, it is essentially a testing ground for the next Red Hat release.

If you are dual-booting and have the time to learn and read (quite) a bit then Slackware definitely works, is nice to get familiar with and certainly does the job :)
<end plug for my fav. distro>

Just my $0.02

mark

I'm glad you stopped. ;)

Mandrake is, and always will be, free. Fedora Core is free, Mandrake Download Edition is free. The only things that technically aren't free are the commercial apps that are supplied with the Powerpack/Powerpack Plus editions.

I download the free 3-CD set. Then I set up my urpmi (a tool for managing rpm files) sources to point to the latest official tree, and obtain my updates from there. *ALL* the free programs are available on the urpmi mirrors, including everything on the "4th CD", as well as all the free Powerpack software.

For mrmcctt: if you are comfortable with FC, I would say stick with it, unless you want to try something different. ;) I personally love MDK, and prefer it over FC, but that is just preference. If staying with FC3 is your comfort zone, by all means go with it. :)

Oh, and I would *TRY* another browser, like Opera, or Firefox. By spoofing the identifier, it just *might* work. Worth a shot. :)

i was misinformed about mandrakes price, i was told by rumor that you had to pay for it, but never looked for myself

and as far as i was aware of, according to some redhat employees was that fedora was the new free project by redhat, and that the redhat desktop os'es that we remember with rh7.2 and rh9 are gone and are replaced by fedora

redhat is now a company selling linux support for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems

therefore fedora is not really the testing ground, since there are no more redhat releases like there were

I made my decision
 

And that is to take Linux off my system for now. I am going through the same things I went through with my first install.

After my initial installation of Linux I went through hoops getting the wireless card working, getting access to my ntfs partition, getting my wireless network up, etc...

Then someone told me about the YUM Update. Great, I thought. I can keep this OS up to date fairly easy. After the update I went through hoops getting the wireless card working, getting access to my ntfs partition, getting my wireless network up, etc... Everything reverted back to pre-update status. New kernel, I guess.

Then I hear that Fedora has Core 3 out. Cool. Kinda like going from Win95 to Win98. Some fixes, some upgrades, more ease of use.

Now I'm back to the stage of jumping through hoops getting the wireless card working, getting access to my ntfs partition, getting my wireless network up, etc... and it still didn't fix a thing with the display resolution. I even downloaded an updated driver from Intel, followed the instructions for installing it and every time I tried to do an RPM or Make Install (I tried both the rpm and then the tar) I would ls the directory where the files were, copy the file after the appropriate command and I was told that the file whose name I had just copied from the directory I was in did not exist. Go figure. (Yes I was in root, yes x server was off, I read carefully and printed out the installation instructions from Intel.)

I'll be back to Linux eventually. Probably after the holidays when things aren't quite so crazy. That's all I need is to have my computer turn me into Scrooge.

This post is not to start a flame war and I'm still really interested in Linux so I will try it again someday. This post was to thank everyone who took the time to give some advice and a little help when needed.

yea, linux and wireless dont mix very well, unless its a linksys wireless card, cause they aparantly release linux drivers

unfortunately, linksys cards are hardly ever on sale, therefore me and a majority of the population dont have linksys cards, so yes, wireless is an issue in linux

if only companies would release more specs on wireless products

Actually
 

It was a Linksys wpc11 ver.4. What got me was that I had to reinstall the ndiswrapper and the realtek driver for no apparent reason. The previous install was still where I left it (can't remember at the moment) but the system wouldn't recognize it until I reinstalled all of it.

Really I'm just getting frustrated with having to "reinvent the wheel" almost every time I upgrade/update something. The driver and the ndiswrapper had not changed at all (in terms of version) but still had to be reinstalled to work. Maybe it's just the distro I tried and I'll take some other peoples advice and try Mandrake or one of the other distros and see if I have better luck.