no mandrake is still supported .. red hat is not

Huh?

What are you talking about?

sorry i miss understood speel's comments bout Red hat and mandrake not being supported any more. What do you mean by Mandrake being bloated?

Speel uses another distro.

As such his personal leanings are to that distro.

Like most biased users, he is asserting an attibute which IMHO is not there to a competing distro.

He states that "Mandrake is bloated".

Hmmm. No more or less so than any other distro.

Mandrake like most distros can be installed in a mimimal configuration producing a svelt operating environment.

What Speel overlooks however, is that most Mandrake users are not looking for a "light" distribution. If so we would all be running things like Peanut, Puppy or other distributions which are targetted to small footprint systems.

e.g. that they require minimal resources and install minimal programs.

Mandrake has a relatively HUGE repository of add-ons available to it.

If you add in everything then you indeed need a larger amount of disk space, a good amount of memory, fast CPU and good video card to run all of this.

So if you "feed" your Mandrake install too much, it will get bloated, hence my anthropomorphic analogy.

However this is not a bad thing.

I like having this huge mass of software available to me for free.

All of this software is trivially easy to install with URPMI/RPMdrake -AFTER- you set up your URPMI sources.

what was being said in a round about way is Red Hat is no longer supported for the desk top user. Red Hat now caters to commercial users, and it kind of branched off. Fedora Core 3 or whatever number it is currently is the desktop version of the old Red Hat so to speak.

Bloat is just personal opinion. Ubuntu would be said to be bloated by Peanut linux users. I suppose bloat is the extras Mandrake puts in such as drake tools etc, to make it instantly useable and administerable by the newbie. It is all in what you are looking for and the hardware you have to work with. I suggest you try both out and decide for yourself. Another deciding factor for me is always how good is my support net, so check out the available forums for any distro you plan to try to see if there are people there to help with your problems.

i see i see. Does anyone have any idea how to use Partition Magic to make a partition for Linux (any distribution, lets say SuSe in this example) without deleting everything on my windows partition?

Re: Partition Magic

The easiet thing to do is to use Partition Magic to free up space for Linux.

Let's say you have a 200 gig drive which is currently all allocated to Winblows.

Your best bet then is to resize the existing Windows Partiton to say, 100 gigs.

Then leave the rest as unallocated space.

Boot up Mandrake.

When you get to the partitioning wizard, manually allocate a NEW partition for SWAP about equal to 1.5 times the amount of RAM you have.

Then create a single ReiersFS (my preferance) or EXT3 partition out of the rest of the drive.

This should be mounted as root "/".

Format the root partition when indicated and proceed with your installation.

When you get to the grub/lilo setup make SURE that you tell it to install the boat loader into the
MASTER BOOT RECORD not the partition!

This will cause the newly installed bootloader to come up first.

From it you can start either Linux or Winblows.

You can even leave Winblows as a default, so that your system will automatically fall through to Windows if no one touches the keyboard during boot up.

I installed Suse Instead and the installation went well i must say. One problem though, i am having trouble configuring Suse 9.1 personal to recognize my Verizon DSL. My DSL modem is a Westell VersaLink Model 327W. I played around with the DSL configuration settings in the YaST configuration program on Suse and it did let me connect to my email but when i tried to connect to some sites it would just sit there and it wouldnt connect. Any suggestions? in other words it was running REALLY slow for a DSL modem.

Try this:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...13#post1255613

I think thats only for Mozilla browsers, whereas i am using Konqueror. I tried going to about:config but still that gives me problems because it brings me to the about:konqueror page instead. What should i do?

Post in the SUSE forums.

I disagree with that statement. Some distros are unequivocally better for certain uses. One distro that lots of people seem to be complaining about recently (and this is not simply an artefact of greater installed user base, although figures are hard to come by), is Suse. Incidentally, I've never had a positive experience with it - despite the fact I use German hardware!
In the same way as there is good and bad software design, there are good and bad distros. Of course, the distros that do get mentioned are the ones that stand above the rest: Slackware, Debian, Mandrake, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Mepis, Gentoo, ...
So to repeat something trivial: it depends what you want to do with it, which is exemplified by the existence of specialised distros like fli4l and smoothwall.

Regards,

Samsara

"will the partitioning utility on Mandrake's install cd, reformat my entire harddrive before making the linux partition?"

Not if you don't want it to...
It can if you want it to.
If Windows is on the drive, it will leave part of the drive for Windows, and create partitions for Linux - if you want it to.