I am considering switching from Debian Sarge to Mandrake. Partially because of the automount feature, partially because I think it will be easier for me to use. (I am new to Linux)

If you think I should switch to Mandrake, is there any version that is superior(sp?) to the others, or is the most recent the best?

the recent is the best. im new too, only been a month but i havent had a single big problem. i had some small ones but this forums helped me a lot

Yep, the most recent is the best.

If you switch to Mandrake for automount feature... be aware it works very badly.
You'll give a lot of error messages like unable to umount cdrom or if you'll be able to extract the media the newly inserted won't display contents and so on.

I don't know if on commercial mandrake is better but the free download edition especially the latest (10.1) you are thinking to install is so.

This is my experience!

Good Luck!

Give MEPIS b05 a try, it is based on debian so you should be used to it. Automount works good for me.

from what I have read/seen ubuntu>mepis and are both debian based.

I find automount on my system quite solid. Last weekend I catalogued over 40 backup cd and dvd's on disksearch software. That is 40 automounts in a row, between a dvd and cd rom without any screw ups. The only flakeyness I have found is on a Rio Cali Mp3 player, it automounts both internal memory and the sdcard, if it is removed and remounted during the same session it only mounts the sdcard. No big deal to me. Also never fails my intelligent sticks. It works pretty good on my hardware. If you have the room, maybe leave Debian on your drive and add Mandrake so you can try it out and decide which you like better.

I had no problems with automount as long as i used Mandrake. But i have another suggestion. Try SuSE 9.2. I think it is better for newbies, only partitioning may be a bit trickier for inexperience, and if you can do that, you will get a better experience than Mandrake.

I use Gentoo and supermount compiled in the kernel. It works like a charm. The version that my old Mandrake used was very buggy. Sometimes I would have to reboot to eject the CD. Not good at all.

Hope that helps you decide what to do.

Later

I have had no problems with mounting my disks, even USB keydrives in Mandrake. I wish my Windows computer worked as well.

"I have had no problems with mounting my disks, even USB keydrives in Mandrake. I wish my Windows computer worked as well. CluelessSteve wrote"

Yes,CluelessSteve you haven't had trouble with supermount because you have buy your distro.

CluelessSteve
Distribution: Mandrake 10.1 official

Maybe Mandrake take care only to do good distro to sell and doesn't take care of free downloadable version.

I've tried 10.0 community (free) edition and it works good.
So I decided to try 10.1 Connunity x86_64 (I've paid for an Athlon64 and I want to use it).

Supermount works badly,no DVD decryption support,no driver (I've got Speedtouch USB dsl) for uncommon device (i.e. NVidia or Ati).

That's why I wrote be aware from free downlodable Mandrake.

Supermount works excellent in the free downloadable Mandrake 10.1 Official Edition. Community Edition is a final beta version of the product. Official Edition is the final. Just because someone is using "Official Edition" doesn't mean they bought the "Powerpack" version.

I tried 10.1 OE but reverted back to 10.0 because there was a really strange problem with my S-ATA controller

Thank you all for the information. A friend of mine is buying the commercial version of Mandrake (he weedled the money off his parents :P) and will let me install from his disks. So, once they get here I will switch over and see how I like it. I still have Debian Sarge on a disk just in case I really don't like it.