hi,
I 've been running mantriva 10.1 for a while now, and I'm wondering if there are any benefits downloading 10.2 limited edition, or going for something different like suse 10 (last time I tried to load suse 9.2 had problems with hardware.
Or do I stay put ? My linux machine is for general all round home usage.
Thanks

With later versions you get updated packages. Is it worth the effort? You will have to decide that. Have a look at the packages you use, and see what new features are in the updated packages.

Another distro? I guess the question is, does 10.1 do what you want? Are there short comings another distro will fix? If you just want to try another distro, and you have the disk space, dual boot and keep 10.1, at least until you have any problems worked out of the new distro. I have Madrake 9.2 and 10.1 multi-booted with W98. I have kept 9.2 because I got my flat bed scanner working with it, and it does not work with 10.1. I do like 10.1. When I upgrade, I'll blow away 10.1 and use that disk space to install. BTW, the only reason I have kept W98 is the windoze software that came with my CD burner will burn video CD's (VCD's) and I have not been able to figure out how to do the same in linux. Sigh...

You will get lots of opinions on this one. Every one has their reasons. These are mine...

I am mostly pleased with Mandrake 10.1, haven't heard what's new in Mandriva 10.1 or 10.2, but the few points of improvement I'd suggest are:

1) make modem detection and setup auitomatic. At the present, a PCI hardware modem's info shows in hardware detection as an unknown device with port address base, and IRQ detected, but the device type is unknown, no driver is installed, and the device isn't added to the device list. These must be done manually using setserial, which isn't installed by default and isn't an accessible choice when installing Mandrake Linux.

2) I'd feel better if a data recovery and disk hardware maintenance program like Microsoft Scandisk or Spinrite by Gibson Research were available to operate on Linux partitions.

3) Debugging of everything from installation to applications should be an ongoing process, of course. I had an Xwindow crash a couple of months ago and it no longer started on booting, i.e., the startup config files lost that setting or file. Not knowing how to fix it from a Linux prompt, I had to reinstall. A crash shouldn't leave a system in such an altered state. Bug fixes should include keeping a few backup config files in case something stops working. In installation, a feature of Mandrake 8.x and maybe 9.x was that you could revert to a previous step in the installation if you didn't like how it was coming out. For example, suppose you made /usr much larger than needed in the partitioning step. In recent versions, you can't just go back to that step and change the sizes of partitions, you have to exit and restart the installation from scratch.

3) Maybe I'm missing something in the instructions, but I tried to install another version of Linux to co-exist with Mandrake 10.1 (or vice versa) and found that the second version wanted to use the same partitions as the first version. If I had a big enough disk, I might like to have separate spaces for current Mandriva, current Debian and Red Hat 5, for example. I heard of someone who wanted versions of Windows and Linux in maybe 3 languages on his system. Giving the user more control over installation if wanted would be an enhancement.

4) For developers, the vast collection of Linux libraries is like a candy store, but having a summary file describing each available library with links to the detailed docs for the libraries would be nice. The route of starting a package manager and reading the summaries from there is a bit tedious. My handiest reference is a Red Hat 6.1 manual with a chapter of package summaries.

5) Working with reference publishers like Britannica to make educational and reference works available on Linux would benefit all Linux distributions, I'm sure.

These are just incremental improvements I'd suggest for my favorite Linux distribution.

fsck is the Linux equivalent of scandisk and it runs automatically every so often or when you do a hard-reboot. As for spinrite what exactly does it do? If a harddrive is going to fail there's nothing any piece of software can do (except backup the data to somewhere else), its a problem with the physical components of the drive. Like all those memory freeing programs for Windows Spinrite seems like a case of a product with sensationalist marketing which as very questionable benefits - http://www.grcsucks.com/spinrite.htm

This section of the manual (on the Mandrvialinux website) might have helped: http://doc.mandrivalinux.com/Mandriv...ubleshooting-x

Every Linux distro I've ever installed forced you to specify the mount point of the root partition during the install process, that's all you have to do to get it to install on another partition.

Regarding Spinrite, one of the things it does is refresh the boundaries marked by low-level formatting. In data recovery, it uses a statistical method based on multiple passes to try to recover data. It doesn't hurt to have a program that can do low-level testing, refreshing and data recovery.

What exactly does that mean? Can you explain it? Have you ever actually used it to recover data from a failed hard drive? No offence but it sounds like you just quoted their marketing materials there.