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Okay, so I finally got my hands on a copy of Mandrake 9.1.
I plan to install it next week after I've upgraded my hardware. I'm thinking of going for a dual boot setup with Win Xp pro as the other OS.
I've chosen Mandrake because most revues say that it's the best distro for the rank Linux beginner. But before I get in too deep, is there any advice that anybody here thinks I could benefit from?
Apart from the always popular "Dont!" :P
read lots about it first. ;)
google should give you enough reading material about linux.
Yeah, I know it... I've been doing just that over the last couple of weeks.. I was thinking more along the lines of personal experiences and the like from folks here that are using Mandrake now.Quote:
read lots about it first.
google should give you enough reading material about linux.
Guess I should've said that to begin with.
Btw, I've always liked that sig 4play. Couldn't agree more. B)
(Edit: typos)
Mandrake is even more easier to use than redhat. I like redhat, freebsd, and netbsd. The last two arent that user friendly, but what the hell who needs user friendly when your a linux guru like me. :D
I like Gentoo. It's probably the most non user friendly distro but I got through it :D
While I was researching which distro to go for, I saw quite a lot of people saying that Slackware was up there as one of the most challenging distros you could get...
Na, gentoo has to be. You have to configure and install everything from scratch. There isn't any fancy install gui or anything, just a framebuffer command prompt >_<
Here you are going to need THIS after you realize you do not want it and get rid of it.
Cuz you will not remember to set the boot manager back
I personally prefer Red hat to Mandrake. Red hats easier for teh beginner because of the massively larger amount of support u can get for it. Go to any bookstore and see how many books they've got on mandrake and compare it to the number on red hat. Go to any hardware manufacturers website and chances are if they support linux then the distro they support is red hat. (the bigger manufacturers usually support mandrake as well, but i had problems getting support for some of my newer hardware).
In terms of installation they're about as easy as each other and red hat's default boot manager (can't remember name) is way easier to set up and use than lilo which is what mandrake (at least up to version 9.0) uses.
u can get it at linuxiso.org