Re: Mandrake 10 vs. Suse 9.1

From: David Jones (dj_at_nospam.com)
Date: 05/20/04 

Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 13:54:16 GMT

Peter Tröhlmann wrote:
> Anyway, as I said, I'll probably tinker with 9.1 on my spare partition,
> waiting to see if Suse get their act together and/or the Linux community fix
> the 2.6 kernel's many bugs. The next distro I want to play with is Mandrake
> 10, or rather 10.1 or 10.2.
>
> Mandrake, a French distro, seems like it might be a better piece of software
> at the moment. I've been monitoring the alt.os.linux.mandrake group and they
> seem most satisfied with the distro, although some of the same bugs are
> apparent there too.
>
> Anyone had experience of this new distro and can do a comparison?

Me.

Suse 9.0 Pro, Mandrake 10.0 (Community). IBM T23 and T41p laptops.
Mandrake rules. I ditched SuSE because they do not support external mice
on laptops. Literally a desktop operating system, then. What a shame. Oh
well, Novell have them now, so a betting man would say they will focus
on corporate rather than home users. Like Redhat now does (they sold out
of the home computing competition).

I installed Mandrake 10.0 without any problems or delays except my
confusion at the video test screen. It was not 100% clear that seeing
rows upon rows of rainbow indicated a positive test.

I did only one Linux "expert" thing and pre-checked my video card model
before doing the installations. I learned from Google that with the T23
I had to use a generic driver. Nothing about problems with the T41p's
driver, so in that case I chose the driver specific to the card. Worked.
High res. T41p is top end.

I don't play games (graphics acceleration), nor use Wireless yet (too
insecure; I simply purchased a 15 m ethernet cable and hopefully won't
kill myself on it, but I CAN now browse the web from my couch, cos
there's nothing bloody on the TV, except world news), so to me Mandrake
10.0 out-performs my XP partition. My XP is by now mysteriously booting
slower and this evening suffered its first blue screen crash. Only three
months new. I complained to the supplier, IBM. They told me my only
choice was to restore. At that, restore CDs cost $90, and aren't like
off-the-shelf XP CDs, which I was told I was free to buy if I wanted no
OEM "known bugs" or issues.

Aside: When you buy pre-loaded XP, you can't take your friend's XP disk,
re-install, and type-in the serial number on the sticker underneath. She
don't work. You must use the OEM CD and go through the automated
recovery process and hope for the best.

Bottom line, if you use XP, be very careful about saving any data to
disk, and don't install any other non-pre-packaged software.

Otherwise, it's a fine operating system when it works.

To resume, my Mandrake behaves now as it did right after installation.
Very snappy. Crisp display. Reliable. Simple to use. Load off my shoulders.

DJ

Relevant Pages

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