[plug] Mandrake 9.1

[Richard Meyer]

----- Forwarded by Richard Meyer/Australia/Contr/IBM on 09/05/2003 10:42 AM
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                      Tim Bowden                                                                                                    
                      <bowden at iinet.net        To:       plug at plug.linux.org.au                                                     
                      .au>                     cc:                                                                                  
                                               Subject:  Re: [plug] Mandrake 9.1                                                    
                      09/05/2003 10:33                                                                                              
                      AM                                                                                                            
                      Please respond to                                                                                             
                      plug                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                    




>I have installed (or tried to) Mandrake twice- and both times I didn't
>like it.  The first time in mid 2000 (what version would that have
>been?) I had to do some fiddling with the partition table (1024 cyl
>limit stuff with duel boot) and I needed fdisk-   that was as far as I
>got before going back to rh in disgust.  If it wasn't going to provide
>decent tools in the installer then I wasn't interested.

This is amazing. It's when I install RH, that I get whinges about
misaligned partitions, and unable to install LILO because the partition
isn't on a cylinder boundary, etc. SuSE and Mandrake (and Windows FWIW)
just install where I tell them. As I result I tend to think of RH as being
unnecessarily fussy.

>The second time was about 6 or 8 months ago when I installed it for a
>friend.  It was ok but it seemed to tell me less about what it was doing
>than rh does which I didn't like.

In what way? (not antagonistic - I'd like to know)

> Does mandrake still dislike 486's?  Does it do a decent text based
>install?  If I'm putting linux on an old box then it sometimes won't
>have the grunt to do a gui install.

Mandrake's always had a bit of a problem with older hardware. Remember that
they started out in the early Pentium days, offering RH with all RH
references changed to Mandrake, but with more bleeding edge packages and
kernels optimised for Pentium. Just the way they positioned themselves. Ran
faster on a Pentium than bog standard RH did.

Haven't tried the text based install.

>Just my 2c worth

>Tim  Bowden

RichardM