[plug] When is the next installfest?

[David & Lisa Buddrige]

>Anyway, have you tried the new Debian installer? I have just has a look
>at the Debian web site, and, the Beta 2 of the new Debian installer,
>which instals Debian testing, is now available (as of yesterday, I
>believe). It may be worth trying.
>

When I first bought the laptop 18 months ago, I had initially planned to
install it with Debian.  I went down to UCC, but after several hours of
messing around trying to get the video drivers to work, I gave up and later
installed Mandrake 9.

I am now wanting to install Abiword 2.0 and also to install software for my
new Kodak EasyShare CX6230 Digital Camera- both of which require later
libraries than those that came with bog-standard Mandrake 9.

I tried downloading the various software it required, but got in this loop
where it would say "need X", so I'd attempt to download X and it would say
needs "y".  But I already had a (too early) version of y, and since KDE (and
just about everything else) depended on it, it was a bugger to try to
upgrade (although I was probably going about it the wrong way - installing
from source).  Anyway, the apt-get system seemed a much easier way to fix
this.  I was thinking if it ran Debian I could just connect it to the
network, apt-get the main package I wanted and Debian would do all the hard
work of getting the dependencies sorted out for me.

Perhaps there's a better way, but as a Redhat user since 5.0, the only tool
that I was familiar with was rpm -i for installing, and rpm -e for
uninstalling.  Mandrake, being an rpm distro, seemed sufficiently like
Redhat to be familiar to me.  But I must admit, I haven't kept up-to-date
with the install tools - does Mandrake have an equivilent to apt-get -
preferrably one where you don't have to pay to connect to the Mandrake
website to get the packages down.

thanks heaps everyone for their help on this. 8-)

David.