If I have one criticism about the Linux community, it is the small, but vocal minority who seem to rank the quality of distributions inversely by their user friendliness. Having cut my Linux teeth on Red Hat 5.0 [Hurricane] circa 1998 (a relatively easy install for the time by FTP) I don’t consider myself a complete newbie, but I’m miffed by those who flaunt installations of more challenging distributions like a badge of courage.
Criticized by some as a “newbie distribution”, Mandrake is definitely guilty of being painfully, excruciatingly simple to install, because it uses Red Hat’s Anaconda installer. More importantly to me, it came ready to work with the features I wanted (2.6.8 kernel, X 6.7, KDE 3.2.3, OpenOffice 1.1.3, and a lot of other useful, thoughtful pre-installed packages). Your milage may vary, but remember that any Linux distribution is just a starting point. Linux is like a Lamborghini chassis – a great framework to add as much horsepower as you want, while removing the parts you can live without. To get you started, Mandrake offers many categories of packages you can select or unselect depending on your intended uses (games, multimedia, productivity, internet, server, etc.).
My installation was on an old AMD Athlon/800, stripped of its decent ATI All-In-Wonder and SIIG Soundblaster-compatible card (which went to my daughter’s computer). I plugged in an ancient S3 Trio64+ 2MB video card as a replacement, and all went smoothly despite the fact that it was not supported for a graphical install (not surprising), but the install proceeded normally in text mode. Oddly, Mandrake selects LILO as the default bootloader. Choose GRUB instead – you’ll never regret it. Because of my video card, it was necessary to configure X in text mode after the main install using Mandrake’s “DrakConf”, but this took 2 minutes. While DrakConf said that the Trio64 was not officially supported, X was still able to load the KDE 3.2.3 desktop without problems (1024×768).
Installed as a dual-booted configuration onto a 6GB ATA/33 drive, Linux’s performance is not noticeably different on the same computer when it’s booted into Win XP from a 160GB UltraATA/133 drive. Makes me wonder how fast Mandrake would fly on a more recent hardware. I guess I’ll find out on my next computer. Free / open source software has evolved to the point where it is difficult, if not impossible, to justify paying for the next update of Windows or Microsoft Office. Were I not a graduate student getting most of this software free through the University, I probably would have already gone 100% Linux by now.
Happy hacking.
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