Mandrake 9.2
Mandrake has produced a polished product, comparing very favorably to RedHat Linux. Of course RHL is now a thing of the past for home users - its Fedora for those poor souls.
As you've surely read, I've been using Mandrake for years. Kudos go out to the Mandrake team. What a great product! Many improvements in the desktop, Journalizing file system, NTFS resizing and inclusion of OpenOffice 1.1 are some of the best features.
Ok, I'll stop trying to sound like a reviewer... I did a complete install on my Experimental box, which went perfectly, but the hard drive size kept me from doing the complete install sans Apache as I've no real need here at home on a dial-up. Of course there are tons more applications, languages support to install.
So now on to the main machine....
I tried the upgrade process of MDK 9.1, but I ran into the usual bugs migrating into the new install. This was easy enough to fix however. I simply popped in the first CD , rebooted and chose the Install option (not upgrade).
And, I know it goes without saying, always backup your data (~/user(s) ) when doing an installation, especially an upgrade of the OS.
Once the installation started, I selected the partitions to install to. This is the critical trick I always do prior to starting the install. To make it easy, I printed copy (# df > lpr) of my partitions to have for this very critical task - something especially importante if you have more than one Hard Disk with multiple partitions (yea, that's me 2 drives, one 80GB, one 160GB). All that room for multiple distribution testing...you can tell I need more space.
So... continuing on....
I selected the previous location for /boot , /, /home, swap and all my other partitions. I then made sure the installer didn't format the /home or data partitions or other OS (Fedora). Yea, gotta explore the other distributions.
I then selected the packages I wanted installed; a process which somehow seems to take longer from distro to distro - way too many applications, and that's just on the Download edition (once I get it fully tested, of course I'll go out an buy a copy).
Now I started the actual install and about 15-20 min later I made a boot diskette. ALWAYS have one of these in hand – something could go wrong and you are left to boot using the install CD, which has a so-so rescue mode. A better way of emergency booting a system is with the boot diskette.
Prior to installing I had obtained the Contribs, updates and complete distribution directories from one of my favorite FTP mirror services.... ibiblio.org (I have access to a DVD burner for such monster file collections, so the process was easier to upgrade and enhance the basic distribution. Of course there's lots of good stuff included on the 3 discs, but I've always been one to push the limit and rapidly fill my root partition.
A few things to add: contribs/updates. Search ibiblio.org or google.
xine support for encrypted DVDs
xine plugins
xmms plugins (keyboard, mplayer, etc).
realplayer
gimp development version (bleeding edge)
games
Mandrake has produced a polished product, comparing very favorably to RedHat Linux. Of course RHL is now a thing of the past for home users - its Fedora for those poor souls.
As you've surely read, I've been using Mandrake for years. Kudos go out to the Mandrake team. What a great product! Many improvements in the desktop, Journalizing file system, NTFS resizing and inclusion of OpenOffice 1.1 are some of the best features.
Ok, I'll stop trying to sound like a reviewer... I did a complete install on my Experimental box, which went perfectly, but the hard drive size kept me from doing the complete install sans Apache as I've no real need here at home on a dial-up. Of course there are tons more applications, languages support to install.
So now on to the main machine....
I tried the upgrade process of MDK 9.1, but I ran into the usual bugs migrating into the new install. This was easy enough to fix however. I simply popped in the first CD , rebooted and chose the Install option (not upgrade).
And, I know it goes without saying, always backup your data (~/user(s) ) when doing an installation, especially an upgrade of the OS.
Once the installation started, I selected the partitions to install to. This is the critical trick I always do prior to starting the install. To make it easy, I printed copy (# df > lpr) of my partitions to have for this very critical task - something especially importante if you have more than one Hard Disk with multiple partitions (yea, that's me 2 drives, one 80GB, one 160GB). All that room for multiple distribution testing...you can tell I need more space.
So... continuing on....
I selected the previous location for /boot , /, /home, swap and all my other partitions. I then made sure the installer didn't format the /home or data partitions or other OS (Fedora). Yea, gotta explore the other distributions.
I then selected the packages I wanted installed; a process which somehow seems to take longer from distro to distro - way too many applications, and that's just on the Download edition (once I get it fully tested, of course I'll go out an buy a copy).
Now I started the actual install and about 15-20 min later I made a boot diskette. ALWAYS have one of these in hand – something could go wrong and you are left to boot using the install CD, which has a so-so rescue mode. A better way of emergency booting a system is with the boot diskette.
Prior to installing I had obtained the Contribs, updates and complete distribution directories from one of my favorite FTP mirror services.... ibiblio.org (I have access to a DVD burner for such monster file collections, so the process was easier to upgrade and enhance the basic distribution. Of course there's lots of good stuff included on the 3 discs, but I've always been one to push the limit and rapidly fill my root partition.
A few things to add: contribs/updates. Search ibiblio.org or google.
xine support for encrypted DVDs
xine plugins
xmms plugins (keyboard, mplayer, etc).
realplayer
gimp development version (bleeding edge)
games
posted by nomasteryoda at
6:10 PM
