[luau] Which Distribution To Go With

Eric Hattemer hattenator at imapmail.org
Tue Nov 4 19:08:01 PST 2003


I firmlly believe that no one should comment on distributions they 
haven't tried and know little about.  I've alternated between Mandrake 
and redhat every year for the last several years.  I use Mandrake 
because its better, and Redhat every time Warren claims its better 
because of some kernel improvement or fedora, etc.  I firmly believe 
average people would like Mandrake a lot better.  But then again, it 
depends a ton on what you're using it for.  If you want a very unixy 
system reminiscent of 1965, there are better solutions (ie. solaris, 
openBSD (and yes, I've used both of these)),  But if you want a home 
user system with movie programs, tv programs, and office programs that 
actually work together, you might want to look at Mandrake.  It had 
urpmi way before redhat had apt-rpm.  The installer has always been 
better.  It decides what changes you make to packages will effect 
dependencies for other packages in realtime.  It detects your video card 
properly and will use vesafb if its unsupported.  Redhat<8 will hardlock 
in the installer on certain geForce cards (mobile and nforce). 

Mandrake is nearly 100% compatible with redhat rpms.  In the worst case, 
you may need to find a .src.rpm and rebuild it.  Because of this, it has 
plenty of programs available.  Probably not as many as debian, but if 
you can think of something its missing, let me know. 

Now if you're upset about the webadmin system of administration, that's 
one of many optional packages to do system administration.  I'm doubtful 
that many people use it.  Linuxconf is available, along with the gnome 
and kde control panels.  All of these get their settings from files in 
/etc and dont' really cache these settings, so you can seemlessly use 
both these and edit /etc files.  I don't know what someone might want 
from an administration tool, but the mandrake control center is top 
notch.  It has gui menus for so much that redhat does not.  The printer 
control panel detects your printer, then automatically can install rpms 
for relevant things like cups or lpr.  Then it updates programs like 
mozilla to use that new printer.  I was amazed that I still haven't 
found a graphical default runlevel editor for redhat (although I do know 
how to do it manually). 

Once you get used to single boot diskette based network installs for 
redhat, mandrake, and debian, its hard to go back to downloading 
gigabytes of CDs unless you already own the CDs or are installing many 
machines. 

-Eric Hattemer

Tom_Gordon/RISE/HIDOE at notes.k12.hi.us wrote:

>Mandrake is just a shittier version of Red Hat.  I've not used the 
>drake-fly distro because of it's insistence that web-based GUI are 
>acceptable means for system administration.  Did you know Mandrake was 
>once just a modified version of Red Hat Linux?
>  
>




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