Mandrake vs. RedHat
Jonathan Hutchins
hutchins at opus1.com
Sun Oct 7 18:26:33 CDT 2001
On Sun, 2001-10-07 at 10:40, zscoundrel wrote:
> I started with Red Hat and then tried Mandrake...
You must've had one of the first commercial releases or something. I've
only ever heard about Mandrake being promoted as a Pentium-optimized
distribution (originally of RedHat). It would be possible to recompile
the kernel for a 486, but kindof beside the point and you'd need a
working machine to do it with, chicken-and-egg sort of thing.
Distributions have been working on auto-installers for a couple of years
now, they've gone from "sometimes this works for some people" to "this
usually ends up with a usable workstation", which is Mandrake's current
state.
There are still oddball hardware combinations that won't work,
particularly older video stuff, but I've heard that most of the post 7
version distros will usually end up running X with a fairly default
install.
I would recommend anyone trying a new distribution start with either a
downloaded .iso or a Cheapbytes or similar discount disk, and certainly
not try to convert a production machine to the new distro. Either
install it to a new partition in multi-boot mode or find a spare
machine.
(I started with a v.1 release of RedHat, and it was a real compost heap,
believe me. No docs, nothing worked.)
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