Linked by Michael Fraser on Sat 29th Mar 2003 03:21 UTC
When I first started playing with Linux (RedHat Distribution -- Version 5.2 Deluxe), it was a present from a father's friend in Boston. As I recall that is the only version of RedHat I ever got to work correctly without any major problems (like "Kernel Segmentation Error" or something to that effect).
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I just install it 2 days ago. Hardware: Celeron 1.2 ghz, 512 meg ram, 1 80g WD SE HD, 1 40 g WD HD, sb live! platinum with live drive, ati radeon 9000 128M, 3com nic, cd and cdrw drives, abit st6 mb. Install had one hitch, the sb live! was set to use the audigy() driver, I changed it during install to the correct driver. Thanks to XFree86 4.3, the radeon card was setup fine to do 1280x1024 on my 21" Phillips monitor. After reboot, all hardware was working with the exception of the live drive (I use headphones connected to the 1/4" jack on the live drive during late hours).
I brought up KDE and it looks very nice, the galaxy theme is the best theme Mandrake has used, and I personally like it better than RedHat's bluecurve. The font rendering is also very nice. I have a collection of truetype fonts and installing them is always one of the first things I do. These fonts live on a Windows 2000 server on my network so I fired up LinNeighborhood and mapped a few drives with no problem and copied over the fonts. I used drakefont to install the fonts but there is a problem here. When you select advanced options and browse for a folder, the text box that is supposed to change to the path you browse to, doesn't. It never changes from it's default text which says something like "select folder...". You have to delete that text and manually type the path. Then it works fine, it's an annoyance at most. Also, I should point out that I installed the fonts while in KDE, but later I loaded up gnome and the fonts were not available. I had to create a .fonts directory in my home folder and copy them there.
Most apps seemed to work fine and seemed pretty snappy. I did have some problems with kde locking up, in fact it locked up to the point I had to do a hard reset, I could not kill X and had not gotten around to setting up ssh yet. So I changed to Gnome, which I'm beginning to like more and more.
Overall I thought the overall speed felt on par with Windows 2000 which is also on the same machine and faster than RedHat 8.0 which had been on the machine. Then today I installed FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 with KDE 3.2 and Gnome 2.2. After using it for a couple of hours and rebooting into Mandrake, Mandrake felt positively snail-like. Conclusion: This is the best Mandrake to date, it's not perfect, but judged on ease of use, ease of install, and most complete feeling overall package, it has set the bar for RedHat 9 and SuSE 8.2.
final thought: FreeBSD 4.8 is simply amazing...