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I haven't tested as many distros as most Linux gurus, hence the first version of Linux I used was Red Hat 7. Needless to say, I wasn't that impressed with it since at the time Linux wasn't as half as sophisticated as it is now. When I bought my AMD64 chip I wanted to use the 64-bit features for my chip and as you all know Windows is not in the 64-bit world right now for desktops. So I purchased Mandrake Linux AMD64 9.2 and thought it was a nice system, but far too buggy. I like my Suse 9.1 Pro system, but I wanted to give Mandrake another go. Here is the config of my main system:

Asus Kv8 deluxe
AMD64 3200+ 2.0GHZ
1GB of 3200 RAM
100 GB HDD IDE Western Digital
74 GB Western Digital Raptor
Ati Radeon 9800 Pro
Sound Blaster Audigy
Samsung 19inch LCD monitor
Pioneer 8X DVD reader Slot drive
Plextor 8x DVD burner
Zip drive 250

Mandrake Linux x64
Kernel 2.6.8
KDE 3.2.3
GNOME 2.6

The point of my system was to have a duel boot config. My Windows partition is loaded on my 75GB Raptor since its my 10,000RPM drive for games so I need the speed. I use the 100GB HDD for my Mandrake Linux side. I didn't want to use the whole 100GB for Linux so I partitioned it in half and put the Linux on one side and a FAT32 partition on the other. What this will do is allow both OS's to use and write to the FAT32 partition so it could share space and files. I know Linux could read the NTFS system, but as far as I know it's not able to write to it. So I set in my bios that the primary HDD would be my 100GB WD.

Mandrake came in a nice professional blue box with the Mandrake symbol on it. A nice touch considering the last time I ordered the 64-bit version it was sent to me in a mailer with no box or instructions at all. Inside the box was two books. One book was a starter kit explaining all the main apps and windows managers and the other, a more in depth overview of Linux commands and tools. This is something that Suse has always done well and im happy to say Mandrake has followed their lead. Everything was explained well and organized in such a way that you didn't have to be an expert to install the software. With my software ready to go I placed my DVD in the drive and fired things up.

Mandrake gave me the typical install blue screen to go right into the install and then it gave me the option to go into a help menu. I could start up with no hardware detection or failsafe and what have you. Since I'm familiar will Mandrakes install I chose normal and went ahead. It brought me to where it wanted to know what language to load and I choose English, because anything else would've been a problem. I accepted the license agreement and then I am suppose to select if this is an upgrade or a full install. I never do an upgrade really. For me it's a lot safer to just load from scratch to avoid any conflicts from a previous installation. I then chose my US keyboard layout and then, told it I wanted a standard security level and decided I would put my installation on my existing partition that I setup. It then gives me a bunch of choices concerning packages. If you dont know what you want, pick the basics you can always load the packages later if you decide you need something.

1. "Mandrake 10.1 for x86, Page 1/2"
2. "Mandrake 10.1 for x86, Page 2/2"