Joe Barr moves from Red Hat to Mandrake Linux and writes about his experiences.
Moving from Red Hat to Mandrake
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Why is everyone bashing RedHat? They basicly changed the name from Red Hat Linux to Fedora. Whats the Big deal? With fedora you get a FREE version of RHN.
It’s not like they set redhat linux on fire and said go to h*ll.
get over it people. If you want to be stupid and just get all @nal regarding the name change then just install Fedora and get blown away.. Fedora is like Red Hat on speed…
later
Based on my many painful experiences with Mandrake, I could never recomend it to anybody, not even folks I hate. Unless of course you’re the sort of person that likes to fix broken things. If you are, you get a new toy to play with every release.
Red Hat has also done a number of things that have irked me greatly, but at least they have shown some measure of improvement over the years. I’m playing with Fedora Core 1 right now, and altogether it’s not that bad.
It’s a pain in the butt to get nVidia drivers to work though, as the kernel was compiled with a different version of GCC than the one that’s installed (Red Hat’s done that before, irritating). At least Tux Racer has sound again… :/
Yeah I dunno really. I administrate approx. 100 slackware based servers during the day at work. At home I use distros that are a little more ‘end user’ oriented; I’ve used Mandrake, SuSE, RedHat mainly at home over the years while also checking out some of the newer smaller community distros . I love OS’s
I recently changed over to Fedora…I really like it & the combo of yum or apt makes it sweet. Fedora has the more current apps now, unlike RedHat of past. All the fuss over ‘being a beta tester’, ‘no support’, etc. What the heck? If you grab the Mandrake Download iso’s, or something similar, are you getting support from them…no. You’d need to join their Mandrake Club (which I am a member of). So what’s the difference with RedHat really, I don’t get it myself? To each their own, but heck ya can’t expect someone to provide free services…
He scratched SuSE of the list because it might undergo changes after being purchased by Novell, yet he chooses Mandrake a company known to have financial problems?
I tried Mandrake 9.2 off the Linux Format cover DVD, and it does work but it had some niggling problems which SuSE 9.0 (which I had paid 40 quid for) did not have, namely bad font handling in Mozilla, and misconfigured Emacs (X and GNU). Also its service for connecting to the internet is faulty; I had to start my connection (with a Speedtouch DSL) manually with ‘pppd call adsl’, as root, while SuSE lets you run Q/KInternet as a common user. If Mandrake can get these basic problems sorted they would have a really great distro.
I’ve ran Mandrake since 7.1. I recently switched to SUSE and have been 99.995% happy. So far the configuration tools and update utilities have performed perfectly. Having used Mandrake from 7.1 up to 9.2, I continually had problems with the Drake tools. They tended to be buggy and cause new problems (One problem involving random menu changes requiring me to occasionally run MenuDrake).
SUSE feels faster and IMHO looks better than Mandrake as well. The only downside to SUSE was the FTP install compared to the Mandrake FTP install. I had to manually configure my NIC (which wasn’t difficult, but just surprising). In addition, the FTP install felt like an after thought in SUSE. I realize I could have purchased the CD set at a store, however I didn’t want to buy until I tried. Other than that, I have been pleasantly surprised by SUSE.
The reason I didn’t try Fedora Core 1 is due to the fact that I prefer KDE. I have felt with prior attempts to use RH, that Gnome was ther preferred DE. In addition, I don’t want to muck with the lack of MP3 support with the initial install (I also felt the SUSE provided the best software with the initial download. Yes, I know SUSE 9.0 has an older version of Gnome, but I don’t use it anyway.
). With SUSE, I only needed to add my CDRW drive to the fstab file using YaST and install the Nvidia driver.
I think the number of people complaining about poor Redhat getting flamed has actually surpassed the number of people actually flaming Redhat.
I mean, this guy literally mentions his reasons for switching in no more than 1/2 a paragraph in the entire review, and even goes out of his way to temper his comments in fairness to Redhat.
If he dared write an entire paragraph, he might very well be called a “Mandrake zealot”. Sheesh, folks, lighten up.
from most of the other distros out there.
I think that Red Hat did the last thing that it could do.
Too bad if what Red Hat did hurt you.
To me “Red Hat Desktop Linux” went bankrupt, and Fedora is what could be saved from it.
PS: I don’t think that it is funny to have 300 distros that don’t do the job well.
PPS: If GPL allows anyone to fork your job it may be too stressing for you to carry on.
Why is everyone bashing RedHat? They basicly changed the name from Red Hat Linux to Fedora. Whats the Big deal? With fedora you get a FREE version of RHN.
It’s not like they set redhat linux on fire and said go to h*ll.
get over it people. If you want to be stupid and just get all @nal regarding the name change then just install Fedora and get blown away.. Fedora is like Red Hat on speed…
It’s more of an issue that you cant buy support for the free version anymore. This detracts new enterprise users from trying it.
I am a Fedora basher because it has been a POS on every machine I’ve tried it on. I don’t have time to go around and fix every little bug on the 25 machines I administer. And Fedora is full of bugs, particularly on the KDE side.
It looks very nice, though.
Isn’t that like switching from Win98 to WinMe? Talk about jumping out of the pan and into the fire!
I switched from windows 2000 to redhat 7.3 some time ago(about 1 year or 1½), and at that point I was pretty much happy with dualbooting between win2k and redhat7.3, then came redhat 8.0 and out went win2k complety. Then redhat 9 came, and was in all a slight disappointment. Too many bugs from 8.0 was still there, and new ones had joined. The biggest eye-soar to me was that when running in my native language the up2date windows, runs in max resolution no matter what, making it 2x sizes bigger than the screen. Many other similar bugs, dispite bug reports being filed, weren’t corected and new ones where added. When fedora came I was, again, disappointed. The same bugs where still there, and KDE (my pref. x-window) was so amputated that it was useless pr. default…then i switched to Suse 9.0, and I am NEVER looking back….redhat is dead as a desktop distro for me.n This has nothing to do with its name change, simply just a lack of quality.
Linux is good, but it will never be anywhere near what Windows is today. Really come on, Windows on the Server and Windows on the end users pc makes any network easy to work with and it saves companies money in the long run. Why would you not want that? Plus you get good techs for cheap because every techie knows windows. Having a Linux guru would mean companies would have to pay more for a skilled Linux zealot. Not to mention scaring the CIO from firing them cause who would look after the Linux servers? I am glad the days of paying techs $95,000 a year, letting them get away with slack dress code, and doing basically anything they see fit for the IT department are over.
The shit that people are allowed to get away with on this site is amazing. Look at all of the pointless empty and hollow bashing.
Mandrake is an incredible distribution and the only one that I can wholeheartedly recommend. Not only were they the first true-to-the-GPL distribution that was easy to use, but they have stayed that way.
People who bash Mandrake have never used it
Windows saves money? The high cost of buying and supporting Microsoft products has been the key reason many of my clients have switched to Linux. As for getting good techs cheap, that’s a laugh. They may be cheap but they’re not good. Most of them braindumped their way through Microsoft’s simple MCSE exams. I’m a MCSE myself and I know how easy these tests are. Most of the Linux techs I encounter know more about Windows than Microsoft’s certified “engineers” do.
Linux is not hard to install or support. Anybody with a working brain can learn to do it. I’ve seen companies that are now testing for Linux knowledge even if they’re an all Windows shop. If they hire a Linux “zealot” they’re at least assured of getting a someone with real technical skills.
I must say, mandrake 9.2 is a vast improvment over 9.1
on MD 9.1 my computer never was able to get on the internet
now with 9.2 i can, i’ve run slack, bsd, red-h and SUSE as well i like redhat 8.0 for least bugs it just works, i LOVE
SUSE 8.2 but i will now give mandrake 9.2 the #2 spot over
redhat.
I had moved from RH to Mandrake because I remebered times when this distro was just RH + KDE. Well now things have changed, it has a lot of things but seemed to me very buggy. So I went to the newsstand to see which other distro I might install, there was a magazine with the Gentoo, and I wanted to give it a try. If you are used with distributions which configure everything it is not for you. You must configre everythnig manually and it takes ages, even with GRP-stage3 (that is from 2 CDs and no internet connection required, only the kernell will be compiled). At any rate the documentation is very good and if you follow the installation manual step by step you can’t do wrong, and in the end I have a system which is considerably faster than RH and Mandrake, and more stable. Configuring manually everything I know better how a Linux system works. Its an experience I suggest to all who want to know Linux a little more deeply.
Did anybody mention MS Windows? This article is about a switch from Red Hat to Mandrake. Some people…
*sigh*
Mr. Barr explained, why he wanted to switch: He wants a commercially supported consumer desktop GNU/Linux.
Mandrake, unlike Red Hat, offers such a thing and he had the installation media on his shelf. Off he goes. He is a jounalist and tries to make a living, so he writes an article about it. Next month he maybe runs Lollypop Linux 13 and writes an article about it. Why all this loyalty to one distro? Use what you want, it is your choice!
Choice, wow, man, i mean choice. Wow.
I get so sick and tired of everyone bashing the different operating systems and/or distros out there. I still run Windows when I have to, I run FreeBSD b/c it is different, and I recently went back to Mandrake after 1 year using Slackware and SuSE. My computer has really new hardware on it that only Mandrake was able to immediately recognize and set up. SuSE didn’t and Slackware didn’t. My sister wanted to use Mandrake but her hardware is so old that I installed Slackware 9.1 on it. In my experience, we should be happy to have the different distributions of Linux out there. All of the distributions have been good to me and my machine at some point in time over the past few years. If I didn’t have the choice of distro, then I WOULD BE STUCK WITH ONLY WINDOZE.
Windows servers are every bit as complicated as Linux servers — often more so. It takes a good admin for both. And as John Turner pointed out, Unix/Linux admins often know Windows better than strictly Windows admins.