My advice is to get the mandrake release too. I'm going through installing
most of the major releases that you can download or get get from LinuxMall for
$2.00 in order to write a review on them from a newbie's perspective. Here's
what I've discovered so far-
Caldera and Red Hat may have prettier installers, but they have BUGS, a couple
of them are BIG bugs, and don't include anywhere near the applications
Mandrake does. The Suse interface takes going through a couple of times to
really understand it and get what you want. It has more applications than Red
Hat ot Caldera but less than Mandrake. Suse leaves out the configuration of
some important features for a desktop machine during the install that are part
of Mandrakes installation routine. Mandrake has been the ONLY distribution
that allowed me to pick my sound card from a list when it identified my PCI128
incorrectly.
I'm getting ready to give TuboLinux a spin. Once that's done I get to start on
the commercial packages. (Oh my achin' head)
The Cyberian wrote:
> I would say the only real way to learn Linux is to install it
> and Mandrake 6.1 install is so easy that anybody should be able to do
> it :-) If you buy the boxed package, you get the manuals and the 6
> reference books on CD that you can use and the manuals walk you
> through the basics of installing and using Linux and so you should be
> on your way. As it lets you boot up straigt into a GUI environment via
> KDE, you should be more or less in familiar territory if you've used
> Windows <g>
>
> i> I'm so new I haven't even loaded Linux; I've never seen a Linux screen
> i> and I don't know one command. When you pick yourself up off the floor I
> i> have one question. I've decided on Mandrake based on the strength of
> i> support. Where do I go to begin to learn the raw basics? My goal is to
> i> have a pure Linux box.
>
> Fahim
