Well folks, I've apparently had the opposite experience from most of
you with Mandrake
7. I've yet to have it crash, which is not so with Win 98 Second
Edition OEM version I have a new (three week old) Athlon 600 with 192
megs of memory and two 13.5 hd's Windows
on the first, Linux on the second. A couple of things I have noticed.
a. When I installed a ATI Rage Pro 128 AGP graphics card on the pc (a
slower, Diamond Stealth PCI card came with it) Linux immediately picked
up the
card and formatted itself for the new graphic settings (a feature I
understand
is new with Mandrake 7). On the other hand, I am still trying to get
Windows
98 to recognize the d.... card. Win 98 wants to set itself as a low
resolution
generic vga PCI graphics card and won't budge.
b. The SETI program takes about 25 hours to run through an iteration on
Windows 98, and just about 12 hours on Linux, even when I use the xseti
graphics interface (which I don't really care for).
c. After working on word processing, spreadsheet, web browsing and seti
on
Windows for about 12 hours my system memory is down to about 65% but I
seem to
have no such problem on Linux.
d. Linux will only recognize the memory above 64 megs if I log in at
Lilo with
"Linux mem =192mb" -- even though I have added that line manually to the
lilo.conf file. That seems strange (any suggestions?).
I am yet to have a problem with Netscape 7 (though I had many with
earlier
versions), but I do agree that Linux will be of much more use when
programs
like Quicken and Turbo Tax are ported to it. However, I fear that (as
much as
I dislike Microsoft and Mr. Gates) we are just tasting what the rest of
the PC
world will taste if that company is broken up and there is no de facto
standard
OS. I am new to Linux but I remember the pre-microsoft days when there
was
Apple and dozens of CPM computers, each with their own flavor and disk
format.
It was pure H... getting software that would work on any given PC. A
vendor
might have the Kaypro version but not the Eagle version, and you
couldn't read
disks for another pc without an elaborate and expensive and not always
dependable translation program. Hence, many companies didn't put out
really
good software until MS/PC DOS hit the market.
All in all I really like Linux, but then my primary occupation is as a
writer
and the Star suite by Sun Microsystems is pretty adequate for that.
Enough of MY opinion. Does anyone have a proposed fix for my memory
recognition problem?
Charles Wackerman
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
