I like Mandrake. They have put a lot of work into making it easy to use, there are a lot of packages available and they have a nice utility for downloading and installing rpms called urpmi. It has a nice gui frontend too, if you like. They have the mandrake control center that makes it very easy to install printers, change your monitor resolution, configure your firewall, set up "internet connection sharing" (making your box into a router), etc. I've been able to get more done with linux using Mandrake than I ever was able to with RedHat. It's not that redhat doesn't have the capabilities, it's jut that Mandrake makes it easier to get at those capabilites, and then you can still dig deeper and get into tweaking configuration files or firewall rules or whatever it might be later.
Cons? As a company Mandrake seems to be in some financial trouble. What does that mean for the future of Mandrake? Who knows, but for now they have a very nice distribution that is progressing rapidly. If they die, it's not like you will be left up a creek with a bunch of files in their proprietary format, or you'll have to go learn a whole new operating system or something. Some Linux distro will still be out there for you to use. Debian will still be chugging along, right? :) Bryan On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 09:37, Ammon J Christiansen wrote: > I want to know what distros I could try out and what would work for me. > > People throw the terms around slackware, debian, mandrake, netbsd and > freebsd. If you could inform me on your experience and how you think > these would work for me, I would appreciate it. also let me know if the > club has the cds for these distros. I know mandrake and redhat are in > iso form on the uug site and I imagine they're all available via ftp > from somewhere. > > I know everyone has their own opinions about what is best. I was > wondering if you could let me know some of the pros and cons of > different distros and specifically how hard they would be for me to > start out with. I've been using Redhat for about a year. I like ease > of new package installation and a good gui interface with email, ftp, > web browser clients and also ssh, ftp, web, php serverside stuff. > > Thanks for your input > Ammon > > > > _______________________________________________ > newbies mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies
