At 01:45 09/09/01 +0100, Gordie Stirling wrote:
>I have tried mandrake 8.0, and found it dead easy to setup and get working,
>even persuaded some of my MS only colleagues to change, and they had no
>problems with install either.
"Which distro?" is a very often asked question, and there are a LOT of
answers. By far the most sensible one I've heard was from Lawrence Sweeney
who said that it should be the distro that your friend uses (Lawrence must
have read that somewhere ;).
IME, Mandrake _can_ be very easy to do an initial install with; like
certain other commercial systems, it's easy until it goes wrong and then
its VERY difficult to fix. Also doing stuff like kernel upgrades can be a
nuisance, and I've had lots of problems getting XFree86 installed off the
the 7.x disks we had for the installday.
Suse seems to be very popular with people at the Slug meets. I have to look
after some RedHat boxes so I've stuck with that distro for compatibility.
Meanwhile Debian, with its package support and online updating, while
having something of a hairy-chested reputation, is getting a lot more user
friendly.
> >you recommend I install which isn't extremely complicated but still gives
>me
> >power to do what I want with it.
> >
There's the crux - what you want to do with it. You don't say what spec of
hardware you are running on (both Suse and Mandrake can give problems when
installing on a 32Meg box).
I suppose the best bet is to make sure you set up /home in its own
partition and keep a detailed log of your configuration and account info,
so if you decide to change at a later date it will be a lot less painful.
HTH
Colin
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