>One final distribution I'd like to try is Mandrake. I've heard good things about it - >I gather it's more similar to Redhat than Slackware?
I had been a Redhat user till as far back as I can remember (RHL 4.2 to be precise). One day, my CTO walked in when my computer was rebooting after a power fail.. while waiting for fsck to complete, he said "Why dont you try Mandrake Linux, it has a Journalised File System and is an over all good distro". Well, that weekend, I gave Mandrake 8.1 a shot and I was impressed. It comes close to MS Windows in terms of ease of installation. The GUI is pretty good and almost auto detects all hardware. Once set up, the administration, if you want to use the GUI, is prety easy. Mandrake guys have done a great job on that front. If you are trying to ween away users from Windows to Linux, this is the distro to give them... :) Also the number of utils they provide is enormous. I believe Redhat 7.3 might compete with MDK in that sense. Just checked 7.3, it is pretty good too. Another thing I noticed with MDK is while installing from RPM, I very rarely get dependency errors. I know they can be rectified. But what would you rather do? Get the thing up and running quick or go around hunting and removing dependency headaches. Most people will say if you are looking for a desktop distro, Mandrake is the way to go. But what the heck, I would say even if you are setting up a server, give it a shot. At the most you will be pleasantly surprised. And forget trying to download the distro... Madhavan if you are living in/around Mumbai, please let me know.. I will try and pass on the distro to you.. I have Mdk 8.1 and Mdk 8.2 on CD. [One last word: There is no such thing like a perfect distro. What people think is the perfect distro is what appeals to them the most. And different distros appeal to different people. So all comparisons, including this one must be taken with a pinch of salt. The best thing to do, like I have done, is to keep a machine aside for trying out various distros and then decide what you like]
