Free Mandrake Linux at B&M Staples

[bmacd]

Hi. There are three copies of Linux Mandrake for $.01 at staples b&m. All three have the penguin on the cover, all versions 7.1. Two are blue striped/white boxed (one deluxe, one std.) and the third is a red stripe/whited box.
The skus are available at staples.com, one of which being 444089 i think. Regardless, don't buy online b/c the price is normal retail.
Thanks.
-=bmacd=-

 

[kw7]

On rebate needed? just a cent when you check out??

 

[Thyme]

7.2 is out and can be downloaded from their Website. It's a great distro, but I'm waiting for a build with the 2.4 kernel.

 

[dapic]

Since we're at it, does any one know where can I get a version with 2.4 kernel? I know I should've bought the free technology preview.

 

[Thyme]

SuSE 7.1 has 2.4 built in.

 

[DAM]

you can compile your own kernel, check the distro's site for infor on that, it should not be so hard.




dam()

 

[mcdull]

It's a good deal. It's handy for you to install Linux for the first time and you can download only the kernel to upgrade it later.

 

[dapic]

thanks guys. I have SuSE 6.4 installed, guess I just need to download the new kernel and compile it.

Thyme, the SuSE 7.1 is not out till Feb 12th.

 

[SUOrangeman]

The current Cooker offering (identifies itself as "Linux-Mandrake 7.3&quot has 2.4.0 kernel and XFree86 4.0.2 as default. Yummy.

-SUO

 

[DealDatabase]

What about sparc edition?
I run linux only on SUNs!

 

[hkssupra69]

bump

 

[shadowfaX]

cool - i need linux. thank you for saving my rear from micro$oft!

 

[thommy]

staples.com is telling me the SKU is invalid. Perhaps discontinued?

 

[manly]

a penny is a hot deal, but Linux distros move so fast that most people wouldn't want to run an outdated distro. So if you have a broadband connection and a CDR drive, it's definitely better just to download the Mandrake 7.2 ISO.

As for Linux kernel 2.4, I recall reading (maybe on slashdot.org) that one of the Mandrake developers had cooked up some kernel 2.4 RPMs for download.

Right now, Red Hat 7.0 has perhaps the best reputation for being kernel 2.4-ready, although most of the up-to-date distros are fairly up to date for you to compile your own 2.4.0 kernel.

Personally, I'm going to wait for Red Hat and SuSE to officially ship w/ the new kernel, and I'll choose from amongst the two. Right now, I'm a little wary of SuSE 7.1 shipping w/ kernel 2.4.0 within a month because SuSE has had a poor history of updating their kernels in between their distro releases. As most of us know, many kernel revisions contain security fixes, and it's irresponsible for Linux vendors to issue security updates w/o issuing precompiled kernel updates. And I'd guarantee that down the road, you'll definitely want to upgrade past 2.4.0 for features or critical fixes.

 

[cmv]

If you are a linux dude but haven't tried Debian go for it! apt-get is simply awesome. Grab the 2.2r2 ISO from www.linuxiso.com (or .org?) and burn it, install base system, change /etc/sources.list from stable to unstable, apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade!

That is the basic gist of it... It is so easy to keep up to date on packages that you are interested in but don't want to take the time to download the latest tar.gz's and compile. With apt you can merge in the new changes, etc. I'll still grab tar.gz's for apache, php, mysql (actually, not mysql, the debian package is great for it), and the linux kernel (least until 2.4.1/2 stabilizes) but otherwise I'm golden.

And yes, debian unstable (aka sid) does have XFree86 4.0.2. I grabbed KDE2 yesterday and the improvement over v1.x is awesome! It's been a while since I took a look at kde but I'm still impressed at how quickly they have improved. Hopefully gnome will be rocking along soon too...

 

[thommy]

Dude, all I want is the pretty box...