Mandrake

[blackstealth007]

Do you think it is worth putting on one of my hard drives? Is is a good operating system?

 

[n0cmonkey]

It's ok.

 

[Codegen]

I wouldn't plan on learning anything on it, though.

IT's one of those distros that are user friendly, but don't plan on doing complex stuff. Mostly due to dependency hell and stuff being moved to odd places.

 

[OffTopic1]

It is just as good as any other main stream distro.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

It's Mandriva now, and it is fine. If you want to learn Linux try something else, but if you just want to use Linux, use Mandriva.

 

[sourceninja]

I personally can't stand it, I find it slower on my system then other distros, it dogs vmware even more then other distros. Plus i'm not a fan of rpm based distros at all. I'd suggest starting with ubuntu or if you have to pick a newbie give me a gui for everything distro suse. I still can't figure out what makes mandrake dog so much on this box.

Personally I run gentoo on my main machine now (amd64 3500 nvidia 6800 gt 256meg), but I wouldn't recomend it for newbies.

 

[blackstealth007]

kwjake my friend is going to install gentoo on a system. Hes is going to get help though

 

[pcgeek11]

Originally posted by: AnonymouseUser
It's Mandriva now, and it is fine. If you want to learn Linux try something else, but if you just want to use Linux, use Mandriva.

You can learn just as much on any distro. It doesn't have to be a pain in the @ss in order to learn from it. Linux is Linux. Just say you prefer Gentoo or what ever if you like.

pcgeek11

 

[GMaximus]

I've used Mandrake 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2 (along with many flavors of Red Hat and Fedora) and like it quite a bit. urpmi is there to handle your rpm packages and I had a great deal of fun with Mandriva in general. I don't see why everyone is here is saying you won't learn anything, Linux is Linux and you can always poke around underneath the config scripts. I had Samba, CVS, Apache and Postgres running fine on it. After using Red Hat for years (since 6.2) I installed Mandrake and the only thing that I had to get used to was urpmi, which is a godsend (managing dependancies manually..ug)

 

[Codegen]

All I've ever had is problems. If you can't find a package with urpmi, then you have 2 options:

1) Install from source
2) Find an RPM

Neither of them ever work in Mandrake.

I've got Gentoo (Ubuntu ATM, gonna reinstall when 2005.1 comes out) and it does everything I need it to do.

 

[GMaximus]

Well there are a few databases that contain tons of packages built for Mandrake. You can also always install the RPM manually, which I've done fine (rpm -ivh). I've also compiled a program from source fine. Were these problems with a recent version of Mandrake?

 

[Codegen]

Mandriva LE2005

It said Mandrake 10.2 at boot up, so I got RPMs for that. Even after installing it manually (used built in tool) it didn't work correctly.

Installation successful my ass.

 

[pcgeek11]

" All I've ever had is problems. If you can't find a package with urpmi, then you have 2 options:

1) Install from source
2) Find an RPM

Neither of them ever work in Mandrake.

I think this statement should read " I could not get them to work for me in Mandrake "

Mandrake works just fine for most people. It may take some configuring, but I haven't seen a linux system that didn't.

pcgeek11

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Originally posted by: pcgeek11

Originally posted by: AnonymouseUser
It's Mandriva now, and it is fine. If you want to learn Linux try something else, but if you just want to use Linux, use Mandriva.

You can learn just as much on any distro. It doesn't have to be a pain in the @ss in order to learn from it. Linux is Linux. Just say you prefer Gentoo or what ever if you like.

pcgeek11

I agree that one can learn from any distro, it's just that Mandrake/Mandriva didn't usually require that you learn it in order to use it. Installation is easy and the default install is plenty usable for most users.

I have been using Mandrake since 8.1, am currently running Mandriva LE2005 on my desktop, and have learned plenty about Linux while using it. I also currently run Fedora Core 3 on two other comps and have tried Suse, Damn Small Linux, and Knoppix over the years, but I still prefer Mandriva for my desktop distro.

 

[pcgeek11]

I agree that one can learn from any distro, it's just that Mandrake/Mandriva didn't usually require that you learn it in order to use it. Installation is easy and the default install is plenty usable for most users.

The bad part is when just starting in Linux a newbie that gets beat up at every turn when trying to accomplish a task will usually go back to what they do know "Windows" because it is easy. then no more Linux for them. For them it now sucks. If how ever they start out with something they can use right away they can then dig into the true heart of the system and truely know how to use it...

For new users I always recomment Mandrivia or Suse.

pcgeek11