Earlier versions of Mandrake were based on Redhat, however, they are their own distro now. About the only similarity to redhat is the use of RPMs for package management. Much of the Mandrake setup is automated so you don't have to dink around with config files as much, and their desktop environments (both Gnome and KDE) are very nicely set up with menus that auto update when you install software using RPMs. It's very polished too, little things like Aurora (Mac like startup with Icons that appear when booting), gcc has a nice wrapper that will highlight warnings and errors with red text when compiling. Everything just fits together nicely. 8.0 was a good attempt at it, but contained many bugs. 8.1 has no major showstoppers like 8.0 did, adds many more features (like "dynamic" which adds icons to your desktop when you plug in certain USB devices or PCMCIA cards). It's also the first distro to use devfs and come with support for ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, and ext3 (of which you can install using any of these, though it defaults to ext2). Download it, install it, if you don't like it, I'll give you your money back. :) Jay > -----Original Message----- > From: Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom [mailto:chrome at real-time.com] > Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 3:37 PM > To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org > Subject: Re: [TCLUG] I'm sure everyone will be glad to know... > > > > Mandrake rules. I've been using it pretty much exclusively for > > workstations for the past 2 years or so, and it's very nice to work > > with. 8.0 had some nasty bugs, but 8.1 has fixed them, and > adds a ton > > of useful features. > > I've always heard that Mandrake was a really newbie-friendly > distro. I admit to little experience with it, tho. > > 1. I have a copy of Mandrake 5.3, signed by Linus Torvalds > himself. I installed it once, and it was pretty much Red Hat relabled. > > 2. I tried Mandrake's firewall sub-distro (Mandrake > 7.2-based); and aside from the (fairly good) firewall > aspects, didn't see anything that recommended it over RedHat for me. > > I'm honestly curious tho; what do you see as advantages of > Mandrake over RedHat? > > Carl Soderstrom > -- > Network Engineer > Real-Time Enterprises > (952) 943-8700 > _______________________________________________ > Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. > Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.mn-> linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >