Hi everyone, I've installed and used both RedHat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.0 in the last week or so. Here are some initial impressions of both. Hopefully this will be of some use to those who are trying to decide with distribution to try. Test system: 1 GHz Athlon w/ 512 MB RAM, Matrox G450 video card (dual head), Kingston ethernet card (tulip chipset), CD-ROM, HP CD-RW (IDE), 20 GB IDE hard disk, el cheapo onboard sound (AC97?), USB mouse, and two Optiquest V75 monitors (17"). RedHat 8.0 ========== Install via ftp and CD-ROM was flawless. Installing from CD used a very nice GUI installer, while the ftp install used the older ncurses-based text installer. Everything was auto-detected except my dual head video. I poked around a bit, but never bothered to dig in and configure the X config file to get it to work. Once installed, the user interface is *great*! The font rendering is far and away the best I have ever seen on a Linux desktop. The RedHat engineers and designers have outdone themselves. Gnome is the default (of course), but KDE is there too. The "bluecurve" theme really does a nice job of creating a uniform interface between the Gnome and KDE environments. I think GCC 3.2 has really made a difference. All the apps seem faster now. Bottom line: A user new to Linux (but not new to computing) will have very little trouble getting going with RedHat 8.0. Your grandmother (to use the classic example) will have no more trouble with RedHat 8.0 than she would have with Win XP. Mandrake 9.0 ============ The ftp install crashed on my, but I had no problem installing from CD. I was blown away by Mandrake's auto-detection. I detected that I had a dual head system and offered to set it up right away (with the option of enabling Xinerama). You can install your printer during the install too and it will even scan your LAN to find printers. You are presented with a list of available printers and you can configure whichever ones you want. Mandrake uses KDE by default. I found a couple little problems. konsole wouldn't run (KDE terminal emulation program) and their appear to be some minor problems with the terminal settings. The look of things is good, but not as nice as RedHat. I noticed that Mandrake used supermount to mount the removable media. This is nice from a newbie perspective as it eliminates the need to manually mount and unmount the disks. Bottom line: Truly stellar auto-detection of hardware and an out-of-the-box system that has a lot of nice touches that make Linux easier to use for new users especially (e.g., supermount). Summary ======= There are a lot of similarities between these distros. Both use ext3 for the filesystem, gcc 3.2, and include nearly identical software. Both include software to keep your system up to date with security patches or new versions of the software you've installed. Overall, I liked RedHat 8.0 better, especially if you're trying to get a new user going on Linux. If RedHat had Mandrake's auto-detect capabilities, it would be no contest. Well that's my $0.02. Take it for what it's worth. YMMV. IANAL. Caveat emptor. Don't shoot the messenger. :-) I can elaborate on anything if someone has a question. -Tim -- Tim Wilson | Visit Sibley online: | Check out: Henry Sibley HS | http://www.isd197.org | http://www.zope.com W. St. Paul, MN | | http://slashdot.org wilson at visi.com | <dtml-var pithy_quote> | http://linux.com