Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux helpSpecial Offers
Feature: Linux
Moving from Red Hat to Mandrake
Share
Print
Comments
The installation
My desktop system is cobbled together with three hard drives and a CD-R/W drive. One drive is partitioned for /backups, one is for my /home partition, and the third for /. When I started the Mandrake 9.2 installation I told it to use the existing partitions but to format only the / partition. The installation was off and running in no time.
The Mandrake Linux Discovery 9.2 edition is geared towards newcomers. It contains only 2 CDs instead of Mandrake's usual 3. The English language version of this edition may not be ready yet. In the copy I received, all the accompanying manuals were in French, and the box itself was as well. The installation default was US English, however, so that didn't slow me down. I suppose it's a sign of how far Linux installation has come in general that I didn't even notice the manuals weren't in English until after the install was complete.
I noticed a single commercial ad during the install. After all the uproar on Slashdot and elsewhere when the ad policy was announced earlier this year, it was highly anti-climactic. One small thing that bothered me during the initial detection phase was that my GE optical rodent was identified as a USB wheel. I left it that way and it works fine, but I still worry about it.
The thing that bothered me most about the relatively quick install was that the update phase seems to have run without having updated anything at all. This is a critical phase, when security fixes which have become available since the CDs were burned are applied. Nonetheless, about 20 minutes after starting the installation, I rebooted from the recently installed Mandrake Linux system.
Tweaking the installation
The installation worked perfectly from a hardware point of view. My printer (HP Deskjet 842C) was correctly identified and configured. My misidentified mouse worked. Same for my NIC and the network configuration. I was pretty much good to go. Except for the software environment.
I hadn't been offered any choices during the installation, and I ended up running a KDE 3.1 desktop, with no sign of Evolution, Mozilla, or even Galeon. Instead I was provided with KMail and Konqueror. Nothing against those fine programs, you understand, but I want to keep my mail history intact and Evo is my choice of mail clients. Ditto Mozilla as my browser. Worse, the KDE desktop seemed to suffer some hangover from previously done KDE installations under Red Hat. There were no icons on the bottom panel, which made even the simplest of tasks a little more challenging that they needed to be.
The cure was to use the Mandrake Control Center to start RpmDrake and start changing things. When I am cut off from my email, I am cut off from the world. Evolution was the first thing I had to install. Trying to install it with RpmDrake didn't work, however. It failed because of a library dependency. No problem. I simply installed Gnome using RpmDrake, then Evolution. Everything was there. I began to feel connected again. Of course, if I had known about urpmi from the beginning, I could have saved myself from that small case of the RPM dependency blues.
Mandrake uses urpmi to resolve the notorious tangled dependencies that plague those using RPMs. It does the same thing that apt-get, up2date, and Ximian Red Carpet all do: Determines what is needed by the package it has been requested to install, and provides the missing pieces.
Join the club!
I joined MandrakeClub for the same reason I had joined the Red Hat Network: Quick and easy access to the latest security updates. There are other benefits, too, but in my book that's what makes these offerings worthwhile. There are three levels of MandrakeClub membership: Standard, Silver, and Gold. Silver is the recommended level. The standard level is recommended for students and other "low resource" folk. That's the one I signed up for at $60.00 a year.
The first thing I found when I logged into MandrakeClub was a list of sources to use with urpmi to do security and bug fixes and updates. Since nothing seemed to be updated during installation, I was curious to try the security update right away. When I ran it, four updates were downloaded and applied.
I don't know if I did something wrong during installation -- possibly failing to configure something correctly -- or if Mandrake Discovery 9.2 just has a bug right out of the box that prevents security updates from being applied as part of the install, but I'd like to know which is the case. New install or not, the latest security fixes should always be applied.
I thought I had another issue after the install, but I didn't. I wasn't getting any sound from my SBLive card. It was puzzling me because the installation had seemed to find and configure the card without a hitch. Then I looked at the Gnome Volume control applet. Amazing what increasing the Line volume from zero to about sixty percent did for me.
Burp me urpmi
I still have an update problem, however. Whenever I try to update the waiting bugfixes, the download process just hangs up about 3/4 of the way through and never completes. Most annoying. I'll be working on that gotcha until I get it resolved.
As far as installation of new packages goes with urpmi and the MandrakeClub-supplied sources, no problem. I've added K3b, tvtime, and a few of my other favorite apps with no more effort than typing "urpmi (appname)" from the command line.
Conclusion
The Thanksgiving weekend is over and I'm riding a new Linux horse. The major difference between my new steed and the old one is that MandrakeLinux has not given up on the Linux desktop, while Red Hat apparently has.
I've had a few minor bumps thus far in the migration from Red Hat to MandrakeLinux, but no more than might be expected. It will take me a little bit of time and effort to become as familiar with urpmi and the Mandrake configuration tools as I've become with the Red Hat counterparts, but all the signs point to no loss at all in functionality, security, or ease of use.
On Monday, I had to copy a document in order to fax it before the close of business. Unfortunately, I hadn't realized that my HP 5200C scanner was not hooked up when I installed Mandrake 9.2. I discovered that when I tried to run Xsane and the only image source I had was from the TV card. I plugged in the USB connection and rebooted, thinking I might have to do a lot of scrambling to get it working. Wrong. The only thing I had to do was to choose the source: the scanner or the TV card. It just worked. I think I'm going to like Mandrake just fine.
Comments
on Moving from Red Hat to MandrakeNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
I was rather disappointed to find that when I tried to upgrade from RH9 to FC1 it hung the installer (my guess was the LVM partitioning), so I backed up and installed from scratch.
i have used RH9 for a while. i was a little concerned awhile ago about drake's finances, and decided to use RH because i was not sure about drake's future. but hopefully, that is in the past. i am going to update my desktop soon.
thanks.
I wish you great success as a beta tester for Red Hat.
Which I happen to disagree with since there isn't exactly a vast amount of difference between Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 1, there are updated packages, graphical boot, an update to a better GNOME and other version updates.
I really can't see how Fedora can be significantly worse when its a full release, (the lack of a box really doesn't bother me, I do have a pen and CD cases), the beta version is provided and released at a different location on the FTP server and most of the developers are the same people.
In fact I see what you're saying as an insult to the developers, you're impying that they have become rotten at QA overnight (presumably the night Red Hat made their announcement?)
RH, for me, always had the highest polish and quality out of the box than any other distro. I installed Fedora, expecting the same thing, and I was sorely disappointed. My CD burner didn't work out of the box (Plextor), when I tried to change some mimetypes in GNOME's control panel it always reverted, when I installed KDE 3.1, there were no desktop icons, Nautilus and file-roller's create archive didn't show up like in RH9, etc.. I can list about ten other issues. I'm still using Fedora ATM, but I'm considering either switching back to RH or installing something else.
Fedora is RHL 10.0, so it's going to have quirks. They updated the development and distribution (e.g. yum) of RedHat. This change is about as big as the long overdue update of GCC in RHL 8.0, so it'll likely be as disruptive.
If history is any guide, Fedora Core 1.1 will be solid and FC 1.2 will kickass.
After trying to get everything back to work as before for a while, I decided to bite the bullet and did a complete re-install.
This was the best thing I could have done, the new version runs a lot better now. The hardware detection has again improved. Even my brand-new USB-camera (HP photosmart 935) and new all-in-one printer, scanner, copier work perfectly. Without installing anything I can scan from within the Gimp (or any other program). Great stuff Mandrake.
I absolutely love it that whenever I hook up the camera, the camera-icon (FLPhoto2) just appears on the KDE Desktop automatically.
Most used programs are:
Mozilla Thunderbird, Evolution, Gimp, OpenOffice.org 1.1 and Netbeans 3.5.1.
Oh, a tip about the updates: you just have to set the setup-sources yourself, initially, only the CD-set you used to install is set as a source. I removed the setup-disks from the list and added one of the mirrors, and that way, I keep the system up to date perfectly.
I have used RedHat 6.4,7.2 and 8.0 before, but I've never really missed it since switching to Mandrake.
What all-in-one printer do you have?
Even if I agree it is always better to do a new installation, I have to say that Mandrake developpers did a really good job with the upgrade.
Usually I format everythink except the<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/home directory. But I always create a new user for every version. It works well.
Since you didn't mess with your<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/home partition, I would guess this is why things seemed a bit off. All those diddly dot files with your customizations for Red Hat may have interfered with your fresh install of KDE.
This also makes me wonder if perhaps a fresh, from-scratch install of Mandrake would be as quick and painless as your transitional installation. Maybe it would be even smoother.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)
Of course, the obvious is not quite so glaring when one is on the other side of the kb, but still... drake 9_2 is not quite up to spec in several areas without a clean install. Who knows, they may not go bankrupt in time to prevent his having an effective quack version installed...
I'm not much concerned about your FUD about Mandrake's bankruptcy. They booted the "experts", put some of the people back in charge who actually have a clue about free software, and immediately turned the business around.
At home, I use exclusively Debian, but I also give courses and we settled for Red Hat two years ago. I must say that the experience was not entirely positive. Certain parts of the grafical interface, notably around GNOME, tend to generate kernel panics.
For this year, I put out the message to base all our courses for this school year on Red Hat 9.
However, with the changed policy, we can not really afford to use Red Hat AS, because it is too costly for a school, we do not have the time to download the sources and compile it ourselves, and I do not want give a course on something that may be not too stable. Although most people have the opportunity to download and burn CD's, I feel that one should give a course based on things that one can buy in the store.
Another thing is that maybe next year we will start giving courses OpenOffice/StarOffice on Linux desktops.
This, together with the acquisition of Suse by Novell, led me to opt for Mandrake. Maybe the fact that it is for the moment the only distribution that is completely European plays a role.
So, in the coming weeks I will be testing Mandrake 9.2, adapt my courses and find out which bugs could bother me. I think that Mandrake is also as well a distribtion as any other for server usage, especially since in a country as small as ours (Belgium) people tend to opt to use simple white box systems as servers.
Amazingly that again and again MDK and Debian users spread a lot of FUD against SuSE, they're not reading any official message from SuSE or Novell,
just repeating FUD hoping that people will choose for MDK/Debian. Plz use your energy to make your own distro great.
So tell me, what's worse, a MDK or Debian user (or in this specific case RH user) expressing concern over how SuSE may be changed based on the acquisition or a SuSE users badmouthing other distros and suggesting they are spreading FUD?
Who is doing more harm to whom?
Certain parts of the grafical interface, notably around GNOME, tend to generate kernel panics.
This sounds like BS to me. What was the panic message?
--
Mark Roach
Maybe the fact that you are an anti-American bigot plays a role.
It has nothing to do with the American people but everything to do with your power mad goverment - Please don't take offence - I realise you didn't vote for them either!
>>"Maybe the fact that it is for the moment the only distribution that is completely European plays a role."
>Maybe the fact that you are an anti-American bigot plays a role.
When did you last use a European, Asian or South American distribution?<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-) (Or non-US steel, Chinese textiles... ?<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-))
There are differences between distributions, as we all know. Some of these differences are probably due to differences in mentality between continents, so a 'local' distribution is possibly simply closer to my preferences.
I'm British, and live in Switzerland. I've used
- Yggdrasil Plug & Play Linux for several days, failing to ever get it installed
- SuSE Linux (5.1,6.2,7.x,8.1) (my main distribution for years)
- several versions of Red Hat (5.2? 6.x, 8.x and 9), and always had some problems. The problems could probably have been solved, but there was just something about Red Hat which I just did not like, so I couldn't be bothered to invest the time and energy to get it running.
- Debian since March, after trying Knoppix
I've also checked out Mandrake once or twice - I can't remember having problems, but it never lasted long on my computer. I can't remember why. I tried Corel Linux, too.
(And before you accuse me of being an anti-American bigot too, three of my closest friends are Americans, as well as my father's new girlfriend.)
Everybody can buy the products they prefer. I´m from Germany and i really like Suse. But i think now that they become part of an american company they have to include many of this bullshit patent issues into their distribution. This patent obsession is really what i stongly dislike.
RedHat and SuSE as well do not include many videocodecs because of legal issues that are manly only issues in the US. I know it is quickly fixed if you install the complete mediaplayer after install but it surely would be prefereble to have the functionality out of the box.
I installed Mandrake 9.2 lately. I have to say it´s wonderful. The Mediaplayers they deliver is much less crippeled than others. It just works out of the box. I guess thats the reason why many europeans tend to move to mandrake now. Or take Gnome. Gnome does not play a great role here. But KDE does. Mandrake tends more to KDE than Gnome as SuSE did til now just because the main customers demanded it.
KDE never was a priority for RedHat, so their Gnome is much better there.
The solution is here:
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/errata.php3#pubke<nobr>y<wbr></nobr>
Thanks! That sounds like the culprit, alright.
The problem with Software Updates is, that it doesn't check for return values from urpmi. I once run weeks with the SU telling me that "the list of updates is void, your system is up to date" (something like that) when in fact it was just the mirror that had closed and was returning a 404. (You can test this by unplugging your network cable, and trying to upgrade. urpmi will tell you what's going on, the graphical interface will let you think that everythings fine when it's not.)
Dispite all this, I think Mdk is the best desktop distro and I use it myself. I just hope once they get out of their financial troubles, they'll hire someone with some discipline to go through the apps in the Control Center.
Another comment on the article: The club doesn't make it any easier to install updates. This was Red Hat's strategy, not Mandrakes. Mandrakes provides easy updates even for those who don't pay, their system is very similar to Debian in that respect.
The nr 1 reason to join Mandrake Club is to give Mandrake money and thus help them keep running. (Yes, I happen to think this is a great reason. I like to download the ISO instead of bying a box that takes 1 month to manufacture, and I'm okay with paying mdk for that.)
The only actual benefits you get is an urpmi repository of some non-free applications like java, flash and realplayer and a possibility to vote for new RPM:s to be packaged. As of 9.2 the download edition was first available to club members only, which probably saved a lot of LG CD-ROM:s, but is not a major thing otherwise imho.
Nice article, thanks
henrik
I wish Redhat much luck in future endeavors, but I wish all their apologists would sit down and shut up. Redhat orphaned a substantial part of their paying customer base - they're going to have a hard time living it down.
Things proven in Fedora will end up in Red Hat.
That makes it a beta-test distribution, and that's definitely not what I'm looking for.
Mandrake Linux Corporate Server 2.1, hmm, do you think Mandrake will use provably stable stuff from mandrake Linux 9.2 in future releases of MLCS?
Most things take longer to setup or get done than on Mandrake. Fedora also misses or has very old software packages, just check it out yourself at http://www.distrowatch.com
I'm happy I moved away at last from Red Hat, after using it over 8 years. A new and very exciting world opened<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)
I can't believe whoever runs Fedora would release such a buggy piece of shit.
I've also tried Red Hat 6.1, and even 8.0. I've had Sorcerer and Gentoo. I've even tried Debian. I never was able to get SuSE to install (I think that was SuSE 6 Eval.)
I've toyed with FreeBSD and once utterly failed to get Solaris x86 to install.
Mandrake has consistently been the most useful Linux distro out of the box for me. And with the MandrakeClub contributors, I have to compile my own programs from tarballs far less often than ever before.
--
D. Wokan
Proud Penguinista
You quit RedHat because they become payware. Why go to another Payware?
Mandrake does not distribute its binaries nor it sources for free. In order to get them, you MUST take a subscribtion to the club (which is unfair, in my opinion). So why not just take a charged version of Red Hat?
In addition, as somebody said below, you can still get Red Hat for free under www.fedora.us.
You can get Mandrake for free nowhere.
So in my opinion, Red Hat is still better than Mandrake.
Mandrake distributes both binaries and sources for free. For example:
<A HREF="http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/sunsite.uio.no/pub/unix/Linux/Mandrake/Mandrake/9.2/" TITLE="mirror.ac.uk">http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/sunsite.uio.no/pub/<nobr>u<wbr></nobr> nix/Linux/Mandrake/Mandrake/9.2/</a mirror.ac.uk>
—Toby Inkster
<A HREF="http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ftp.php3" TITLE="mandrakelinux.com">http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ftp.php3</a mandrakelinux.com>
Must've been my imagination.
As for the sources, they are only available via ftp when using the downloaded version (they're included on CD in packaged versions other than the new user-oriented Discovery Pack).
There's "free" and there are "freeloaders". Mandrake favors its paying customers (the free download came a month after the paid packages), but that's hardly the same as requiring you to pay.
Even the security updates are free (contrary to what the original article implied). Stick with Fedora if you want, but it's pretty childish to call a pretty decent company "unfair" and not even get your facts straight.
you could run a network install, urpmi --auto-select your way to 9.2 or download all packages and use the makecds script to generate isos (which had the same mdsums as the club isos).
Mandrake employees and developers even told you how to do it on mailing lists and forums.
so all that happened is that Mandrake postponed spending resources on conveniantly delivering the free product for a while.
what I said in no way contradicts what you say, where are the wrong facts that I stated in the previous comment??
I know ISOs where released for the public, I just making a point that Mandrake 9.2 was available to the public at the same time it was available to club members just in less convinient forms, so even if you did not want to wait for the ISOs you could have installed 9.2
I think you did a foot in mouth on this one. Mandrake has everything released as source and binary from day one. Unlike Suse, and the other confused degenerates.
They give the compressed iso's out early to club members, but everything else is a free for all. They have more mirrors than fedora has as well. You are paying for the convenience of them making a iso for you in case you are too damn lazy to mkisofs yourself.
I suggest you support the people that are actually supporting you, whether it be redhat or mandrake or whomever. One day, you'll need to do more with your box than show it to your friends.
You'll at one point need to be able to point to a phone number or email and say, "Dr. Bob, if you have problems with this just give them a holler." And then you'll wonder in amazement where all the support went for the desktop you've been using for years. And sadly, it's already happened. Guess you weren't paying attention.
hate to burst the bubble there bud but you can't include SuSE in this lot. Their rpms and source are always available from their web server. the only thing they don't do is provide iso images, which I admit is a pain, but you can still get everything for free from the ftp site. including all updates fixes etc
You misunderstand the reasons I changed. Let me make them clear for you.
1. Red Hat is not interested in the Linux desktop. They make money from server Linux. They dropped the less profitable pursuit from their business plan.
2. The cost of using Red Hat triples if you stay with them, and if you are a desktop user, you are still a second-class customer. They want corporate seats, not onesies and twosies.
3. I prefer to do business with those who support the Linux desktop. Not by contributions to Fedora or a project at OSDL, but by making the success of their business depend on it.
Of course you can get Mandrake ISO's for free. One good address to get it, as well as any other distro you would like to try is the following: <A HREF="http://www.linuxiso.org/" TITLE="linuxiso.org">LinuxISO</a linuxiso.org>
Next time, get your facts straight before complaining.
A FREE start is important to me.
If you want to try Mandrake, all that you have to do is to try the free download. If it doesn't work for you you haven't lost anything, you had to pay NOTHING. I loved Suse 7.2, but when I tried the $80 version of Suse 8.0 it locked up on install. Plugged in the MDK disk and I was back to MDK.
I like the feeling of "Independance" that MandrakeSoft provides, because they are struggling financally (SP?) as much as I am...<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)
I now try to pay the $60 club payment with each release, so now I'm good for 481 days, and the next release would put me over 600 days for sure...
MDK 9.2 has been a bit buggier than past releases, but it is the best computing expierence that I'mve had in my 22+ computing years. Even though I've had to reeboot more often, at the moment I've been up 2 days and 13 hours now.
IN playing with URPMI in the last week, I've found it easier to setup urpmi by copy/pasting using Konsole in KDE. From there on I found it easier to use the gui stuff in Mandrake Control Center.
But I have used urpmi in many ways.
urpmi (name of program) on command line
d/l the file and right click the file in Konqueror.
If you have a link for a file on the internet (galeon), I will right click the link, but instead of "saving" I click on "open" and everything can be done in one step.
Then there is even the easier way. In MCC go to the sources section and click "update". Then go back to the "add programs" section and find all the programs that you haven't installed and click on 4 or 5 of them at a time, and click "install".
Wow! a shopping list of hundreds of programs to run for free! Like a kid in a candy store!
I did have a problem with the menus getting screwed up after many installs, but I've found a couple of ways to "fix" them. Menudrake under root, or update-menus -v on the command line...
MarkP
You can get Mandrake for free.
Or you can get Mandrake PowerPack for $54.
In contrast, I can't get ANY Fedora. Why?
I am from Croatia (Europe).
I am trying to buy(!) "free" Fedora Core 1. There are many sites that offer
CDs, but none of these sites offer transaction over secure server
AND shipping in Croatia. I have only an dial-up (ISDN) connection, so
I am not able to download 6 CDs!
Actually, once I've found site, email them, and they send me a 6 CD
Set. The only problem is that 5 of 6 CDs are corrupt!
Now I must preorder(?!) on Amazon stupid Bible book WITH Fedora
Core 1 (3 CD set).
In contrast, I have ordered Mandrake PowerPack for the same amount of
money.
Currently I have boxed Red Hat 9 Professional and Mandrake.
Althrough Mandrake is Red Hat based distribution there is big
difference between them. In Mandrake everything just work!
I have a DEXXA optical 5 button mouse. This mouse never worked under
any Red Hat in console. No matter how hard you configure all files -
it simply won't work (I am not a beginner). The same mouse work
perfectly under Mandrake 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2.
When "modern" company like Red Hat begin to mess with birocracy then is
best to leave this ship becouse you will not find any code there. Or any
sense. Just stupid bunch of kids in black swimming in the water.
Management can be very dangerous today. lol
Sorry about my English. This is not my native language.
The main benefit I get from the club right now is the ability to vote for applications I'd like to see added to the distribution and the mirror lists that tell me what mirrors are available to members as well as the mirror for commercial apps requiring a membership user/pass.
If you wanted the ISOs for Mandrake 9.2 before they were made available to the general public, you had to be a member. That was Mandrake's way of thanking us for joining.
Right now, if you want to, you're free to download Mandrake 9.2 ISO images and burn your own CDs. If you don't do a custom installation, you're likely to get the welcome message encouraging you to join (which can be turned off, like the Windows welcome program when you first boot it). If you do a custom/expert install, you can avoid even that.
I've watched conversations go back and forth over the whole membership thing. I've seen college students complain when they talked of being short on funds. MandrakeSoft employees responded that they don't want any money if you can't afford it. They want the support of their community, but not to a community member's detriment.
--
D. Wokan
Proud Penguinista
Mandrakeis better than Red Hat because it is GPL
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 20, 2003 08:32 AMPeople running businesses on Red Hat who depend on paid RH support have a legitimate reason for angst. But, I'm sure very, very few run of the mill non-enterprise desktop users have or use paid RH support. Angst about RH stepping aside from the consumer market for a while seems more like wounded pride to me.
Because I don't want to use a beta-test version of Red Hat for my production desktop.
They just announced it as well as doing it.
It took me slightly longer to install Fedora Core than Red Hat Linux, but that was mostly because I was getting a cup of coffee.
You have a career in politics or marketing ahead of you.
ps: You forgot to add: "Except they don't do it any more."
Try cutting and pasting between GAIM and GEDIT 5 out of 10 times it won't work.
Try creating a drawer. Put items in the drawer. Log out, and in. Use the items in the drawer. (HINT: use the arrows on the keyboard since you can't click them.)
Try moving windows around on the screen, 1 in 20 sticks to the mouse until you "click" it off.
Try setting up a printer, now reboot and prey it's still there.
If it is, try to print to it.
Fedora is SHIT, it shouldn't have ever have been released.
I mean I could go to the bug listing at Mandrakes site, or SUSE's and also generate similar FUD, it doesn't make it anything more than your opinion, which is all fine and stuff, but making the arguement that something shouldn't be released by just getting stuff from a bug list and making it sound worse is a little conceited.
Whoa. Way to sound like a Microsoft apologist there, Peter. Yes, there are bugs in other distros, but the ones he encountered are really severe ones. Maybe you need to let go of Red Hat for a little while and check out some other distros, I think you'll find there's a lot to them.
Face up to it, Red Hat doesn't give a damn about desktop users, and you'll get slagged off from here on out.
I also use Mandrake, and occasionally Knoppix when I can't get to my own computer. I find it difficult to admit that Red Hat doesn't give a damn about desktop users when they are responsible for Fedora and they contribute code back in to the community, rather a lot of it in fact.
I don't really care if I get slagged off for that.
Now I'm off to look for open bugs in Debian and then say it shouldn't have been released because its shit.
Otherwise, you really will be a troll.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;-)
people are complaining about RedHat because they have changed their prices, period. changing their focus to enterprise server market was in their best interest. you say that "they don't give a damn about desktop users" ? they give a damn about staying in business and being profitable, as is Mandrake and SuSe. If you think that Mandrake hasn't done the same thing because it's out of the goodness of your heart, then you're fooling yourself.
You think that they are somehow ignoring the alienating of their loyal past desktop users ?
You think that they have just made this decision willy-nilly and somehow weren't aware of the possibility of customer fallout ? RedHat is not dumb, these issues have been in play for quite a long time, and RedHat is the first one to change their direction.
a few tips
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 02, 2003 04:13 PMkudos to drake. jsut installed it on an old (k62-300, 128mb) laptop. it found my linksys wap11 card, and everything fine, except soundcard which 8.0 picked up. however, adding it to<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/etc/modules was easy. (still not a "simple" task for newbies, but then again, this laptop is 5 years old!!). i also like the osx-like profiles for network prefs. way to go.
#