A Magician's Box
Written: Dec 18 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Easy to use, good integrity, good features, good value for money, can be installed on Dos or Windows partitions as well.
Cons: Similarity to Red Hat.
|
|
|
| dollarspurgeon's Full Review: Mandrake Linux |
Mandrakesoft is one of the first companies which decided to make a distribution from another. They made Mandrake from Red Hat, but with Mandrake 7.0, it is a completely new in-house distribution. The feel of Red Hat is still there, as also a few components, but Mandrake provides for a better setup, configuration tools and a few extra packages.
Installation is simple but flexible-you can customize almost the whole of the process and change many configuration parameters. not only this, it can be installed on Dos or Windows partitions as well. You can use a small front-end called LNX4WIN to boot into Linux from Windows. PartionMagic is bundled with the distribution which makes it possible to install on a native Linux file system.
You can choose individual packages while installation, and third party applications can be installed from the four additional CDs, although that has to be done after the system is fully installed. What is of significance to Mandrake users is that because of the similarity to Red Hat, it's much easier to configure help and also ensures greater compatibility with RPM files, as compared to distributions like Storm Linux and Corel Linux that have a slightly different directory structure.
Hardware detection was perfect-it detected everything from the mouse to the GeForce 256 flawlessly. Mandrake claims to be the only Linux distribution that supports USB keyboards and mice, and that's good since the Linux kernel in its current stage doesn't support native USB devices.
Almost all the packages in Mandrake have been compiled for Pentium and higher processors. Though it gives a bit of performance boost for those who use the i586 or i686 compatible processors, people using 486 might find that Mandrake does not run at all.
Overall, this is good distribution for wannabe Linux techies who are still in the rookie stage and want to get their hands dirty on all those application CDs.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
dollarspurgeon
|
|
Member: Deepak Spurgeon
Location: Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Reviews written: 44
Trusted by: 1 member
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.