Linux Mandrake 10.0

Well if you are new to Linux then you have opted for the best and most user friendly Linux OS that you can get into.

Lots of user friendly wizards (drak-wizards) that can help you out in any of the tasks that you wish for, excellent user friendly add-remove program wizard, also features a fabulous GUI and all other regular stuff like mp3player(xmms,mpg123) movie player(mplayer,xine) which you would never find in the most stupidest and most popular Linux (Redhat).

If you are completeley new to Linux I would recommend you to go into Mandrake Move (Live CD for the mandrake ditribution).For those of you who don't know live CD its something that runs entire linux from CD itself without any need to install anything.

Mandrake comes in with one of the best hardware support (the other leader being SuSe).

Go in for this and you would probably forget all other distributions. As far as I am concerned, I have tried out all major distros like Redhat,Suse,Mandriva(formerly Mandrake),Slackware,Xandros,PClinuxOS,Fedora,Ubuntu,Turbo and Yellow Dog linux, believe me Mandrake is one the gems to go in for. Or else you may also like to look in for Slackware as well as Suse which are best in terms of user convinience.

Of all Linux that I have tried probabaly Mandrake/Suse are BEST in terms of performane/stability/and ease while Redhat being undisputed LOSER in all cases.

Kudos to Mandrake

Till recently, I was very happy with my Windows 2000. We had Red-Hat Linux in college but, none of us ever ventured into the linux territory. So, it took my husband a great deal of time and effort to convince me about the advantages of the Linux kernel.

After taking an internet connection, with many virus attacks which crashed my windows os, I had to retort to linux. But,now,I've got so used to it that even though I have a Windows2000 and Mandrake linux 10.0 installed in my system, I almost always use linux.

The installation part is already explained by ashesh in another revu. So, I'll stick to the features of Mandrake linux 10.0. Of course, 10.1 version has already arrived, but, I am yet to use it.

Let me start with a brief history of MandrakeLinux. It was created in 1998 when Linux was already well-known as a powerful and stable operating system. But,linux used lot of ''command line''; MandrakeSoft integrated the best graphical desktop environment in terms of functionality and ease-to-use.

MadrakeLinux is provided with brilliant features on par with the best windows versions available.It has one of the best graphical installation process and offers the most advanced and efficient hardware detection with improved configuration providing good hardware support.

The graphical approach to system administration, in addition to the command line, makes Mandrakelinux extremely user-friendly.Moreover, perfect integration of graphical environments such as KDE and GNOME provide comfort and ease-of-use.

Some of the salient features of Mandrake Linux 10.0 are:

It offers several levels of security. A user can choose a desired degree of security specifically for their computer.As I said, I never found any computer viruses creeping into my system.

It provides support for all the Office tools. Openoffice.org writer and KOrg(similiar to MS-word), Spreadsheets,OpenOffice.org impress(similar to powerpt),and almost all other tools we are familiar with.

Has in built support for Multimedia (Video,audio,etc.,), 2D and 3D games and,of course, Advanced programming.

It provides Mozilla and Konqueror browsers with the tabbed window support which is an excellent replacement to IE.

Provides web editors like Mozilla composer and quantaplus.

Messengers for instant messaging- gaim,kopete and gabber. I use gaim to login into my yahoo account.

Editors- Emacs,vi, kedit,etc., for programming purposes and the development tools like gdb Kdbg and Kompare.

Totem Media player and xmms work as a good substitute of Windows media player with good sound clarity.

Kdevelop- It's a development environment, similiar to VB and VC environments in windows.

It includes in its distribution the latest version of kernel 2.6.3 which has improved threading and memory support.

Automated installation procedure with capability to resize NTFS hard-disk partitions, and automatic printer detection and setup.

An improved over-all look and feel, better than the previous versions.

Mandrakelinux 10.0 now integrates Samba 3 and tools to migrate to it from Samba2.

KDE Desktop platform with features such as Kwallet(A tool which provides integrated, secure storage of passwords and web form data), Kontact(Interface that draws KDE's email, calendaring, address book, notes and other PIM features together into a familiar configuration), Inline spell checking for web forms and emails.

All operating systems require a certain level of maintenance to remain secure and up-to-date. Mandrakelinux 10.0 provides many tools and utilities to facilitate the most common system administration tasks.

There are many other features and specialities provided by mandrake linux.

For the complete details about this, plz refer to the web-site

https://mandrakesoft.com/products/10

This is my first installation experience with a distro other than RH-8,9 and FC2. And I enjoyed every moment doing it.

Installation

The experiment was on a friend's system with P4 -1.7GHz, 256MB, 40GB on it. Created a 10GB for linux and have win2k installed. Upon booting from CD, a screen with <F1>and <ENTER>to choose from to boot appears. I hit enter, just the way, I always did with RH/FC. After some messages, and a fatal error too, it took me to a ''text-based'' installation screen. I have never had experience with a text based installation, but then Linux is all about tweauking and fighting to get things work the way we want.

After taking sometime in reading what was displayed, I choose the 10GB partition for install and created a 512MB swap. I now needed to create / and /home partitions. I didnot understand what the Justified FS, Justified XFS etc meant, wanted to reboot to read some tutorial. It was during the attempt to get back to the first screen, that the system suddenly gives me a message that it is formatting the drive and asked me to choose from the list of programs that I wanted to install. I choose some programs that I recognized from RH installation and after some config screens I was asked to reboot to enter Mandrake10.0.

Booting

The boot screen that I got was also a text based screen. Dared to enter the linux though it was not very appealing. Finally got ''enter password screen'' and was very happy to see the graphical screen of Mandrake. Choose KDE, and found that it was much too faster than kde in RH/FC. The best part is that the control center was popped up and I could make some changes and also got a Lilo-graphical screen for booting. Upon going to /mnt I found that all my windows drives were also accessible, with read/write permission for FAT partitions and read only for NTFS partitions.

Tried to play some mp3 songs!!! And I was happy to see that I didnt have to download a rpm to enable the distro to allow me to play mp3 as was the case in RH. By default, totem-player was used to play the mp3s. Then tried to play a mpeg clip.. was more than happy to see that totem-player could play it without any problem.

In RH, I always installed mplayer. Now I rebooted into windows and found that it had become too slow. Was totally surprised to see this. Browsed around to see how to get GUI for installation with the hope that I could make the required partition for linux. And this time aruond when <F1>and <ENTER>screen came up, I choose <F1>and types ''alt0'', which again took me to text based installation. I rebooted again and typed ''alt1'' after pressing <F1>. And I was taken into graphical installation. I created /swap, and / of 4GB of journalized ext2 and /home of 5GB Journalized ext2 filesystem. (Still I dont know what alt9, alt1, journalized FS mean). The installation went smoothly. Checked the windows, and this time, it was as fast as before installing Linux. (Donot know what caused windows to become slow earier...).

The coolest part

Have realplayer, mplayer, adobe-acroreader installed from the CDs itself. Can access all windows (both NTFS and FAT32) partition without having to make changes to /etc/fstab. But with RH/FC, we need to explicitly instally all these and also make changes in /etc/fstab. The best part is that KDE/GNOME that come with mandrake is much faster than those that come with RF/FC.

Infact I had installed FC2 in the same system, but found that it was real slow. Moreover Mandrake was able to recognize all my hardware without any problem, whereas FC2 didnt recognize my sound card on this very system. All these made my friend happy, and I am sure that there will be the same happiness for any newbie.