Linux - Mandrake - The Linux you may have been looking for

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

A review of Linux-Mandrake, and a play by play commentary of installing this Linux distribution from the land of 'Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite et le Software Libre'.

Let me first preface this review of Mandrake by saying that I had never tried it. I've sort of settled into a routine in my home network which is running a combination of SuSE, Slackware and Debian on 4 different machines. Living here in Europe, I had always heard of Mandrake and particularly of its multi-language support which was supposed to be pretty good. But I never sat down and actually installed it, because, as I said, I am a creature of routine (my apologies as well to all the other fine flavors of Linux out there. I'll try to get to those as well).

I should also say that I am one of those people who's used to tweaking configuration files by myself and I am generally proficient with tarballs (a file that includes a bundle of source code and program files that needs to be 'manually' installed), but I must say, I was impressed by the installation of Mandrake. And here's the real crux of the whole reason I'm writing this review: If you want to change to Linux, Mandrake is the Linux distribution that you're looking for.

First of all, let me go through the steps I took to install Mandrake and you can see for yourself why it's going to get my highest rating of 5 penguins, overall.

The machine I used to install is an older Intel Pentium 120 Mhz machine with a PCI Ethernet (network) card, aS3 VIRGE video card (also PCI) and a Sound Blaster 16 sound card (this one is ISA). For those of you aren't familiar with hardware (and I am by no means 'Mr. Hardware Expert'), PCI is newer technology. The slots on the mother board (the big thing that runs your computer) that these cards fit into are smaller. The ISA cards fit into bigger slots. "Plug and Play" was introduced with ISA cards. I prefer to call this, as many others have "Plug and PRAY" because when I used to work on the other side of the OS fence, (not the Linux side), I used to plug and then pray only to have the gods of hardware not answer my prayers. The Sound Blaster was a plug and play card it's the only part of the install where I'm going to reduce my penguin rating for Mandrake. I'll explain why in the conclusion.

This machine can't boot from the CD-ROM drive as all of the newer machines do, so I knew (or at least I thought) I was going to have to go through the 'rawrite.exe' routine from DOS. If you're new to the Linux game, this means that on a machine that boots normally in a sequence HARD DISK- FLOPPY DISK, or vice-versa, and nothing else, then you have to boot Windows first and run 'rawrite.exe' from the MS-DOS command line and make a boot floppy with Linux on it. That's, of course, if you want a machine that dual-boots Windows and Linux. (There are certain members of the Linux community who will start to hiss and boo now). You re-boot with the floppy in the drive and the Linux installer for your distribution takes over. Well, was I surprised with Mandrake. From Windows, I clicked on the CD icon and a nice little program popped up. I clicked on the option to make the boot floppy and browsed around until I found the cdrom image (what you need to put on the floppy if you're going to install from a CD) and I made my boot floppy. I rebooted and much to my surprise, I get this nice, graphic user interface asking me to choose my install language. I was really pleased. Having installed a plethora of versions of SuSE, I was familiar with their installer, called YAST, which is a text-mode program. Now they have YAST2, a GUI thing, but if you don't have a lot of memory installed (which this machine doesn't) it isn't going to work. Mandrake's GUI installer works fine with frugal memory usage and it's nice to look at too.

[ next ]