Let your machine reboot. When GRUB comes up, you should have Linux as the default operating system to boot and Windows as a secondary option (I like that order!)

Now, enter your user name and password. After, enter the command 'startx'. It's just like the 4th of July. (or Bastille Day, Mandrake is after all, French) Oo la la and voila! You get KDE, the K Desktop Environment. (and the newest version to boot) If you're coming from the Windows world, you're going to be very pleased. It's the look you're used to and you can do anything with it that you used to do.

There are other 'windows' (with a small w) managers available for Linux. I personally like one called FVWM2. I didn't see it on the Mandrake disks I got, so I'll have to pull out some other disks at some point and install it manually. KDE is great looking, but it is somewhat memory intensive. This older Pentium with 32 mb of RAM complains a bit about it, but it works fine, despite being a bit slow for my taste. If you've got a more powerful system, then you'll be fine. My system likes FVWM2 and its memory frugality.

There are a couple of things about Mandrake that I think are just spectacular. One is the ability to use TrueType fonts. This is something that I've tried on other distributions and it's always been fairly hard to get them working. With Mandrake, you have 'FontDrak'. This will get TrueType fonts out of your Windows partition and install them, no blood, no sweat and no tears. Try this out if you like using a lot of different fonts (or if you like writing ransom notes)

The other thing is WINE. (no, nothing to do with that drink so popular in France) WINE is a Windows emulator, so you can still run Windows applications under Linux. I really don't use Windows except for one thing: Looking at our site's web pages through the eyes of MS Internet Explorer and other browsers that run under Windows. For that reason, WINE has never really been a big need for me, but I was pleased when I tried WINE. It was pre-configured in the Mandrake install, so I just typed this in the KDE, X-terminal (ie, the shell).

wine  --managed  --winver win95 /mnt/windows/netscape/netscape.exe

And Netscape for Windows came up. Not too shabby! I looked up some of my old buried apps that I haven't seen for years and tried a few of them. Some worked, some didn't. As the Romans used to say: 'In vino veritas'. (In wine there is truth) Try it and see.

With Mandrake, you have a Linux system that you can do anything with. I'm sorry I didn't try it sooner.

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