Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>> I'm in the "big city" until tomorrow, but live far away so want to
>> make my decision quickly while CD's and handholding are available.
>
> Give Mandriva 2008.1 a try. I'm very pleased with it and, based on my own
> experience, it's better than Ubuntu (of which I've used many versions of
> the years, including the first).
>
> Mandriva is RPM-based, just like Red Hat that you've already used. The
> repository is similar to that of Debian/Ubuntu, so there's nothing but
> messing about with tickboxes to manage software. There's so sudo and the
> command line is obsolete.
I second that. I've been using Mandriva for several years now; it's a
pleasure to work with, and offers great hardware support. And indeed none
of my ordinary users have ever had to use the command line (although I use
it on a daily basis myself).
Make sure of the following things though:
- Get the full DVD version if possible; the Live CD version (Mandriva One)
appears to have a few rough edges.
- After the initial installation, go to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org to add
extra package sources to the install, most notably the PLF sources for
multimedia support, accelerated video drivers and other proprietary stuff.
If something appears to hang during this step, just wait a few minutes --
the package manager is probably checking for updates, which blocks your
access to the package database during that time.
- Fire up the package manager (found in Mandriva's main configuration tool)
and install flash-player-plugin, mplayerplugin, win32-codecs, libdvdcss2,
lame and liblame0. You may want to go to the package source configuration
first, and disable the "CD" sources, so that Mandriva installs everything
directly from the Internet.
- Open the device manager and confirm the choice of graphics card; if there
is a proprietary driver available, Mandriva will tell you at this point,
and ask you if you want to have it installed. Simply click Yes and wait for
the install to finish. I usually reboot after this (although it's not
really necessary) to make certain everything works OK.
- Finally, a minute or so after the next login, you will see a red
exclamation mark in the system tray, indicating available updates. Simply
click this icon and install the updates. Please note that the first time,
this may take a *long* time, because it's several hundred megabytes of
updates at least. After this, you're all set.
Richard Rasker
--
http://www.linetec.nl
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