Mandrake 7.0

[W Guy Finley <wgfinley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Haven't sent anything to the list for a while because, to be honest, I
could never get SuSE to function the way I wanted to, I needed more
Winblows space on my hard drive so I was converting Linux partitions to
FAT.

Well, yesterday I saw Mandrake 7.0 and it seemed to be a real sharp
distro and was cheap at $30 so I figured I'd give it a whirl.  Before I
did I decided to pick myself up a 15GB hard drive so I don't have any
more of my pesky space problems (my prior drive was 4.3).  Speaking of
that, I paid $10/gig for this 7200 RPM drive.....unbelieveable!  I
wanted it now otherwise I'm sure I could have found a better deal
online.

After doing the hard drive install and transferring my Windows
partitions over to the new drive I was able to fire up Mandrake.  The
install process was simplicity in itself, it had a well documented
"Getting Started" guide and plenty of online help with the GUI install.
I made my old 4.3 drive exclusively Linux and wiped it completely.  I
let the installer handle my partitions after I told it to use the whole
drive so I could see how it would do.  The only hitch I ran into was
getting BootMagic to work right but this is because I didn't follow what
the book had said and was going exclusively onscreen after the install
started.  Once I got LILO in the right spot (duh, on /hdb1) BootMagic
worked fine.  I also think BootMagic is great because it hides your
Linux partitions from Windows so the sucker isn't trying to "fix" them
(i.e. with scandisk).

This puppy is running flawlessly right now.  All the problems I had
before with PPP are nonexistent, the install set it up perfectly after I
gave it my ISP info.  It also set up my Soundblaster Live flawlessly
which has been no small task in the past.  Heck I didn't pull a single
hair out I don't think!  It also came with three of Macmillan's Linux
books on CD.

So, on the advocacy side, if you have people you're touting Linux to you
might want to mention Mandrake, my experience was great and has brought
me back to Linux.  I hope to be learning some programming  as well as a
lot more about Linux soon!!

--Guy