[wellylug] I blew it - lost a convert

Wood Brent pcreso at pcreso.com
Wed Sep 1 12:42:16 NZST 2004


--- Eugene Van Wyk <Eugene.VanWyk at 4rf.com> wrote:

> Hi Brent
> 
> Accepted.  I can understand all that.  But maybe this should be said a
> little louder then.  For Joe Soap that sees this distro and decides to
> give it a bash, may be the only time Mandrake has a chance to get
> another client, and if MDK10 was my first contact with Linux, I would
> certainly have given up by now.  I know it has performed flawlessly for
> some, but I have had issues on every platform I've tried.

Like I said, experiences vary :-)

> To date my best consistent MDK experience has been with Mandrake8.
> Second on the list has been the disk based install for Knoppix.  Besides
> Red Hat, I have not played with any other distro's.

I don't know who has the time to play with a significant variety of distros...
Any issues with any distros tend to be seen and reported as Linux problems,
when Linux is only one component of a distro, & the distro itself can tweak
all/any components as they want, to both fix & introduce problems.

Sigh.... any solutions? It is one of the issues with Open Source that anyone
can take it & use it & some may not do as good a job as we'd like. Any
restrictions simply means it's not open any more. In this area proprietary
software does have fewer problems. I still prefer OS overall.


People seem to find something they are comfortable with & stick with it.
Mandrake has worked for me, but if I'd had your experiences I might well have
moved on. I'm seriously looking at SUSE right now. I regard it & Mandrake as
the "best" desktop distros for my needs & SUSE is substantially cheaper (note:
SUSE does not have a free version, just commercial ones, which is one reason I
have supported Mandrake, as I feel they do more for the wider Linux community.
SUSE still does stuff, like sponsoring Reiser & such.... just how I feel about
it.)


> 
> BTW, do you remember the command to do a disk install of Knoppix.  I
> have another P1 machine that I would like to give the Knoppix treatment?

See

http://www.freenet.org.nz/misc/knoppix-install.html

I seem to remember they have changed the command at some time, I never got the
new one to work properly :-(

I've used PCLinuxOS as my main Live CD distro in preference to Knoppix. Had
less hardware recognition failures & being a Mandrake user I prefer the
Mandrake look & feel of this one.... so I'm not too familar with Knoppix.


Cheers,

  Brent




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