Mandrake

[Darin Lang <darin@flashcom.net>]

I installed the Mandrake intsallation as you suggested, Jean. It was easy
and it worked much better than Slackware. It had a graphical drive farmatter
instead of a prompt which made it much clearer what was going on. It easily
configured my printer, my keyboard(Dvorak), X windows and it works excellent
for the first time. It installed the dual boot LILO, mysql, apache, php,
perl all right off the bat. I found it to be a smooth clear and simple
interface, except that there were alot of unneccessary things included I am
sure. But I whittled it down as best as I could to just what i needed. All
the things above and below took me weeks, full time, to figure out and
configure mostly manually, when I originally installed Slackware linux last
November. With Mandrake it was a piece of cake.

    It did not configure the network properly, I have two NIC cards and it
hasn't been able to configure either one and I can no longer connect to the
internet or intranet. Also I feel the distro should have included but didn't
Apple Talk (netatalk) since it included NFS and Samba, so now I have to find
that somewhere and intsall it. And IP Alias so I can configure Apache to
respond to multiple IP requests, as well and then recompile Apache with PHP,
MySQL and Perl and IP Alias. That is if I ever get my network running...

    I still do not have sound either, and I can't figure out how to
configure that either.

    Mandrake is very nice and straightforward. I think it is a good choice
to start with as a base. I wonder what it lacks though that Indy needs to
remedy. You know more about that than I, I haven't a clue really, but it
seems INdy could be offered as a choice right at initial install. When you
first install it, it asks if you want to do the Easy or Expert install. It
would seem it could split there to "Easy, Expert or INDY".

    Darin