[thelist] Mandrake 9.2 or Redhat 9.0

Chris Johnston chris at fuzzylizard.com
Thu Oct 16 13:01:53 CDT 2003


David Mitchell wrote:

>Hi Everyone,
>
>Apologies if this post is way off topic but I just aquired a new laptop
>and have decided to go the Linux route. I have narrowed my choice down
>to the lastest version of either Mandrake or Redhat. Just wanted to get
>people's input on which distro they prefer for an everyday workstation,
>and why?
>
If you are looking primarily for an OS for a notebook (and a fairly new 
notebook at that) I would suggest going with Mandrake 9.2. The reason 
for this is that it uses the 2.4.22 Kernel which has full support for 
ACPI. This will allow Linux to use the power management capabilities of 
your notebook. Without this, little things like a battery indicator, 
auto shutdown of the notebook, suspend, etc, won't work.

However, you can always install Red Hat 9.0 and then install/compile the 
2.4.22 kernel yourself.

A few more reasons to go with Mandrake instead of Red Hat
- Mandrake supports mp3 "out of the box", whereas you will need to 
install the proper packages to get it to work wtih Red Hat
- Mandrake's urpmi is a much better way of updating/installing packages
- www.mandrakeusers.org is an excellent online support forum for 
Mandrake. You will be hard pressed to find anything similiar to this for 
Red Hat.

BTW, which notebook did you just get -- if it is a Dell Inspiron 1100, 
5100, 5150 you may have problems installing any form of Linux onto it.

Hope that helps,

chris johnston



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