| A first look at Mandrake 8.1 [LinuxWorld.com] |
Nov. 20, 2001
Joe Barr reviews Mandrake 8.1 in this online article at LinuxWorld.com. Barr found that although the Mandrake 8.1 installation program does most things well, and for many computers the installation is as painless as installing Windows, on his desktop machine, getting Mandrake 8.1 to install correctly took four tries. Barr writes . . .
"I switch distributions every now and then so that I can get a feel for what they have to offer and how they differ. For the past few months, I've run SuSE 7.2 and KDE. It was time for a change, so I took advantage of an offer of a review copy of Mandrake Linux (PowerPack Edition) 8.1. For the past few days I experimented with the installation, the platform, and configuration issues specific to my machine."
"My desktop machine has a 1-gigahertz Athlon processor with 512 megabytes of RAM. In addition to two Western Digital IDE hard drives, I have an HP 9100B cd-writer, and a floppy drive. I'm using an Nvidia GeForce2 DDR video card with 64 megabytes of memory, and a 19-inch ViewSonic PF790 monitor. I also have an HP 5200C scanner and a Lexmark Z52 ink jet printer attached. I connect to the Internet via an RTL 8129 PCI Ethernet card, which is plugged into a cable modem."
"I used the second hard drive to backup my /home partition before starting the installation. A backup before an installation or upgrade is always a good idea. In this particular case, it was a blessing. I strongly encourage you to do the same. Back up data you don't want to lose before playing distribution bingo."
"The Mandrake 8.1 install is slick, and when it works it literally turns the process into a no-brainer. Installing on my Sony Vaio laptop, for example, took about 30 minutes and was flawless. On my desktop machine, however, it was a different story . . ."
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