Mandrake or Fedora?

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

At 09:59 14/01/2004 -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 11:18:12PM -0500, mark wrote:
> > I likewise had Mandrake, and wasn't that impressed.  I switched to
> > Mepis, which I like (the apt-get utility is amazing!).  Like Fedora,
> > Mepis is free.  I have not tried Fedora, but I hear good things about it.
>
>I think some people put way too much emphasis on how well the installer
>detected their particular combination of hardware and threw a pretty
>desktop in their face.  Given I install a machine ones, and use it for
>years with upgrading along the way, the installer should preferably let
>me do what I want for partitions and filesystems and such, but other
>than that I don't really care what it does.  I care how the system runs
>and how I install and upgrade things.  Now an installer that is
>completely unhelpful and makes me do work I shouldn't have had to does
>certainly do anything but impress me, so it does work in reverse.  The
>SuSE ftp install I tried a couple of years ago was like that.

Hi Lennart,

Hardware detection *is* important if you have exotic hardware like SCSI 
RAID adapters, Gigabit Ethernet cards and such. Why not let the installer 
do the heavy lifting for you, all other things being equal? Both Red Hat 
and Mandrake do an excellent job of auto detecting hardware.

You have reminded me of a few other things during the installation process 
of Mandrake and Red Hat that I have noted.

Disk partitioning - Both are very good so no complaints there. I think Red 
Hat insists that partitions are referenced by labels rather than device 
names. If that is a concern, use Mandrake. I do not care one way or the other.

Package dependency management - Mandrake handles package dependencies much 
better than Red Hat. Red Hat gives you a laundry list of packages upon 
which other packages you have already painstakingly selected depend. The 
choices are to accept them all and go forward, or go back and deselect 
packages you do not want because they depend on packages you do not want to 
install. Mandrake is much smarter about it and notifies you immediately if 
you select a package that has unsatisfied dependencies. You have the choice 
at the time the selection is made to install the package with all its 
dependent packages or not.

Saving package selections - Please correct me if I am wrong but I do not 
recall Red Hat giving me the option to save a list of the packages I 
selected so that in subsequent installs, I would not have to go through the 
tedious exercise of selecting packages all over again. I find that is the 
part of installation that takes the longest. I know Red Hat gives one the 
option of creating a kickstart floppy, which is useful, so the kickstart 
file might be used to derive the list of packages. Mandrake gives one the 
options of saving package selections only and creating an autoinstall disk. 
There are a further two options of the autoinstall disk, prompted, or not. 
The former will allow one to reinstall without having to recreate and 
format partitions while the latter will completely take over the machine. 
Again, subtle differences but the subtle differences are what make Mandrake 
the superiour distro in my opinion. I have nothing against Red Hat and 
would happily use it if I had to but I would choose, and have chosen, 
Mandrake over it.

Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M4N 3P6

Tel: 416-410-3326 

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