Mandrake or Fedora?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 07:05:53PM -0500, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> 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.

Some people know what hardware they have, and would rather just tell the
system the things it can't figure out.  Sometimes there is more than one
driver for a device and the auto detection may pick one when you prefer
the other (I played with one of the hw detection tools in Debian, and
got pissed off at it rather quickly, when it decided the OSS sound
driver would be better than letting me load ALSA.)

> 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.

I prefer cfdisk for partitioning, although I certainly will agree that
this is hardly optimal for the average user.  I have no idea if RedHat
insists on disks labels now.  It didn't do so in the past but I have
seen many RedHat systems recently that used disk labels.  I would find
disk labels more useful if swap supported it.

> 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.

I have yet to see anything match the package handling of debian, or the
quality and consistency of the packages.

> 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.

A method for installing multiple systems identically is something Debian
still could use, although there are certainly ways one could clone a
system other than running the installer.  Perhaps with the new modular
installer in the next version that will become much simpler to do.  It
certainly has much more in the way of ability to detect scsi cards and
disks and such, without being obnoxious about it (and it will let you
tell it otherwise when needed).

Out of cuoriosity: Does RedHat and Mandrake have archives of old
versions available?  I know Debian has archives of every released
version around that you can grab stuff from if you need it.

Lennart Sorensen
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