I just installed Mandrake 9.2 on a clean drive, and I am very impressed. It
took about half an hour, and near the end it gave me the opportunity to
choose my screen resolution. So I selected my favorite and clicked TEST. It
showed a test pattern and asked if that was ok. I clickes YES, but then the
display went blank (actually filled with rainbow colors from the test
pattern,) never to return. I'm thinking, "great, now I'll have to start
over." So... reset. To my surprise it booted up and everything seems to work
ok. It recognized all my hardware, gave me full access to the available
display resolutions of my graphics adapter, and set up the network with no
questions, i.e. the web browser worked first time. Everything has nice
anti-aliased fonts, the UI is very polished, and many of the system
utilities are familiar looking for Windows users, like package management,
hardware management, etc. Didn't appear to install MySQL as I expected, but
that shouldn't be too hard to add. Compared to RH7.2 this is lightyears
ahead. Kudos to the folks at Mandrake. At first blush I would say this does
compare with Windows in terms of polish and ease of use. We'll see how it
does on stability....
--
Phil Mattison
Ohmikron Corp.
480-722-9595 ext.1
602-820-9452 Mobile
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