Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on October 09, 2002 11:49 AM
I've personally installed Mandrake 9 on 10 development workstations and I've installed RedHat 8 on 3 servers & 5 workstations in the past 2 weeks. We had alot of machines still running RH7 so it was time to upgrade and I downloaded both distros as soon as they were available. So we have a couple more weeks time using Mandrake 9.
I find the install of Mandrake 9 is easier. They difficulty factor is about the same for each. Redhat has made a nice improvement in the look of it's install utility. I'm pretty sure this mostly due to the use of gtk2. Mandrake definately has the more colorful install, they both are very polished and provide a very good install experience. The time it takes to complete the install is the main difference. RedHat 8 takes about 1 1/2 times as long for the same amount of packages. Redhat can take up to two hours to complete an upgrade. After 2 Redhat upgrades, I started wiping the machines and started clean, except for the<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/home partitions. Mandrake took about forty five minutes average to complete an upgrade. Upgrades to Mandrake from 8.2, can break some apps, this is due to fact that Mandrake 8.2 put kde3 in<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/opt/kde3 and Mandrake 9 put kde back under<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/usr. So any apps installed outside the distro become broken. This can be a real pain,and one that could have been avoided by moving the kde2 libs in MDK8.2 instead of kde3. The favorability among users is pretty much kde vs. gnome. The users who prefer gnome love bluecurve. Those who prefer KDE love mandrake, (with an added liquid theme!).
The configuration tool for Mandrake is much more integrated, intuitive and mature than what redhat has done. RedHat got rid of linuxconfig starting with 7.2 and replaced it with a bunch of individual apps and wizards that can be run from nautilus, sort of like the control panel in Windows. For experienced redhat users everything has completely changed and not nessasarily for the better. The Mandrake Control Center is a much easier to use configuration tool. Using urpmi to install rpm's is great, it finds the dependencies and installs them even from the commandline which makes administering a server without Xwindows a snap.
Both distros look great & have their own unique menu systems. Unfortunately, in RedHat when you install software not in the distro you have to in most cases make your own menu listings. Many kde apps in the psyche cd's don't show up in the menus for gnome. The same goes for kde, not all the stuff installed for gnome is listed. Alot of stuff that is there you have to hunt for under the extras menu. They managed to break a few apps that have been stable for years. For example try playing aislerot, double clicking on the cards too many times causes it to crash in every machine I tried. It's a minor thing but damn annoying to someone who plays solitaire during lunch! I think both distributions look and work great, but after using & adminstering both daily, Mandrake 9 is a little bit better in my humble opinion.
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Re:mandrake install difference
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on October 09, 2002 11:49 AMI find the install of Mandrake 9 is easier. They difficulty factor is about the same for each. Redhat has made a nice improvement in the look of it's install utility. I'm pretty sure this mostly due to the use of gtk2. Mandrake definately has the more colorful install, they both are very polished and provide a very good install experience. The time it takes to complete the install is the main difference. RedHat 8 takes about 1 1/2 times as long for the same amount of packages. Redhat can take up to two hours to complete an upgrade. After 2 Redhat upgrades, I started wiping the machines and started clean, except for the<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/home partitions. Mandrake took about forty five minutes average to complete an upgrade. Upgrades to Mandrake from 8.2, can break some apps, this is due to fact that Mandrake 8.2 put kde3 in<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/opt/kde3 and Mandrake 9 put kde back under<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/usr. So any apps installed outside the distro become broken. This can be a real pain,and one that could have been avoided by moving the kde2 libs in MDK8.2 instead of kde3. The favorability among users is pretty much kde vs. gnome. The users who prefer gnome love bluecurve. Those who prefer KDE love mandrake, (with an added liquid theme!).
The configuration tool for Mandrake is much more integrated, intuitive and mature than what redhat has done. RedHat got rid of linuxconfig starting with 7.2 and replaced it with a bunch of individual apps and wizards that can be run from nautilus, sort of like the control panel in Windows. For experienced redhat users everything has completely changed and not nessasarily for the better. The Mandrake Control Center is a much easier to use configuration tool. Using urpmi to install rpm's is great, it finds the dependencies and installs them even from the commandline which makes administering a server without Xwindows a snap.
Both distros look great & have their own unique menu systems. Unfortunately, in RedHat when you install software not in the distro you have to in most cases make your own menu listings. Many kde apps in the psyche cd's don't show up in the menus for gnome. The same goes for kde, not all the stuff installed for gnome is listed. Alot of stuff that is there you have to hunt for under the extras menu. They managed to break a few apps that have been stable for years. For example try playing aislerot, double clicking on the cards too many times causes it to crash in every machine I tried. It's a minor thing but damn annoying to someone who plays solitaire during lunch! I think both distributions look and work great, but after using & adminstering both daily, Mandrake 9 is a little bit better in my humble opinion.
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