Is Mandrake Linux 9 good for a Newbi?

[IchNiSan]

Just a couple things to add, since I now know a little bit more about your setup......

I don't know for sure, as I have never tried it, but, you may experience trouble booting to a second hard drive in your machine(set in slave mode I assume, or cable select, which will default to slave mode, if another is master). The following should help to prevent this issue.

Someone please correct me if any of this info is incorrect.....

One way to get around this, is (you should be prompted) to tell Suse, or whatever linux, to take over the MBR(Master Boot Record). That should be on your primary drive, and will load whatever boot loader you choose during setup, which should take over loading your linux system from whereever it is.

On the subject of boot loaders, Suse 8 should default to using GRUB. If it does, great, if it offers you a choice between GRUB and LILO(Linux Loader) choose GRUB. Grub is a newer loader than lilo(though lilo certainly has been updated) and deals fairly easily with some issues which used to confuse the hell out of lilo, such as having your /boot partition past the 1024th sector of your drive, among other things. If I understand it correctly, LILO uses the BIOS drivers for talking to the hard drives, and some older BIOS cannot read past the 1024th sector of the drive. GRUB has its own drivers(simply put) which deal with the hard drive, and you dont have to worry about it. As long as you allow it to take over your MBR.

Also, SuSe should automagically add a boot option for your windows partition. Though you may have to give it a name. If you get through the install, and don't have the option to boot into windows from GRUB, there are a number of people here who can help you get that sorted out in fairly short order.

Have fun, don't let yourself get easily frustrated, and please, please spend some time using the command line(though the gui's are getting very nice a flexible these days.. You will learn a lot more about the OS, and nix in general.

[kadeng]

I use Mandrake just 2 weeks and i love it!
With KDE i had the most fun as a Linux newbie.
I think its a bit more W98-user frendly than the Gnome desktop.

You will love it.

[REDDFOX321]

Yeah its sweeeeet!!! We have a comp with it at the University, though i havent had extensive time with it. Great GUI(KDE, not sure which version). It fooled me for a sec , first i thought it was windows, then a mac ( lol). truly amazing ...

[sed_awk]

I was impressed with this distro. It is the firsts distro that I think is truely ready for desktop users. I was skeptical when I saw Walmart advertising Mandrake based PC's, but after giving this one a whirl I was impressed enough to think that is solid enough for users that don't need or want to know much about a Unix based CLI. Its a far cry from the Slackware distro that I used to save on shoeboxes of floppies about 12 years ago Have fun!