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Due to my bad luck in the past with ISO's, I will be buying Linux. I have narrowed it down to Mandrake or Red Hat, since I am a (relative) newbie.
Mandrake Pro's: Comes with Star Office 6.0, $37.99 locally,
Con's: Dunno.
RH Pro's: ???
Con's: $60 locally, no Star Office
So which would you pick?
I have mandrake 8.1 and I found it quite easy to install and use...the whole process is very user friendly but you can still customize it however you like.
I have red hat, so I'm partial, but I'm also sure
that you will have a good experience with
either one.
You get lots of extras when you buy a boxed
distribution. It's probably the only really
good way for a newbie, unless you are
already technically adept at another OS
and persistent.
My red hat 7.2 came with 6 CDs, lots of cool stuff!
:cool:
Bad luck? Maybe the people at AO can help you out with that. If you're paying for a Linux CD, you're really missing the point of Linux. It's free. Wouldn't you rather figure out the answer to the problem which means you save money and get a sense of self satisfaction?Quote:
Due to my bad luck in the past with ISO's, I will be buying Linux. I have narrowed it down to Mandrake or Red Hat, since I am a (relative) newbie.
If you're having trouble just getting hold of the distro, your troubles haven't even started yet. There will be a lot more challenging problems to contend with. Do yourself a favour and try to figure it out before you buy an official copy of Linux.
If you *really* must buy it, you can get it cheaper than the prices you specified. You can get cheap Linux CD's here.
I've used them both, but if I were you I'd just go buy a book and get one of the cds that'll install the OS with the book for a better deal. I usually just do that if I don't have the time to download the ISOs or anything, plus that's how I found one of my favorite *nix OSs, the Caldera OpenLinux 2.3. :)
I'm a big RedHat fan...Although people tell me that RH 7.1 has a buggy Kernel, I'm yet to have a problem with it. I finally got the install right and it works perfectly.
If you're going to install RH all I can suggest is that you write down your monitor specs before you start. It'll save you alot of trouble!
Enigma has been running my tarpit for over 3 months with no issues.
And big deal if Mandrake comes with Star Office, it's free. What kind of trouble have you had with ISO's. They work perfectly for me every time. The most common mistake is when people go to burn ISO's they just burn the .iso file to the CD-R. What you have to do is create a CD from an image. And point your burner software to that file.
KorpDeath: Actually, I heard StarOffice isn't free anymore. I think this was effective like two months ago, if I remember correctly. I heard someone say it on AO-IRC just a while back when we had a discussion one morning. Either way, it shouldn't matter like I said earlier which one you get. Just do the book thing I recommended if you want a good deal and all.
Hi,
If you want Mandrake 8.2 you can get it at www.spidertools.com for $8.95 for a three cd set. They also have Red Hat 7.2 and 7.3 but they don't use the name because of trademake purposes or something like that. I use Mandrake 8.2 and I bought mine from the Mandrake company. I got the PowerPack edition that comes with 7 cds and two manuals for $69.00. I think the 8.95 three cd set from spidertools sounds good, but I'm not sure what comes with it. You might want to check out the site and maybe e-mail them and find out the details.
My deal with ISO's is that every time I d/l one and burn it, I always get an error when trying to install. For some reason, at different files during the install, it will be unable to read the files. I coastered many discs downloading and burning. Red Hat, Madrake, Slackware ( I know it's not for newbies, but hey, it was only 1 CD) all have errors every time. The one time I bought a book that had RH 6.something, it worked fine. Maybe my old burner sucked?
Anyway, next week I will be moving to a townhouse that shares a T-1 with the adjoining apt. complex. I can d/l every distro that I can find, especially since they offered me the admin job!!! :D :D So I'll just wait until then and buy a spindle of 50 CD's and have fun. How does that sound?
[edit] StarOffice 6.0 is like $70; but I think you can still download 5.2?? for free. They also have that OpenOffice, but I haven't heard much about it.
OpenOffice is great. Thats what I use. I migrated from an XP Pro and Linux dual boot to just using Linux. I have an extra HDD that I left formatted in FAT32(Vfat) that I left all my OfficeXP docs on. So far OpenOffice works well with them all. It will even save files in all the OfficeXP & 2000 formats. I could even use my powerpoint slides with it. I like it better than Star Office because you can open the programs individualy instead of running everything from one desktop interface like Star does. The big plus is that it runs better than OfficeXP. So far no crashes or lockups. Something that happened ever so often in OfficeXP.Quote:
They also have that OpenOffice, but I haven't heard much about it.