Fourth Distro: Mandriva!

Ok so as I already alluded I ended up using Mandriva, because that's what we use in house. I bought a Western Digital 120 GB drive and dual booted. Mandrake was very impressive, I was quite suprised by the ease of installation, and relative ease of use. Now let me preface that with the point that I was not entirely ignorant of configuring and using linux. The one piece of hardware I had to manually configure was my Linksys USB100TX network adapter, but that was it.

it was a simple as:
# modprobe pegasus
# ifconfig eth0 up
and I was set, but I did have to google to find out what kernel module had the driver for my network adapter.

I've been using this distribution every day now for over 1 year. I've hit a few bumps on the road. And here's some things I've learned.

1. Use a journaled file system. When your system locks up you will be glad.


2. backup often, when something goes wrong you won't regret backing up. (Of course that's a general computing maxim)


3. Read as much as you can about your distribution, and linux issues in general.

Do these things, and you'll get by just great. Of course if you are a gamer, there are a few what are considered "good" games (popular anyways) that you can play on linux. However if you want the latest and greatest in the gaming front. Dual boot and use Windows for your games, and use linux for everything else. BTW- I don't really game, any games I play, I use Linux for :-P

Anyways that's it for now. Next time I'll talk about some neat distros I took a look at to put on an old school P100 box I had kicking around.

-NT