Dear Friends,

Got myself a dvd rom and the linux distros are now being tried out one by one.

First the live cds were tried out. Knoppix 3.2 and Cool Linux. Knoppix is fairly good for a general live os setup. Cool Linux is a Russian distro and comes with a dvd player icon on the desktop itself. On booting, it gives a big list of boot options of different screen resolutions and kernel versions. This is a very usefull feature. This software is worth atleast to have a close look.

The main software tried out was Mandrake 10.1. This is a 3 cd iso set and initially the installation does look dull with a low resolution keyboard only type interface. It had boot loader options like loading in the mbr or on the root partition. I wrongly selected the root partition and after reboot, nothing could be booted and I only got a grub prompt. The rescue option in the cd1 only reloads the bootloader, does not allow any changes. So the os was reloaded and this time the mbr option was selected. The os was loaded with the 'workstation' type installation.

On reboot, it gave me choices of linux, and windows. Mandrake uses lilo by default. I tried to point to the rhel installation in /etc/lilo.conf but the lilo command reports failures. A peculiar feature of Mandrake is that root cannot log into the X mode. On typing a root password, the login window only giggles and wiggles. The root has console access only. In the console, a new user was created and this user gets X login and desktop. My sound card was detected without any hiccups.

There is a very good all-in-one control centre that allows you to configure everything. It asks for a root password for access. You are still in user mode only. In this control centre there is a bootloader selection option and I chose grub on my root partition. This brought back my favourite loader and the /boot/grub/menu.lst was modified to point to the rhel os. Everything perfect.

After the initial speedbreakers, I find that this is the most compatible distro to the new P4 systems. It has audio, video (media) players, a video editor too. The video player can play a video cd smoothly with excellent picture and sound with full screen mode too. There is a dvd play option too but I don't have a video dvd to test. The lx300 printer too got setup. My external modem gets setup in a jiffy using kppp.

There are minor problems of no drivers available for my canon D646U scanner and the canon digicam. But as time goes by this may be available soon. There is a firewall that keeps you protected. The default desktop is the latest kde 3+ with nice little utilities. Open office is the latest 1.3 version.

If anyone has a ppd file for lx300, please mail it to me. The linuxprinting site does not have it but it says that it can be available in your windows partition too, though its not in my xp nor in my winme. I have misplaced the driver cd. This file can be added to my driver in mandrake and this would enhance printing features.

On a scale of 1 to 10, this distro gets between 7 and 8.

Regards,

Rony.