oti0sus

I've been using my new computer for just over a week now, and all is going well. The old one was just too slow and starting to make burring noises. It was time for an upgrade. So I have a faster chip, and more memory. I partitioned the master HDD and installed Windows. The fellow who made the computer gave me a CD with some virus patches and told me to install Windows with the Internet connection unplugged, and not to configure it until I had installed the patches. I did as instructed and still I managed to get infected before being able to install the more up-to-date updates and the latest anti virus/spyware offerings from Microsoft.

I took the change-over as an opportunity to experiment a little more with Linux distributions. The previous one I had used, Suse 9.1, chosen originally for its recognition of my old sound card, didn't recognize my new one. This was a plug-and-play card that I soon found would not be recognized by any of the half dozen or so distributions I tried. I eventually gave up on it and switched over to the sound card on the motherboard.

I settled on the Mandrake 10.1 distribution. It managed to mount all my devices and partitions, and has done very nicely with multi-media, including the TV-out functions. The only reservation I have about it is the system used for installing new software.

I cut my teeth on the Suse YaST system, found it a pleasure to use and since have read many other users praising it. Follow this link to shop around for places to get new software for Mandrake. It's nowhere nearly as satisfactory as the YaST system, but it seems to work so far. Mandrake seems to put a lot of emphasis on its "club". There is a fee for this and it seems that users face a little more effort in order to ferret out stuff for free. However, that's only based on my uninformed first impressions. For the mean-time, I'm enjoying tinkering about with Firefox and the Gnome, KDE and other graphic environments, something I never bothered with (or was aware of) under Suse.