Re: [TCLUG:6525] redhat vs mandrake

["Mike Glaser" <jurupari@geocities.com>]

> > the past month I've installed RH 6.0, Mandrake 6.0, Caldera 2.2, and SuSE
> > 6.1.
> > 
> What did you think of SuSE 6.1 and Caldera 2.2?  


I have installed each of those this past month also except for the 
Mandrake distribution. I had been using RedHat 5.1 previous to trying 
these other three. The CD's I installed from were from the Linux 
SixPack from Linuxmall. I acutally downloaded the entire RH6 
distribution and burned my own CD before I got the SixPack.

The Caldera had a spiffy graphical install but I had great difficulty 
getting the system to boot at all when it was done. In fact I 
completely reformatted the sytem and installed it three times. I 
finally got it to come up and run ok, but my ethernet card does not 
work - DOH!  I am not sure why yet - it is an HP Lan adapter plus or 
something. It never had a problem with various versions of RedHat.

On a different machine I set up Suse 6.1 because of the difficulties 
I had with the Caldera system. The installation screens seemed to be 
more confusing and more work to go through, but everything worked 
right from the start. The problem I had with this is I could not get 
the IPX protocol running. I need that to access Netware servers when 
at the office and one I have at home for testing. I got into a bunch 
of trouble fiddling with that and when half of the errors started 
coming up in German I dumped it too. I later heard that the kernel 
needed to be recompiled to get the IPX going. I am not sure. There 
were IPX modules compiled that I loaded but it didn't go anyhow.

I have also installed RedHat 6.0 on four or five machines now and 
that has worked well every time. I liked its installation program the 
best I think too. Plus with the RedHat, it is easy to set up and 
switch between GNOME and KDE if you wish. The other two only come 
with KDE.

I know most people will not need Netware connectivity but that is one 
of the reasons I wanted to try Caldera. I don't know if it works well 
or not since I havne't got the nic running yet. I have been using the 
ncpfs-2.2.0 to mount my netware servers and that works ok for logging 
into root, but it doesn't fully support NDS like Calderas Netware for 
linux is supposed to. I will have to monkey around with it some more.