[NCLUG] Looking for user reviews and installation CD-ROMs

[Doug Holland]

On Monday 06 November 2000 05:55 pm, Milind Kamble wrote:
> Hi,
>   Just joined this mailing list in order to try out
> Linux. Can anyone comment about the merits/demerits of
> the following distributions:
> .. Redhat 7.0
> .. Mandrake 7.1 and/or 7.2
> .. Turbolinux 6.0
>
> Can anyone lend me Redhat or Mandrake cds to try them
> out? I have Turbolinux 6.0 and wanted to compare
> whether  the others are better in terms of
> installation and maintainence.

I have installed Red Hat 7.0, using CheapBytes CDs, so I have enough 
experience to give a halfway clueful first impression.

The installation had a major glitch - Anaconda came with a bug that 
causes a crash with a Python error dump in the middle of installation, 
after you've formatted your partitions and before it starts installing 
packages, which happens if you try installing on a system (like mine) 
with an unmodified partition table (no Anaconda, I don't want to 
repartition, I like it the way it is.)  Fortunately, Red Hat has been 
good about providing fixes, so I downloaded the fix, put it on a fix 
floppy, booted the RH install cd with a "linux updates" on the LILO 
line, and that solved the problem.

There are several other known major bugs with fixes available on the 
Red Hat site (for example, the update daemon that runs in the 
background leaks file handles and will crash your system after a few 
days, either install the errata or disable the daemon.)  Other than 
that, RH7 seems to work acceptably.  I was able to configure it to boot 
into KDE, set up my networking and get online without too much hassle.  
I did install KDE 2.0, which didn't come with RH7 due to bad timing, 
though the RH7 CDs come with a KDE 2.0 beta in their previews section, 
along with a 2.4 pre release kernel and some other goodies.

As far as day-to-day usage goes, I haven't had any major problems after 
the installation.  KDE 2.0 still needs some bug fixes, but is pretty 
stable at this point, good enough for government work.  The same can be 
said for RH 7.0.  As far as the compiler goes, RH7 comes with two 
compilers: the 2.96 compiler that has been *ahem* discussed at length.  
After using it to build a few things, I have concluded it is Good 
Enough for me.  It also comes with a kgcc compiler which is used to 
compile the kernel, apparently there is some problems with 2.96 dealing 
with the kernel.

All in all, I'd say it's working well, for a .0 release.  Provided you 
make backups and pay attention to the errata on Red Hat's web site it's 
good enough for tinkering.

Doug