[NCLUG] Re: Mandrake 8.1 installed.

[Matt Bruehl]

> I recommend Mandrake 8.1 Linux to other linux non-power users
> based on my recent experience with it.

I've also been a lurker on this list for a while, and 
have a recent experience with Mandrake 8.1  However, my
experience isn't as good.

I downloaded all three iso images for the Mandrake 8.1 distro,
burned them and set forth to install LM8.1 on an old K6-450 I have
in my basement [K6-450, 196 MB ram, 12 GB HDD, 10/100 PCI NIC].
The machine is nothing stellar, and doesn't have any strange I/O
or periphs.  So, my first attempt at installation failed with the
"No hdlists found" error, at the end of the package installation
section.  BTW, I selected 'Expert' mode for installation, since I've 
done many other Linux installs before, and proceeded with partitioning
my drives and painstakingly selecting each package I wanted to install.

To make a potentially long story short, I ended up reburning disc 2,
and retried installing it FIVE times before I was successful.
Some searching on the net led me to believe that there were
corrupt packages in the isos (bad MD5 checksums), and if you had
those selected at installation time, the install would fail.  I 
ended up selecting the absolute minimum number of packages I could get
away with, and the install completed successfully.   Some people
have said that you should install using "normal" mode, and that
"expert" mode will have problems, but I hate giving up all that 
control...

Anyway, I think it's a great distro, and has just about every 
package I could want included on the iso CDs.  Hell, it even 
setup and correctly configured X and dhcpc the first time around!

Matt Bruehl