[H-GEN] Mandrake Linux

Hilton Travis QuarkComputers at email.com
Sun Aug 15 23:25:13 EDT 1999


[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and
Unix-related[1] topics. ]

Hi Martin,

> Can someone explain to me what the fundamental differences are between
> Redhat 6.0 and Mandrake 6.0?

The main difference, as far as I can tell, are that RedHat is compiled for
i386 and higher processors (eg. 386SX, 386DX, 486SX, 486DX, Pentium, P-II,
Celeron, P-III, P-II Xeon, P-III Xeon, Cyrix 486SLC, 486DLC, 586, 6x86,
6x86MX, AMD 486, K5, K6 and K7, IDT WinChip and etc), whereas the Mandrake
distro is compiled for 586-class systems and above (same list as above, but
without the 386 and 486 class processors).

Also, Mandrake 6.0 installs KDE by default as the X Window Manager (unless
you choose a "Server" install).  This window manager is quite similar to
Windows 9x, and makes it relatively easy for Windows users to find their way
around the X Window system.

BUT, I have only just installed Mandrake 6.0 on Saturday, and have noticed a
couple of problems with it that were not apparent with my previous RedHat
6.0 install.  These are that if I do a "man if" I get an error message -
there seems to be some man pages that have not been installed properly, and
I had to play around for quite a while to get IP Forwarding/Masquerading to
work, where it was much more straightforward with the old RH 6.0 install.

I will say that I quite possibly did something wrong with the
routing/masquerading, but the files I installed and the procedures I
followed were the ones that worked for me on the RH 6.0 install, but you
never can tell... :-)

All up, if you have a Pentium-class (or higher) computer, Mandrake would be
the system of choice, whereas RedHat 6.0 would be the choice for 386-class
and 486-class systems.  The Mandrake 6.0 distribution is supposed to offer
between 5 and 30% performance gains due to the faster 586 instructions, but
YMMV.

Regards,
Hilton


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