[CS-FSLUG] Fred's gonna love this

[Timothy R. Butler]

>
> Hardware detection isn't everything, Mandrake removed kdm from 
> availability
> altogether so from now on the shutdown and restart options will no 
> longer be

	What did they switch to then? I haven't tested 10.1 yet, admittedly.

> available from KDE's log out menu, and of course Mandrake has made 
> other
> modifications that I don't like, especially when it comes to their 
> control
> centre which now has huge icon spacing and doesn't look very nice that 
> way.
> SUSE also has more up to date software, Mandrake 10.1 seems to me like 
> a
> minor upgrade from 10.0 compared to the differences between SUSE 9.1 
> and SUSE
> 9.2.

	That's a *good* thing. Minor updates are preferable. It's time for 
GNU/Linux to mature to the point where you don't see the wheel 
rewritten every six months. And Mandrake, and to a larger extent, our 
friends at Red Hat with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are doing just that. 
In business you don't want to have to worry about a whole new way of 
doing things with all new bugs all the time. :-)

>  Finally I hope you haven't forgotten that Mandrake doesn't let you get
> to their download/mirrors page without agreeing to join the Mandrake 
> Club
> whereas SUSE 9.2 now has the personal version available as a free 
> download
> without expecting you to agree to any contracts, and I'm talking about 
> the
> entire DVD not just a net-installer.

	Not technically a contract at all. But, I mean, c'mon, Free Software 
need not be gratis, and for it to be sustainable, cannot be forever. 
And, if you feel bad about clicking that link but don't feel bad about 
not paying for the hard work you are enjoying, you can always go 
directly to a mirror. I rarely use a distribution's mirror page, 
because I already have favorite mirrors.

> Have you compared the two yet over hardware support? I've found them 
> to be on
> a level playing field from that standpoint, although SUSE supported my 
> 3Com
> network card before Mandrake did, albeit not perfectly.

	Not 9.2, but every release previous to that, I had to do significantly 
more tweaking on any given test system. SuSE's support of 
multi-function devices has always been dismal (i.e. you still have to 
run hpoj yourself), for instance. Not to mention its lack of 
auto-installed ATI video card drivers and Lucent winmodem drivers (all 
Mandrake commercial releases take care of both -- a big deal!).

>> SuSE still doesn't include apt, yum or uprmi. :-P
>
> Thats what YaST is for, you can get to it either graphically or 
> through the
> command line, if you want to install software from a console use `yast 
> -i
> <packagename>` and it will install if its available.

	If its available on the SuSE DVD, right? :-) If not, I'll concede the 
point.

>> 	-Tim
>
> After all is said and done whether SUSE wins the distro shootout or 
> not won't
> stop me from using and liking it, I just think you've missed Mandrake 
> taking
> away from the KDE desktop in order to add to Gnome which if you ask me 
> is no
> way of being impartial to either desktop environment.

	I really haven't seen that at all. But frankly, I don't care if a 
distro supports both desktops, what it should do is support one really 
well. It doesn't matter if it is KDE or GNOME, although personally I 
feel that GNOME is far ahead of KDE these days in providing the 
usability that is needed for enterprise class solutions. OfB, being IT 
focused, isn't going to worry as much about which one has the most 
features... what matters is which D.E. provides the most important 
features (like Rendezvous/Zeroconf, full Exchange support, etc.) in the 
most integrated, easy-to-use way.

	KDE is great for the hobbyist, but I think their "leave no feature 
behind" philosophy will ultimately handicap them in the enterprise.

	-Tim

---------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy R. Butler       Universal Networks      www.uninet.info
==================== <tbutler at uninet.info> ====================
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