Aug 30, 2004 04:57 PM
2407 Views
(Updated Aug 30, 2004 05:00 PM)
This is my first installation experience with a distro other than RH-8,9 and FC2. And I enjoyed every moment doing it.
Installation
The experiment was on a friend's system with P4 -1.7GHz, 256MB, 40GB on it. Created a 10GB for linux and have win2k installed. Upon booting from CD, a screen with <F1>and <ENTER>to choose from to boot appears. I hit enter, just the way, I always did with RH/FC. After some messages, and a fatal error too, it took me to a ''text-based'' installation screen. I have never had experience with a text based installation, but then Linux is all about tweauking and fighting to get things work the way we want.
After taking sometime in reading what was displayed, I choose the 10GB partition for install and created a 512MB swap. I now needed to create / and /home partitions. I didnot understand what the Justified FS, Justified XFS etc meant, wanted to reboot to read some tutorial. It was during the attempt to get back to the first screen, that the system suddenly gives me a message that it is formatting the drive and asked me to choose from the list of programs that I wanted to install. I choose some programs that I recognized from RH installation and after some config screens I was asked to reboot to enter Mandrake10.0.
Booting
The boot screen that I got was also a text based screen. Dared to enter the linux though it was not very appealing. Finally got ''enter password screen'' and was very happy to see the graphical screen of Mandrake. Choose KDE, and found that it was much too faster than kde in RH/FC. The best part is that the control center was popped up and I could make some changes and also got a Lilo-graphical screen for booting. Upon going to /mnt I found that all my windows drives were also accessible, with read/write permission for FAT partitions and read only for NTFS partitions.
Tried to play some mp3 songs!!! And I was happy to see that I didnt have to download a rpm to enable the distro to allow me to play mp3 as was the case in RH. By default, totem-player was used to play the mp3s. Then tried to play a mpeg clip.. was more than happy to see that totem-player could play it without any problem.
In RH, I always installed mplayer. Now I rebooted into windows and found that it had become too slow. Was totally surprised to see this. Browsed around to see how to get GUI for installation with the hope that I could make the required partition for linux. And this time aruond when <F1>and <ENTER>screen came up, I choose <F1>and types ''alt0'', which again took me to text based installation. I rebooted again and typed ''alt1'' after pressing <F1>. And I was taken into graphical installation. I created /swap, and / of 4GB of journalized ext2 and /home of 5GB Journalized ext2 filesystem. (Still I dont know what alt9, alt1, journalized FS mean). The installation went smoothly. Checked the windows, and this time, it was as fast as before installing Linux. (Donot know what caused windows to become slow earier...).
The coolest part
Have realplayer, mplayer, adobe-acroreader installed from the CDs itself. Can access all windows (both NTFS and FAT32) partition without having to make changes to /etc/fstab. But with RH/FC, we need to explicitly instally all these and also make changes in /etc/fstab. The best part is that KDE/GNOME that come with mandrake is much faster than those that come with RF/FC.
Infact I had installed FC2 in the same system, but found that it was real slow. Moreover Mandrake was able to recognize all my hardware without any problem, whereas FC2 didnt recognize my sound card on this very system. All these made my friend happy, and I am sure that there will be the same happiness for any newbie.
