Over the past few weeks, I have spent a great deal of time picking on the many faults of Linux, open source software in general, and some of the personalities and companies involved in the movement.
This could be the last time users ever have to hand-write a configuration file.
Alastair Otter, journalist, ITWeb
Today, however, the dark cloud has lifted and I thought it appropriate to look at some of the highpoints that now mark the Linux landscape. This sudden change in attitude comes largely as a result of a new laptop and a recent version of Mandrake.
Mandrake 8.0, to start with, is an absolute pleasure to use. Having trawled my way through at least half of the distributions on the market, Mandrake comes as a great surprise. Admittedly there are a few faults, some of which may already have been rectified in later updates, but the installation process that Mandrake uses is possibly the easiest Linux installation ever.
Deceptive simplicity
Previous versions of Mandrake, I seem to recall, required a fair amount of interaction between the user and the installation software. Version 8.0, in comparison, requires practically no information from the user. In fact, the simplicity of the install process is deceptive. Behind the scenes, Mandrake does a better than good job of identifying, configuring and installing hardware. Which brings me to the laptop portion of the story.
I re-entered the world of laptop ownership with a certain amount of trepidation. I had read far too many newsgroup postings about laptop hardware incompatibilities to be anything but very cautious. And with the price tag that laptops carry, the prospect of buying something that wouldn`t run my favourite operating system was worrying. After weeks of deliberation and almost as much time surfing sites listing Linux-compatible hardware, I was ready and I did the deed. I laid down hard cash in exchange for a reasonably small piece of hardware.
Pleasantly surprised is the only way to describe installing Mandrake on my new laptop. The Mandrake distribution that I had did practically everything for me. When I first started the install I was convinced the PCMCIA card was going to be the major obstacle, and when the Mandrake installer popped up a message at the beginning of the install to the effect that it was configuring the cards, I confess to a small smile of satisfaction. I wasn`t disappointed and within a couple of minutes not only was my laptop up and running, but I was ready to hook up to my closest network.
Obvious choice
Mandrake defaults to the KDE desktop which for most users coming from the "other" operating system will be the most obvious choice, and KDE2 is a neat, although somewhat overly heavy, desktop environment. If you have extensive RAM to throw at it, it`ll serve you well, but if you`re on anything less that 64MB, something like Gnome or WindowMaker will do. Or, my all-time favourite, Blackbox, the smallest and neatest of all the desktop applications.
Linux has come a long way and anyone who disputes that it is ready for the desktop has obviously never seen distributions like Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE. Gone are the days of hand-writing all the configuration files, thanks to Mandrake`s Control Centre software that, although a bit on the slow side, is the easiest configuration tool for a long while.
And when it comes to installing new software, Mandrake`s packaging tool works almost faultlessly. I`ve always liked tools like RPMDrake but the most recent iteration of the software could well mean that Linux users may never have to look at another configuration file or manually use a compiler.
Linux may not yet be ready to storm the desktop market, but if products like Mandrake are anything to go by, it can`t be long now.
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