Our Opinion February 2002

Our Opinion Page for February 2002

I know a month back I said that the topic of my opinion page would be about brand machines, but what the heck, its my only chance to have a good moan and get things off my chest.

Linux has became one of my favourite Operating Systems. If you haven't ever used one of the many unix distro's, do yourself a favour and try one. At the moment I am getting my head around two of the more popular, RedHat which is probably the industry standard and also possibly the most supported. I have also installed Mandrake Linux 8.1 on my workstations.

What do you get with Linux. Well for starters, there is about 1600 packages with both of them. The main difference, in my opinion, between DeadRat (RedHat) and Mandrake is the versions of the packages you get. While RedHat appear to offer tried and tested packages, for all purposes, they are usually out of date, but that isn't always the case. Mandrake on the other hand tend to be more adventurous. They include more up to date packages with their distribution.

My experience so far with the two is very varied. I have had RedHat 7.2 installed on my main computer since about August last year and am happy to say that I have had no problem with it at all. I have also successfully updated several of the included packages to more up to date ones, with no difficulty whatsoever. Mandrake on the other hand has at times been a complete disaster and as a result, has been reinstalled more than half a dozen times since I installed it around the same time, August last year. I partly blame this on user error (me), but also have suffered from decent lack of support plus the fact that it took me over 3 months to actually start reading the very many pages of documentation that came with it.

To be completely honest, I don't really fool around with the RedHat installation like I do with Mandrake. Also, on my system, it takes a meagre 15 minutes to reinstall Mandrake from scratch. That's including installing all the packages I use. About 1.6 gigabytes worth.

The RedHat set-up has an 8 gigabyte hard drive which is partitioned into relevant sizes to suit the set-up, whereas the Mandrake machine has a 30 gigabyte drive which also dual boots in to Windaes 98 second edition (I like my games you see). My Mandrake system also has the best hardware, such as Geforce 2, 512 MB RAM, CD-Writer, DVD drive, video capture card and so on. Really its my toy. I have another two machines which also have Linux, namely Slackware and FreeBSD on them, both for experimental purposes, although I must admit, FreeBSD is a little different to the rest. It is also, in my opinion a dam site faster, considering the spec of the machine its installed on.

So, now that I have followed my own advice, and RTFM (read the flaming manual) life is becoming so much simpler and I am not only making fewer mistakes, but am actually really enjoying using my computers again.
Best of all, like I said last month, I haven't needed to buy any software for any of my computers, I have all the programs I want now and what very powerful programs they are. I have even returned to some programming. My old favourite Pascal is fully supported and comes of course, free, then there's a whole load of games that run like lighting on the GeForce such as Quake, Doom and Civ, three of my all time favourites.

Not really much of a rant or rave this month (my ISP BlueYonder got the brunt of that, along with UK2 who host this site for me). I also have other things on my mind. My daughter Heather is almost 14 months old now and is due inoculation for measles, mumps and rubella, which has been scaring the shit out of her mum and I for some time now. In fact were pretty serious about the wee bear not getting the MMR jag, but that's another story for another day.

Until next month cya in cyberspace.