After reading a few reviews on both Mandrake 9.1 and Red Hat 9.0 I set out to see for myself which one of these distributions was the easiest to install and use. Mandrake's new installer gave me immediate and logical customization choices (even for a novice such as myself) whereas Red Hat has standardized installs by default, if you want variations it requires selecting the custom install option followed by some ambiguous selections to be made. Mandrake and Red Hat both did a fairly good job of hardware recognition and there were no apparent software application configuration problems or errors after a post install reboot. One noticeable difference I found using the KDE desktop with Mandrake was that it seemed to load a lot faster, applications lanuched quicker and the default sound volume was just about right (the folks at Red Hat must be a lot more patient and have very sensitive hearing). Mandrake’s menu layout was a bit more involved than it probably should be but when it comes to included applications and utilities Mandrake took the show with the most current versions of OpenOffice and Mozilla (a big plus in my book), system utilities that make sense (without requiring some docs to read unlike Red Hat) and native MP3 support was a nice touch as well. Sun's j2re (java runtime environment) 1.4.1, RealPlayer 8 and Macromedia Flash 6 were instantly recognized by Mandrake. Mandrake's anti-alias and font conversion features are nothing short of awesome (making it somewhat of a threat to Windows XP in the near future from my point of view). I give Mandrake an "A" for effort and Red Hat a "B" for better luck next time

Almost forgot...

You can find the Macromedia Flash 6 plug-in at (the Netscape plug-in link doesn't work...it requires flash ;( ) http://sdc.shockwave.com/shockwave/download/alternates/

RealPlayer 8.0 at: http://proforma.real.com/real/player/unix/unix.html?src=downloadr,000814rpchoice_c1

Sun's j2re-1_4_1_03-linux-i586-rpm.bin at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/download.html

(RH doesn't seem to like Sun's Java J2re plug-in)

Gtk-Gnutella can be found at: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=4467

The current version of AIM is at: http://www.aim.com/get_aim/linux/latest_linux.adp

Reminder note: Mandrake 9.1 easily converts most MS True Type fonts for use with OpenOffice documents that can then be easily saved in alternative formats for those inferior Microsoft Office users

You said:

(...) Mandrake and Red Hat both did a fairly good job of hardware recognition and there were no apparent software application configuration problems or errors after a post install reboot. (...)

My question is specifically about KDE Desktop Sharing with RH9. I was unable to use it. Can you use it?

I posted more details about this here in this forum.

Hmmm I'm assuming you're talking about VNC, check your firewall settings and you might find these links helpful as well. Personally I don't like running client's like this on my home boxes for security reasons. 8)

http://www.tjansen.de/krfb/

http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/

Well, this is the error message that I get when I tried to run Desktop Sharing in KDE Control Center (Internet & Network):

¨There was an error loading the module¨

The dialog screen has an option for details that say:
Library files for ¨libkcm_krfb.la¨ not found in paths
(still in details option)
Possible reasons:

An error occurred during your last KDE upgrade leaving an orphaned control module

You have old third party modules lying around

Check these points carefully and try to remove the module mentioned in the error message. If this fails, consider contacting your distributor or packager.

I have no firewall installed.

Works very well with Mandrake 9.1 and I was able to help a few friends remotely.

I anticipate that this tool is going to give a huge boost to Linux because it will be much easier to support newbies and provide general maintenance via a remote connection.

I'm using RH9 on both my laptop and personal workstation, I have successfully ran the desktop sharing feature and works very nicely. I have not experienced really any issues other than the default version of mozilla acting up, so I upgraded mozilla and everything is running awesome!