Well, this is going to be an on-going post
First of all, I'm posting from Windows now, which should give you the tone for this post

I cannot seem to get the NICs to work in MD9.0, it drives me nuts, i KNOW it's ETH0 i need to use for my PPpoE connection....somehow it doesnt work...i will try the Linux NOAPIC option next, maybe i have luck.

RedHat 8 on the other hand is beautiful, and it's DEFINATELY heading in the right way. I got AA and TT Fonts in Mozilla, Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, etc, etc...looks awesome. Hardware is recognized ok, which brings me to another point in Mandrake which drives me nuts. The Geforce 4 is NOT recognised?????? I use XFree 4.2.1 and it keeps defaulting to the Geforce (xfvid) or something, driver. I cannot run 24/32bit color, i am stuck with 16bit...

So far MANDRAKE SUCKS.........REDHAT is very, VERY promising.
Brb
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Edit:
Man this is getting annoying...i keep thinking that the 9.0 distro CAN do better than what i see, only because i dished out 55EUR to buy the DVD edition a month ago...still waiting for it actually, but after today, not as eager.

I installed the Nvidia drivers from Tarballs, that went OK. The NOAPIC option is not in the /etc/lilo.conf file. Somehow my NICs work now, dunno what i did, as i rebooted 10 times with and w/o NOAPIC and still didn't work. Now it does all of a sudden.

The overall Mandrake looks are somehow not as polished as RedHat's, and I still haven't got the AA fonts to work in Mozilla and such. It just looks weird...it feels weird too, because you would normally think that 9.0 should be better and improve in a lot of areas compared to 8.2, but i just can't see it yet.

RH8 is definately outstanding... but I can't find some vedio player preloaded which MD9 have Xine...

Ok, it's almost 10PM here and i spent the whole day with the 2 distros. Some might say it's not enough, but it's darn enough for me to say that RedHat 8.0 is the better of the two, because:

- Very nice and polished installation, you cannot go wrong with anything.
- Hardware detection is very good, USB acts NORMAL (hello Mandrake, are you listening?).
- Default fonts are amazingly rendered, I just LOVE the extra options you have to adjust the smoothness, etc...
- After you log on you cannot really tell if you're using Gnome or KDE, and personally I don't really care, because it looks just...GOOD !
- Networking or xDSL setup is a breeze, very nice laid out

Of course there are minus points, like mp3 support out of the box but that can be solved. One thing also missing is XINE or OGLE or anything that plays DVDs or Mpeg4.

Something funny happened, kinda sad actually I cannot find the "init" command !! I wanted to install the NVidia tarballs after going into runlevel 3, but i gave up. Can any1 help me on that?

I think that RedHat CAN and HAS the knowhow and resources to put a KILLER distro together, but it doesn't want to do it yet...sound stupid, eh? Just think about it, it all boils down to economics and marketing

Oh, one more thing:
NO ONE DOES GNOME AS GOOD AS REDHAT ! Mandrake & co. should learn from it or leave it...

I am not sure I know what you mean by not finding "init". Would you like me to lay out how I installed my drivers in RH8?

LOL man, nevermind...i must have been tripping...it's there.../sbin/init

hehehehe

I was wondering WTH you were doing. In any case, how's the framerate been in Q3/UT?

Haven't tried yet...i spent some time into getting the overall looks to a good standard (fonts, AA, TTF, icons, etc...). Will try it later.

Mozilla with XFT support looks just fantastic !