SuSe 9.2 vs Mandrake 10?

[roadworker]

Which one suits a Linux newbie best?
No specific office enviroment required........just a plain multimedia and internet desktop.

[ipdave]

I would say Mandrake. It is very graphical on install, and has a lot of bells and whistles, without needing a real indepth knowledge as with SuSe.

[scarecrow]

More or less, they are of the same caliber/ease of use.
yast is slightly better than mcc for graphical system administation, but mandrake is closer to "opensource" distro currently.
Mandrake also has a wider choice of third party repositories (Penguin Liberation Front, Chip, Thacs- all of them being fine). Moreover, both of them can use "synaptic" (a spinoff from Debian/ apt) as package manager, which is close to the definition of the nobrainer's package manager/dependency resolver. Finally, Mandrake's partition manager is by far the best one can afford under Linux.
I could also suggest PClinuxOS, which is a distro created and mainteained by the ex- Mandrake packager Texstar. At heart it is Mandrake (it even uses Mandrake Control Center for administration), but the packages are of great quality and much more up-to-date compared to Mandrake. It uses synaptic by default for package management, and some thing like P2P applications, java, microsoft TTF fonts etc. have been injected into the main repositories. IMHO it's the best live distro for newbies, much better than the overhyped Mepis, and installation on HD is a no-brainer.
PCLinuxOs is at heart a KDE distro, if you want to use Gnome then Ubuntu might be a better choice. personally I can understand KDE is "bloat", but it's also ages ahead of Gnome- the virtual filesystem of those two desktops is a very good example. On KDE you just type on the Konqueror bar thr protocol name and the URL and you can browse immediately almost any filesystem that exists (samba, nfs, ntfs, fat32, ftp, ftp/ssl, ssh2, browse inside .zip, .rar, .ace, tar-something, EVEN rip audioCD's!), while Gnome is nowhere close...

[roadworker]

THX for the input guys!
I was dl SuSe,since Novell offers a free version,but also got PCLinux......seems that it's more multimedia orientated than Mandrake or SuSe....

[scarecrow]

Originally Posted by roadworker

THX for the input guys!
I was dl SuSe,since Novell offers a free version,but also got PCLinux......seems that it's more multimedia orientated than Mandrake or SuSe....

It's a superb liveCD distro, just get sure you dowwload the very latest release (v.81) as v.8 had an initscript bug which could not initialize SATA harddisks. PCLinuxOS is almost exclusively aimed at Linux desktop (not server) usage, and while it has a slight problem initializing modern hardware (based on Mandrake module, which is surely much worse than the Knoppix one, which is used in most current distros) it is great overall.
If you want to use Linux on a laptop, you can also consider Kanotix, which is based on Debian unstable (SID), and the custom kernel works great with ACPI, and all of the Centrino special features. IMHO it is WAY better than Ubuntu, Mepis or any other Debian based distro- but anyway my suggestion for noobs is still firmly PCLinuxOS.

[roadworker]

Can I acces the internet with the LiveCd?
I fiddled with the proxy settings,but still no-go......
Before I installed my router,I needed a configuration script or manual proxy configuration @ my internet settings tab to be able to acces the internet @ full connection speed....
Since I'm behind that router,I don't need any proxy settings anymore for windows...
Do I have to use a localhost addres for the LiveCd or do I have to play with the router's security settings?

[scarecrow]

The default on ALL liveCD's is a DHCP client... if you don't use DHCP, you can still install PCLinuxOS on HD, and then boot normally, open "mcc" as root and set your network settings there.

[roadworker]

THX m8,a few things to try then...
Another question,
some nice movie tools in that Livecd,but mostly avi conversion or mpeg1....
What is the best for dvd ripping and recoding ?

[scarecrow]

You'll find aplenty of good tools for DVD ripping here although I believe there's no remedy yet for the very latest DVD protection scheme.
Checkout transcode video encoder as well, it's commandline but some popular programs (like K3B) can be used as frontends for it.
PS: I can see now PCLInuxOS liveCD updated to .81a, in three different favours: One generic, one for ATI video cards and one for Nvidia ones. The reason is almost obvious if you have toyed with .81: I could not start the xserver at all, even after passing nonsense at the kernel init and then gfalling to console and editing xorg.conf on it... (.8-nv worked fine). This problem doesn't happen with ALL nvidia or ATI videocards, but it can be a stopper, especially for newbies.
I have not tried the new liveCD-yet... .81 installed fine on my laptop (Intel 855 graphic card), but on my home puter (Nvidia 5200) I could not start X.
Of course this is only toying, my fav distro is not Mandy anymore... but Arch Linux is rather too difficult for n00bs (maybe they can afford trying it after 7-8 months experience with Mandys, Suses and the like).

[roadworker]

I have no real experience with commandline stuff,and especially not with Linux commands,so I'll play around with those newbie-friendly distros,and see what I can make out of it....
THX for pointing me to the dvd stuff,pretty interesting!
The audio tools and movie tools look nice,and burning data is easy too.......has Linux a 1:1 copier too for the latest protections?And Virtual drives?

[scarecrow]

No virtual drives, but ISO images can be mounted at any directory you choose... KDE VFS also browses inside .ISO by default.
If you pick PCLinuxos .81a then get the "plain" image, the Nvidia and Ati ISO images are bugged (maybe retreated already for revision).

[big_gie]

Hey scarecrow,

I've tryed gentoo a month ago but compilling things is really slow. I then installed Arch and I can say it is really nice. Pacman is really a great tool. Also building new packages is so easy. I'm using Xfce 4.2.0 and it runs great. I just need to fix two things: acpi and cpu freq scalling, and I would love to make my computer suspend-toram/disk, but those are hard to get...

Thanx again for suggesting it!

[scarecrow]

CPUfreq behaves somewhat unpredictably indeed, but it has been better with the new 2.6.11 kernel (currently still in the /testing repo). ACPI works fine, just add both acpi AND acpid as running daemons at your /etc/rc.conf
Under KDE you can use "klaptop" to set suspend, cpufreq etc, under XFCE some manual footwork is needed though.
Pacman is great indeed, but there's a current bug which may give problems when upgrading software groups, so it "might" be wiser to uninstall group first.

My main worry with Gentoo is that installing software may be time consuming but pretty straightforward/easy, but uninstalling software is a huge pain in the butt.

Arch is currently my absolute favorite- pretty close to Slackware speed and reliability, plus the only couple of things Slack doesn't have: package dependency checks aind i686 cflags optimization.

[burntup]

a distro i have had good luck with is Yoper

[scarecrow]

My only concern about Yoper is the package quality, which is not great... but it's fast (i686 optimized), easy to manage (yast admin tool, borrowed from SuSE), and KDE-centric (which may be good for some).