Re: Of mice and men

jce wrote:
A lot of distributions will automatically install a boot manager to help you dual boot. Mandrake is traditionally ranked in the top few for ease of install (along with Redhat's Anaconda? and Suse's Yast) so I'm not going to suggest it's a poor choice at all....the new version is Mandriva - in typical fashion renames itself for confusion

Red Hat (and, by extension, White Box (WBEL) and Fedora) do as well. On the machine I'm using now, I wiped it clean, allocated a 100MB partition first on the drive, then split the rest of the drive between two others. XP installed on the second partition, and put its boot stuff where it needed to be. Then, when I installed WBEL, it found that partition, and put it as a "DOS" choice in the boot loader. (Once I got WBEL up and running, I just went into grub.conf and changed "DOS" to "Microsoft Windows XP".)

There are a number of pro's and con's to each distro however. The main issue with getting a "freebie" version is just limited to the support. I would look at what software you want to run and then do a quick search on them to establish if there are any typical problems.

That's one of the reasons I run WBEL - it tracks RHEL, and you *know* that Red Hat is going to fix their stuff when it breaks. :) From what I've seen on the user list, about the only applications that are giving people fits are Oracle (which has a long list of things you have to do - if you follow it to the letter, it works - so I've been told) and MythTV (which typically wants a 2.6 kernel - WBEL 3 uses a 2.4 kernel, with lots of updates (WBEL 4, based on RHEL 4, uses a 2.6)).

I for one, have had problems with certain aspects of both Fedora and with Suse. I have Fedora now because it happed to install my copy of websphere studio with less pain than anything else I've tried, though I regret this decision as I definitely preferred the Suse maintenance. There is a distribution that intrigues me - White Box (it was mentioned by another clc user on another thread) -this is supposedly a "red hat" distribution without the "red hat" proprietary stuff. 

Yep!  :)


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