[olug] Help me select a distrob

[Mario Steele]

Hey All,

Just want to say, I'm back to watching the list a bit more activly, since I 
got myself a job, and such.  Anyways, noticed that the subject kinda went 
off into Left Field here, so I'll kinda track it back to the original 
Poster. FC and Mandrivia are both good distros, they both have their 
strengths, and their weaknesses, just as with any Linux distro out there 
you'll find.  But, I'm the kind of guy that likes the ideal of "Try before 
you Buy"  or in this case, "Try before you Install"  Cause, nothing is worse 
then getting all the hype of how this is such a good product, and you go to 
install it onto your computer, and it messes up the install, isn't as great 
as you thought it was, or was lead to belive, for your own personal 
preferences, and other such things like that.

This is where I bring my distro of Choice for thoes who are looking to Try 
before you Install.  PCLinuxOS.  It's a Branch off of Mandrake (Not 
Mandrivia) 8.0 or so.  The Maintainer of the Distro, Texstar, has been a 
major Supporter of Mandrake, creating a large repository of RPM's and such 
for Mandrake.  He split this off, and created his own Linux Distro.  Texstar 
took the LiveCD Project, and gave it a proper place with PCLinuxOS, which 
allows you to fully run a Linux Graphical Desktop right from the CD.  Which 
is an absolute best idea to come along.  It's similar to how Gentoo does 
their LiveCD, except, PCLinuxOS includes KDE, or Gnome (Whichever you want 
to choose), and allows you to even mount a USB Thumbnail Hard Drive, to 
mount as your home directory, so you can litterally use your OS of Choice on 
any computer, with USB Capability, to have your home drive go with you.

Ofcourse, there are some weaknesses, because it's not even a full version 
(Current version is Preview .92), but don't let that fool ya.  It's packed 
by default with all the 3rd Party Software Packages like MPlayer, Media 
Codecs for playing just about any possible Media File currently available, 
as well as Several Internet Software Suites, Mozilla, Konqueror, gAIM, 
Kompose, Thunderbird, and also includes Office Software OpenOffice.  This is 
just a small sampling of what is available.  If your new to linux, and want 
to keep your Windows Installation, while still being able to explore Linux, 
this would be what I would suggest, and if your looking to convert fully 
over to Linux, I would also suggest PCLinuxOS, cause it does make an 
excellent distro for installation.  (It comes with an Installer GUI that you 
can launch once your logged into the Main Desktop)

Well, hope to be around a bit more,  L8ers,

Mario Steele


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "HAB Boy" <haobboy at gmail.com>
To: <olug at olug.org>
Sent: Monday, April 17, 2006 5:28 AM
Subject: [olug] Help me select a distrob


Guys/Gals,

I have done a lot of search to select a distro to switch from Win to
Linux. Finally, I came up to two distros

1. Mandriva (Mandrake)
2. Fedora Core 5

Can any of you help me making a choice and may be give me some of the
pros and cons of both based on experience

HAB
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