Today, on board of our beloved Virtual PC 5.1, we are going to venture in the depths of Mandrake Linux. Beam me up, Scotty!
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okay. I downloaded only the first CD. If neccessary, I will get even the second one, the Extras. And I most certainly won't need the third one, which is for internationalization. (The cool thing with VPC is that I do not need to burn the ISO into an actual CD. I can just load it from a menu!)
First impressions.
I just loaded the Mandrake Boot Up CD in the VPC virtual CD-drive, and now there is a basic graphical window on the screen. Thank God. I expected much worse.
The installation seems pretty straight forward, and no Windows user will have any trouble installing this. Even though the program names are somewhat peculiar.
By the way, I noticed something very nice. The OS was avaiable for install in a lot of languages, amongst which was Albanian. This is a first.
Security stuff.
Apparently I can choose between a Normal, Secure, Extra Secure, and Paranoiac security mode. Weird. Isn't there supposed to be even a low-security mode or something?
Okay. Now the OS is installing. Thanks to my VPC, I can just multitask between the Mandrake installer, and Notepad. Ain't that fun?!
It is taking quite a long time for the installation procedure. More than thirty minutes now. Weird. I even gave the Virtual PC well 65 MB of RAM.
There is another cute thing. For every program that is installed, a short description is showed on the screen, so that I know all the time what is being installed. I believe that InstallShield should take this into serious consideration. Not just stupid percentages. Actual information scrolling through the screen. Thats a pro. 1 point in favour of Mandrake.
Situation, 1:0.
Oh! It just installed spell checkers for several English dialects! lol
Okay. Installation is done. But apparently the Graphics card and the Sound card haven't been properly configured. It wants me to tinker with them manually. Durn.
After 10 mins of tinkering with the settings, it barely accepted my ATI Radeon 9200. And it says I have to run some weird utility after reboot to configure the sound card. Damn.
Okay. First reboot.
Pretty cool. First a LILO something loaded, in the usual DOS-like text
environment, then a graphics window appeared. It has got 4 options.
Linux, Linux -nonfb, Failsafe, and Floppy. Dunno what to do, so gonna go with Linux.
Okay. for some weird reason, every time I press enter, the VPC window
closes.
Update. Apparently that happens only when I click Linux. Gonna try the second one.
"Initial ramdisk loads below 4Mb; kernel overwrite is possible." Screw you too! Same thing with Safedisk. Gonna try increase the allocated RAM. 128 MB ought to be enough.
Okay. I think it's working. Loading bar.
Hey. Cool. The OS is loading and it says, "Press Esc for Verbose mode".
and when I press Verbose, I see loading all the drivers that are usually seen in the Bootlog.log file that Win creates when run in "Restart with Boot Log " mode. Kewl.
It's taking a little too much time though. Maybe it is just because it's the first time running, but I ain't so sure.
Pretty cool. The OS loaded, and asked me what GUI I wanted to choose, and showed me a window, with a drop-down list. I choose KDE. It looks better than this Ice thing, and I've heard better things of it.
Heh. In one point, it asked me whether I wanted to recieve periodical mail from the Mandrake company. The unusual thing, is that by default it was set to No. In a Windows environment, it would be pretty difficult finding a software that wouldn't be defaulted on Yes. Even though in most cases they don't even ask.
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to be continued....
