Finally installed this puppy. The inspiration was the new "Mandrake" distribution of the latest version. I downloaded the whole thing -- about a gig -- over my DSL line in a couple of hours. No charge, naturally. Unlike the previous stuff I had, this one auto-detected my sound card and video all by itself. I have no idea what partitions it made. With a minimum of tweaking I got the network/e-mail/internet stuff going. Major hurdles the last time around. Now if I could only figure out whether the little buttons are 'on' when they seem to stick out, or when they seem to be depressed.
mbs ---------
Alright Max. I have to admit getting the hardware recognized is a major hurdle--one I haven't managed with a scanner so I still have evil Bill on an old hard drive, just for that. Older video cards are no cake walk either. On my last project I go an old IBM PS-2 monitor to do 1024x768, which I considered a major victory over obscure hardware.
The one part of the whole system that is easier than evil bill's (mainly because it works the way it is supposed to, and is already integrated into the system) is the network/mail/internet.
I put together yet another home network from another pair of old give away computers and finally got my work buddy Larry G to say he would try it--so I took the whole thing to work Saturday and loaded it into his car with a few hand written instructions for logging in to the user and root accounts and their passwords to get him at least up for the weekend. I made up a notebook with the usual commands, including how to turn the thing off, and told him that if you use `rm', that's it. It's means remove, as in gone forever so be careful.
Have fun Max. Try to force yourself to use the command line for awhile at first just so you have some idea of what's going on down there in the bulge pumps. Do you know what X-window desktop your are using--KDE, Gnome, or something else?
Chuck Grimes