[Techtalk] thanks for all the help!

[Malcolm-Rannirl]

On Friday 02 August 2002 12:50 pm, Sam Bradshaw wrote:

> think you are totally right, I have to just tackle on thing at a time.. How
> do I know if I have lilo or the other thing by the way? Will it say on boot
> up? Also I have a fast AMD machine, why is boot up so slow with Linux?

I missed this one first time around. Mandrake 8.0 only has lilo I believe, 
and later releases default to lilo unless you ask it specifically to use grub.

So lilo is almost certainly what you have. Mandrake also generally detects 
other OSes on the drive and gives you entries in the lilo menu for booting 
them. (Just defaults to linux).

> 4) Which Linux should I buy?? Should I rush out and buy Mandrake or Red
> hat??

Personally, I recommend Mandrake for newer users, it tends to be somewhat 
more friendly on the GUI and install side of things. (I haven't used RedHat 
in a couple of revs though, so it might have improved).

> 6) All this talk of installation handlers has me confused.. Someone pointed
> out a cmd line command that would allow me to "install" a downloaded file
> (rpm).. What the heck is an RPM, is it like a zip? If I don't use the
> command line, what is this other installation thingy about?

RPM is something like a cross between zip and install-shield type programs. 
The files to install come in a zip-like file, and the rpm tools keep track of 
what's installed, where, make it easy to uninstall, etc. 

Mandrake (and other distributions) come with graphical tools that do the same 
job as the commandline ones, but look prettier.


-- 
Be careful what you want.
It might want you.
- 'the Dragon' Elvendrums

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