Cheap Mandrake Linux PowerPack Edition 8.2 (Software) (Linux) Price

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Customer Reviews of Mandrake Linux PowerPack Edition 8.2

Easy to setup with Mandrake's graphical installer drakx. Includes great packages such as cups print server, proftpd, postfix, Star Office 6, Real Player, kamera, chat, and scanner software.

You can choose from 11 desktops including Gnome and KDE. You get games, multimedia, development, and a large assortment of extra printer drivers, and special Mandrake configuration tools to get up and running pretty easy and painless.

I had Mandrake 8.2 installed in about 30 minutes, and it was near painless. It was the easiest install of any Linux distribution I have ever done.

So if you are sick of Windows, and are looking for something else try Mandrake 8.2. Even old Linux hands can enjoy 8.2.

Excels in ease of use but still a long way to go...
I am a linux enthusiast and have been trying out new linux distributions as they come out for the past 3 years. Needless to say, linux's 2.4 kernel has made some dramatic improvments and so has KDE 3.

While RedHat is suited better for enterprise users, Mandrake and SuSe try to adapt their packaging for the average home user. SuSe 8.0 has to be the "easiest" linux distribution out there now by virtue of its great system configuration tools and streamlined installation. While Mandrake 8.2 has good configuration tools, it lacks the friendliness and wide scope of SuSE Linux.

Two features that caught my eye in this distro are:

1. Mandrake's utility for configuring Samba file sharing and browsing, and
2. Mandrake's font installer. Unattractive, out-of-the-box fonts typically plague Linux distributions, so a good font installer is a must. In tests, the Mandrake font utility was much easier to use than the KDE-based utilities that come with Red Hat and SuSE.

Overall, Mandrake 8.2 has taken some great steps. However, if you are looking for a replacement for Windows, SuSe 8.0 is a better option.

Good, but needs work
Linux in general has many awesome features, including efficient a high command line, great networking capabilities, security, and (in my opinion) the best file system (i.e., disk format) around. Being Linux, those are all here.

This distribution is designed to be user friendly, both in installation and everyday use, and it mostly lives up to that. Included are some form of all the most common program types for a home PC -- word processors, web browsers, mp3 players, etc. Further, the user interfaces have all been set up with a very attractive appearance. Unfortunately, some of the office software is lacking in feature that were added after this distro was release and is a little buggy.

However, there are some short commings. My biggest complaint is that the C/C++ compilers don't work out of the box -- I had to change several links by hand to gcc 3.x work, and I've never gotten gcc 2.96.x to work at all, and it still will not compile all programs. While compilers may not be desirable on production servers for security reasons, they may be needed on other systems. If you are a tinkerer / programmer, a student learning C++, or just want to compile software from trusted web-sites, be prepared for a fight. I never had this problem with Red Hat, and I think any software included should work as some as its installed. This is a major problem the guys at Mandrake Soft need to work on.

Likewise, the version of Java, though functional, is out dated, and should have been at release time, and is not even Sun Java but a thrid party version. It only good up to Java 1.2 so that many Java 2 features simply don't work.

Other than that, the only major problem has been printing. That always seems to be a difficult thing to set up in Linux. The Printerdrake program solves most of the problem, and makes the original setup easy -- I've done a lot of printing here. However, its also buggy and breaks easily -- I've lost my printing capabilities several times and getting them back has often been a major and stressful chore -- currently I have no printing and am now at a loss what to do. This may be a dangerour switch if printing is am important use for your PC. Note, though, that creating PDF files is very easy and does not require Acrobat.