[Discuss] SuSe Strikes out so does Mandriva?

[John Blomfield]

This is a continuing saga of myself and Joan trying different distros to 
prepare for the Linux SIG at BB&C.  Those that have followed the 
discussion so far will have heard Joan's tails of woe with SuSe.  I will 
probably leave it for now on my demo multi distro box until I find 
another likely candidate.  It may be hard to find one distro that works 
on all hardware but at least its worth trying to eliminate those that 
have the most problems.  For the record my demo box is rather old and in 
principle most distros should be able to handle it easily.  The critical 
item is usually the video card which in this case is a nVidia GeForce 2 
MX/MX400.  So far Debian, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Fedora and SuSe handled it out 
of the box but Joan says SuSe does not like her nVidia GeForce 6600 or 
her Logitek Trackball.  All my cases are full installs whereas Joan is 
doing Live CD's.

My latest efforts are with Mandiva Free Live KDE CD.  I have download 
images from two different mirrors and both had good MD5 checks but 
failed on three burn verification (I burned three CD's).  However, I 
went ahead and ran one on my demo box which failed to recognize my video 
card.  Just to make sure the CD was ok I ran it on my new computer which 
has an nVidia GeForce 7300 3D card and it worked perfectly 3D effects an 
all!  However, I have not been able to get it to work on my demo box.  
Mandriva only provides the one live CD for free. Its full set 
(Enterprise) is 49.00 Euro's.  I don't think I will bother to try 
playing around with it any further, as I would need to see if I could 
make it install as Level 3 and then configure the X config file with the 
correct driver.  Not something to recommend to a newbie!

So I am now looking for recommendations for two distros for my two spare 
partitions.  Distros that could be suitable for newbies to try when they 
are ready or interested to progress beyond Ubuntu.

John Blomfield