After a week of hassle in windows I started to remember the pretty much hassle free time I had with Linux. I've installed numerous versions before but I never felt quit comfortable with them. Well I was surfing around the other day and I noticed Mandrake has been upgraded from 9 to 10. Out of all the other distro's I used before I did like Mandrake the most so I downloaded the new version and thought I'd give it a go.

I hunted through a few newsgroups to see what was new and I was keen to see if any viruses had been discovered for linux yet. I read one site where if you kept the distro updated it's something like the following:

Windows viruses:50,000+
Linux viruses: 0

Even if you never bothered updating the OS you're only likely to encounter 2 or 3 viruses and none of them wide spread or major. What's funny is I read somewhere else that there are indeed virus checkers for Linux but until an actual virus comes along that's wide spread and disruptive they don't see the point trying to sell them yet. Heh, keep on waiting folks, could be a long time :-)

For peace of mind I was glad to see Linux was still the rock solid and secure platform I loved.

First off I wanted to see how well it coped with winXP which was already on my machine. I had already partitioned the drive in windows and had some files on it. I decided to leave everything alone and watch what it did.

The install process was a a lot easier than I remember from last time. It knew I had XP on the machine and knew it had a 2nd partition. All I had to do was click on the D drive and choose how I wanted to set it up. A novice would have no problems installing the new Distro.

Setting up the duel boot was easy and I don't think they could possibly make installing it any easier.

I chose the KDE desktop because I like the way it looks and this also has undergone some really nice changes. It was good to see that MD 10 only installs minimal programmes this time around because last time I left everything default I had gigs and gigs worth of junk because it installed half a dozen of the same kind of programmes.

KDE is looking more user friendly than before and if you're worried about installing it and losing the feel for windows don't panic because if you understand windows you'll understand KDE well enough. You can even have the same startup look as windoze plus a desktop closely resembling it.

I'll be reviewing it more shortly but if you want to see what I'm going on about check out: The Mandrake Website