The installation was going to be a fresh one on one machine, with a 13Gb HD, and an upgrade on the other one.

I first try to install Red Hat 5.2 with a CDRom found in a magazine, but fdisk gave me some worrying messages about my 13Gb hard disk. DiskDruid was totally useless.

I then bought the MacMillan Mandrake 6.0 distribution. Buying "free software" makes me grimace, but this distribution offers a kind of Partition Magic light, which I thought could help me. It was totally useless, it gave me an error message without formatting anything than a damaged swap partition. I have 4 Fat partitions, this could be the problem. Fortunately, the version of fdisk included was able to deal with my hard drive.

The system was able to boot (I use Loadlin), but with some messages about kernel version discrepancies, although this was a new installation. I discovered later when recompiling the kernel that the distribution included a 2.2.5 precompiled kernel with 2.2.9 sources.

Then I choose Gnome as my preferred desktop (I only did use AnotherLevel before). This was a mistake. I got a lot of processes left in D status, especially when browsing. These processes are absolutely not killable, as I discovered by searching users groups. If one of these processes uses the file system under /, the file system cannot be unmounted during shutdown. It becomes corrupted. I lost a lot of configuration files in /home and /root directories (I was not able to use more than 1 main and 1 swap partitions, because of my other Fat partitions). Besides, it seems that the shutdown -f option has changed, so that you must use -r or -h for a clean unmount. I finally reinstalled all the kit, like in a good old Windows adventure.

My opinion: Gnome and the main gnu applications or gnutilies are at the alpha plus or beta minus stage. I am now able to enjoy some stability with KDE.

About the support: Linux offers the best support I know, from my personal and professional experiences with Windows and commercial Unixes. A search through the Net can give you the fastest answer to forbidding problems you can dream of, from the best people around the web. Big players behind an OS mainly give confidence to managers who don't understand technology. A company cannot offer you enough experts to compete against the web, when they can offer experts at all locally.

Bye and continue your work.

PS

Feel free to edit this text if you ever publish it, I am not comfortable in English. I prefer you do not publish my e-mail address. Thanks!

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