Mandrake 10.0 CE

Well, I was so impressed with the ease of setting up madrake on the work PC that I decided to do it at home too.

What especially impressed me was DVD playback. The PC I used was an old celeron 300 (:-) and using software decoding with Totem, I saw the sharpest, clearest DVD pictures I've ever seen on a PC. Granted it was a little jerky, but still, full screen using software on a PC of that spec is a moajor processor burden.

Anyway, I've replaced the old DVD drive this week with a new Liteon unit, and suddenly all those discs that were 'difficult' to play work really well. However, the new drive came bundled with 'powerDVD' and using this produced the fuzziest images imaginable! I was using MGI softmax before, but the audio delay wasn't really acceptable (Actually I've NEVER seen good audio:video synch, even with dedicated players).

So I thought I'd try Mandrake, since I wanted to learn how it worked anyway. 1 Hour later my drive's partitioned, software installed, boot manager configured printer recognised (not the modem :-( and Linux runs great. Pop a DVD in and nothing. Eventually find how to make totem look at the DVD drive, and it says it can't run it. Neither can any of the other multimedia players :-((

And so the learning curve has just steepened a little more. I'm sure this is good for me, in the same way doing crosswords is supposed to keep the brain from deteriorating.