We chose Mandrake. [LWN.net]

We chose Mandrake.

Posted Sep 10, 2004 22:22 UTC (Fri) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813)
Parent article: SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9

After evaluating SLES 8 our small shop (~ 20 Linux servers) decided to start switching from RedHat 9 to Mandrake 10.0.

While we carry a Novell edu site license, the wait to obtain access to the non eval SLES 8 ISO's and a license key was about a month, required several phone calls to an account rep, and creation of a Novell support website account. The required creation of a SUSE portal account in order to use the YAST software updates added further annoyance. After all that, SUSE 9 pro looked nicer than the SLES 8 for most of our uses.

Mandrake was a painless initial download and the urpmi command line tools work very nicely, (as a debian user I am pleased with urpmi). Security updates are swift, and software is up to date. We can maintain a local set of updates and the initial packages repository if we wish. We have access to per incident and subscription style support if and when we choose to do it.

Novell-SUSE would do well to note the better service offered by the Mandrake folks.

- cameron

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We chose Mandrake.

Posted Sep 17, 2004 12:51 UTC (Fri) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

In my experience, the support from Mandrake is not really comparable to
that of rhat/suse. I don't want to pick on them, they do a good job
and everything but the only time I have worked on Mandrake server
products, it was obvious that the testing that had gone into the product
was orders of magnitude better with rhat/suse.

Don't dismiss Debian completely though. If you can find a good third
party support contract it's very well suited in a commercial environment
even in larger companies. The lifetime of the an ordinary Debian stable
has so far been in the order of, or even surpassed, rhat/suse server.