Red Hat Takes Aim at SuSE, Mandrake

gowen writes "The gloves have come off in the competition between commercial linux distributions. The Register is reporting that Red Hat is offering a $10 rebate to people who upgrade to Red Hat 7.3, including those who previously used Mandrake and SuSE. Previous users of Windows are not eligible for a rebate."

Comments

Windows users incentives to switch to Linux

[dkh2]

1. No BSOD
2. You typically only HAVE to reboot to switch kernels. No reboot just because you upgraded a package
3. You can remove the internet browser and not break the OS
4. Upgrades tend to be free
5. Technical support does not cost $50USD/instance and $9.95/minute plus long distance charges

Need I go on?

Dual boot: How (Not) To

[HiThere]

This is a caution about dual boot systems:

Dual boot is quite useful, and I use it on my main system at work. But I don't really trust partition resizing tools. I've ended up with a few too many corrupt partition tables. So now I have a second hard disk. But if I install the boot partition on the second hard disk, then after awhile that installation fails at boot.

It took awhile to figure this out, but in the end I backed up my windows partition, reformatted my primary disk, with a boot partion, a swap partion, and a windows partition. Rolled the windows program back in (I used ghost for this). And then installed Linux. Now it works fine, without much problem. But figuring out what I needed to do was largely a matter of try something, wait til it crashes (sometimes a couple of months). Figure out what to try next. Repeat. And for the longest time, the only reliable way to boot Linux was from a floppy.

I'm not really sure that it would be appropriat to expect things to work better (though it sure would be nice). I am sure that it's appropriate to expect better diagnostics. Partition tabel corrupt is a terrible diagnostic to be the first warning sign. Particularly when it keeps you from even accessing the disk. (Interestingly, when I reformatted the system to put the boot partition on the primary disk, fsck magically recovered all of the missing data, and nothing ended up lost ... not at all what I had been expecting. I thought my hard disk had gone bad.)