Mandriva it is!

It is ironic that just when Vista is here, I am thinking of going back to Linux at least as a second operating system. I love XP and am going to use it as my prime OS, since it is very versatile and supports 3 softwares I primarily use and are only available for Windows. I am going to get Vista for free as an upgrade soon too.

I am a regular Solaris users, but since 3 years ago where I stopped doing system administrative part time work, I have been using Linux only occasionally.

I have been researching to what Linux to pick: OpenSuse, Mandirva, Redhat or Debian. I have used Redhat quite a lot and also Debain but as a compute server not a as desktop. After reading here and there I decided to go with OpenSuse or Mandriva. My first pick was SUSE but I run into many problems. I had to download it a few times the md5deep checksums were not matching. Finally I had the Opensuse live DVD as well as the x-86-64 images, but neither worked well. I get kernel panics every time. I seriously wasted too much time on it so concurrently I gave Mandriva a test. I tried Mandirva one first, as it is both live and install. It worked perfectly and got all my devices on my AMD Turion 64 X2 recognized. I then downloaded the 2007 DVD and boom installed easily on a external harddrive (I didn't want to mess with my NTFS windows drive and so boot loader was a problem if I wanted to install it on a partition of the main hard drive).
I am loving it very much: installation was a breeze, system is stable, lots of free softwares and games

AND

With the pre-installed 3D desktop, ..... boy oh boy when I get my Vista in a few weeks I don't think it is going to be a wow (as advertised by MS) to me anymore, no matter how well is the eye candies. (I am more of practicality and not into eye candy but if both are combined, why not).

However, I could not get drak3d to work on my laptop, as it complains that it doesn't have required hardware! It is a premium ready machine, why ...