Opinions on College Linux

[ArcticFox]

How good is College, and what seperates it from the Mighty Mandrake?

[Mead]

Lots of things seperate it from MDK, but to list a few, its based on Slackware, its not an rpm based distro, its alot smaller its not as pretty its not as hand holdingly friendly. On the other hand you'll probably learn alot more using College Linux than you would in MDK. I havent had a mandrake install on this computer in a few releases, but my last experiance with mandrake was that it was alot slower than when I was running CL.
As for is it good. Its small and stable and does what you want it to. That seems pretty good to me, but then again I havent left the same distro on my computer for more than two weeks at a time in over a year so what do I know.

[nukes]

Thing with CL is, you're free from RPMs. I don't know how it has gone the last few releases as I kinda fell out with rksuisse. I made a massive list of problems and faults in the distro and installer. He asked me to try fixing some of them, I did , then he started ignoring me.
In truth though, it seemed to have reasonable potential, but left a bit to be desired in terms of the layout (some of it was downright dirty, like having a couple of X config programs and them all generating bad config files, in the wrong places) and there were some pretty big problems with the installer too. Also, it left ALL the services on by default, no option to disable them other than ripping them out of your rc.d files.
In short: Mandrake is ready to go, CL is usable, but you have to do some work getting it that way, you would probably be better off going straight for slackware or something.

[ArcticFox]

Well, I have an ISO on my hard drive, so I may just try it out and install it alongside Mandrake. But before I do, I need to make sure that the installer will alow me to partition my drive, since I can't install Partition Magic. The only programs that will install on my desktop PC is... uh, Red Alert 2, Counter-Strike, and video drivers that my freind downloaded and burned for me. That's it. Oh, and WinZip, no matter how much it sucks.

[nukes]

If you've alresaady got mandrake on, boot into that and fire up diskdrake. That'll do the job better than the CL installer. If you haven't got Mandrake installed, you can boot off the first CD and partition the drive.

Yeah, College Linux has some pluses, but needs polish. Especially the installer.

But it's nice, easy and clean, IMO.

Cheers
Mick

[ArcticFox]

Well, it's official. College Linux was installed on my laptop, along with LILO. That part was a mistake, as now I can't get into my win2k partition. Help!

Ah, dual partitions with College linux is a pain, alright.

So, does college linux start? All you need to do is reconfigure lilo to add the win2k partition to the loader. I'm not in linux right now, but you should be able to find lilo.config in the /etc folder and edit it. Or visit this page for the easy way on how to fix it.

Cheers
Mick

[nukes]

its /etc/lilo.conf
open it as root (using pico or vim, depending one what you're comfortable with)
add this in at the bottom:

other=/dev/hda1
     label=win2k

Then run /sbin/lilo as root in a terminal. Then do "lilo -q" to check it shows up. Reboot and try it.

[ArcticFox]

Wow, thanks for the help. CL is the only thing I can access with LILO right now. Once I get back to my laptop, I'll have to try it.