Tired of Mandrake, goin for Red Hat... few quick questions

I grow weary of Madrake and am right now in the process of buring the Red Hat 7.3 iso's, heres the quick story. Back when I installed Mandrake I did it the fast newbie way and installed it on the whole drive and didn't leave a blank partition on half the disk for later use. So instead of messing around with trying to shrink my very large /home partition I'm I just want to get rid of Mandrake completely and just go with Red Hat. Am I going to have to clean the drive myself or is there something in the Red Hat 7.3 instal that will let me install over Mandrake? If I have to do it myself, what would be the best way of going about that?

the installer will let you delete the old partitions and add new ones then it will reformat. meaning yes it will overwrite. but why RedHat?

Even so, why RH7.3, when there isRH9?

Well I wan't to try out all the major distros just to see what they're like and such. I wasn't planning on installing a more complex distro like Gentoo or Slackware until the end of the summer so I need something to bridge the gap. Well I have all my cd's burned, I guess it's Red Hat time!

As for the why Red Hat 7.3 question, I dunno I've heard good things about. I also want to see what an older distro is like. Maybe throughout the summer I'll try out 9. Who knows...

The reason you've heard good things about 7.3 might be because of 8.0. 8.0 wasn't really the most stable distro that RedHat release, so to speak. I don't think that there's anything wrong with 9, though.

Well I sure did it this time. Right in the middle of the install where it promted me to put in cd 2 it said the cdrom wouldn't mount and it kept telling me to put in cd2. Tried 3 but it asked for 2. So then I had to reboot and I couldn't even boot into windows because the boot loader was messed up so I had to REinstall Mandrake. Luckily everything went fine and both Linux and Windows booted up as they did before but now I'm left with a Linux system with all my stuff gone! Oh well, I left half the drive open this time so I can try again with Red Hat later and triple boot I guess. Quick question, I can't seem to access Windows in /mnt using Nautilus like I could before, I can only access it through the terminal logged in as root. There must have been something I did before to make it so I could do this but I don't know what. Can someone field me in?

(P.S. How do you change into directorys that have spaces in them. For example: Documents and Settings in Windows)

directories that have spaces are filled in by "\" but you can also press the tab key to finish the directory name once you have it started.

about red hat....

I have been using it for what seems like a long time. Basically 8 was garbage, 7.3 was rock solid amazing but now has outdated packages so I use 9 now which is very good.

and your viewing directories in windows while using nautilus - I don't really use gnome cuz I hate it, but normally you would need to add a mounting line to your fstab to access the files after booting.
if it's fat32, it is easy and you can see how to do that on the "helpful tips" page of my guide (link is below) for ntfs, it's just a different command for mounting, but i don't use ntfs.

I am not a big fan of mdk at all, in fact it has never behaved well for me, but red hat has been great (with the exception of 8)

cheers!

Yeah I think I'm gonna go for 9 instead. As for Mandrake, it was good to learn on. It installs easy and rpmDrake is a pretty nice tool. It'll always hold a place in my heart.

BTW Yowwwww your site rocks. I burned the 7.3 iso's using your little guide on using cdrecord in the terminal and it worked great!

yeah, it took me a while to get into using cdrecord, but i love it now.

good luck with rh 9, if you have any questions, feel free to ask, I have picked up on a ton of do's and don'ts with it

Ok still having problems with Read Only permissions with Windows. I tried:

Code:

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mount -t ntfs /mnt/windows user,uid=500,gid=500 0 0

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but it ends up giving me a list of mount options. Should I unmount and mount it again, if so how would I unmount it?