[cumbria_lug] More on Mandrake 9.2 and Suse 8.2

[grouper at beehive.demon.co.uk]

I've just finished installing  Mandrake 9.2 and Suse 8.2 on my laptop. Word to 
the wise: Both installations work fine but be very careful when it comes to 
configuring the bootloaders. After several installs on a new clean disk 
(wahoo!) I ended up having to do a bit of jiggery-pokery to get my /boot 
partition to work. After wasting much time editing grub configs, I finally 
succumbed to a very inelegant but useful approach. I installed Suse, then 
booted it and tarred off  /boot to a safe place. I then installed Mdk92 and 
watched it totally munge /boot for suse, i.e. Mandrake works fine but I can't 
get suse to boot. Then I booted up in rescue mode, mounted all my filesystems 
and restored the original tarball and hand-edited the grub menu.lst on my 
boot partition. Hey presto!

The usual Mandrake niggles (MandrakeUpdate doesn't work without lots of 
tweaking, the above bootloader prob which I've had lot's of problems with on 
previous versions) aside, it seems pretty stable and easy to install. What 
I'm way impressed with is SuSE 8.2. It installed painfree on both my desktop 
and laptop systems. I was quite impressed when I plugged my scanner in and a 
scanner config wizard popped up and sorted it out with a few mouse clicks. 
Not having used SuSe since 6.x, I'm really impressed with how well integrated 
and tight everything seems. Having to adapt to SuSE from Redhat (which I've 
used for the last year) styles of doing things hasn't been too bad, even 
though sometimes the differences are less than trivial.

Bottom line? SuSE kicks ass!