Mandrake 7.0
Mandrakesoft is one of the first company to make a distribution by borrowing from another vendor. They originally made Mandrake based on the Red Hat distribution, but Mandrake 7.0 is a completely new in-house distribution. The feel of Red Hat remains as do some of the components, but Mandrake now provides for a better setup, configuration tools and a few extra packages. Installation is simple and flexible as you can customize almost the whole process and change many of the configuration parameters. Not only this, it can be installed on DOS or Windows partitions as well. You can use a small front end called LNX4WIN to boot into linux from Windows. Partition Magic is bundled with the distribution, which makes it possible to install on the native Linux file system.
From the additional CD you can install individual packages after complete installation. Since it's some what similar to Red Hat, it is easier configuring help and ensures greater compatibility with RPM files as compared to others. Hardware installation was perfect as everything got detected and Mandrake claims to be only distribution to support USB keyboards and mice. It comes with a total of nine GUIs, ranging from WindowMaker, Afterstep and also desktop environments such as KDE and Gnome.
Almost all the packages in Mandrake have been compiled for Pentium and higher processors. Overall this is good distribution for the wannabe linux techies who are still in the rookie stage and want to get their hands dirty on all those application CD's.