The CPLUG had it's first install fest on Tuesday. We had a blast, and a load of people showed up. I'd guess in total there were nearly 25 folks who came by, which is about 15 more than usual. Around 8-10 of those were people coming to a CPLUG meeting for the first time. Some of those were new to Linux, others had used it for awhile.

It worked out really well for me, as I've been needing to do some installs/upgrades for awhile. We have a new server for our mailing list / websites, Todd and I did a Debian install on that. Shana wanted to try something new, I put Mandrake on her computer. And I've been debating for awhile on what to put on my laptop -- since it already had RedHat 9, I decided to just do an upgrade to Fedora to prevent me from having to start from scratch.

All three installs went pretty well. I've gotten pretty familar with Debian in our rollout at work, and that one went pretty smoothly. Fedora wasn't too much different than the standard RedHat install, though the installation itself seemed a bit more polished. I had never used Mandrake before. I was a bit surprised by it's simplicity. Everything from the install to the desktop experience are done very well -- I'm pretty sure my mother could use it, perhaps even install it. It's desktop is much cleaner than other distro's that I've used, though some of that can be chalked up to KDE. For example, RedHat has three menu options which contain settings -- Preferences, System Options, and System Tools. For a lot of users, that could be confusing. If I want to configure my Palm Pilot or Add a Printer, which one would it be in? Palm Pilot is apparently a preference, while adding a printer is a system option. With Mandrake, things like that are all under a single menu item called "Configure". You can just poke around under there until you find what you want.

No, I'm not quite ready to switch my desktop to Mandrake, though I think I might consider recommending that to new users. We'll see how it goes after Shana plays with it for awhile.

Fedora seems just like every other RedHat release, except that it has newer programs. But then, perhaps that's what it's supposed to be. I just need for it to provide some configurable menu's on the desktop, then get out of the way so I can use it. I did finally try a new background for my laptop. One of these days I should get a Digital Blasphemy subscription.

Oh, and I started using Apt with Fedora, I should have started using that awhile ago.