Does anyone remember that? Mandrake, with lilo.my first linux. Fell in love with linux and never looked back. Thank you guys.

Hi...

Welcome to the forum

I remember Mandrake 8.0 or 8.1, which I purchased (in a box) at a department store back in 2001.

Regards...

Welcome aboard.

(Yes, I remember Mandrake, rpm based, but too 'heavy' for my tastes.)

I recall mandrake in those days. A lot of colleges that focused on media production favored it in that era. I bought mandrake 7.0 off the shelf at best buy when the SuSE 7x I bought didn't install for my laptop. But mandrake had the same symptom. Then I found debian and never looked back. Before then I had run SuSE 6.1, the under dog to redhat's dominance at the time.

In more recent history, mandrake went bankrupt and morphed into mandriva or some such. But now even that version has encountered a similar fate. But it persists in the form of mageia, although a fork of the code base and no business relation to the original. Or something like that.

I installed my first Redhat distro around that time and moved to mandrake 7 something later. I liked mandrake better than redhat at the time, but as someone said above to got to be too much eventually and i moved to gentoo.