I am wondering, because i get this message while rpmdrake is running that recognizes exactly the version of Mandrake I am running. It refers to it as "Download CD's."

I am curious: Is there any real difference between the version that you download at say Mandrake's download site and the version that you see at CompUSA? Is it worth spending the $40-some-odd dollars for it?

there isn't any difference of quality that i know of.. if you can download it, there isn't any reason to buy it.

I should have put this in there...

I was talking with someone yesterday and they told me not to try the cheapie ones you see at CompUSA (the eval versions I believe) and be suspectful of downloads from Planet Mirror and in some cases from the distribution's FTP site... I did not understand why so I brought the question here...

Thanks

well, you generally pay for two reasons, a paper manual and support. oh and a nice coloured box. that's the only reason to buy. you can buy extended versions of oses aswell like the mandrake power pack, but i don't gerneally see the point, as you can dl it all anyway

Its good to support the linux community once it a while

personally i don't see how giving redhat, a company with a current anual turnover of $1.2bn, $50 is gonna do anythign to help the open source community. if you want to support the "community" give money to sites like this, or use the paypal, and similar, accounts that open source writers setup.

As a matter of fact i am donating some money to this website so at least i'm helping alittle bit.

Does getting your local kernel hacker drunk count?

Anyway, to somehow wander back onto topic, yes there usually is a difference. The best example is Mandy 8.0.

The store purchased box, or at least the only one I ever bought, for someone else, with their money; damn I'm a freeloader, had 3 CDs: two system RPM CDs and a Contrib CD. The Contrib CD had a mountain of non-GPL stuff on it that in a rare few cases was actually pay-licensed by Mandrake. I think... regardless, the contrib CD wasn't part of the download release.

Then there were the download CDs, both of them, with most of what you would need for a normal desktop on CD1.

Then there was an entire distro-set on 1 CD that was distributed in copies of LinuxWorld and some other mags. I even got one free with a network card once, which was an old trick of TurboLinux. Heck, when everything is in RPM format, its easy to juggle around the full distrobution set accross 1 to 3 CDs depending on what license/space constraint you are limited to.

-Cheers,

Finegan