

GNOME's Ximian Evolution has become many Linux users' e-mail program of choice.
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The PowerPack Edition includes two printed user guides, two months of free technical support (instead of one), and unlimited security updates for one computer.
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In fact, PowerPack includes two CDs filled with commercial applications, plus another with more applications, none of which are part of the Standard Edition package. The PowerPack Edition includes Sun's StarOffice 6.0 productivity suite, in addition to the two suites packaged with the Standard Edition, OpenOffice and KOffice. The entire installation fits into a few gigabytes of space, so we recommend installing all the apps if you have room. The Standard Edition includes the latest Apache Web server, as well as GNOME's well-regarded (and very Outlook-like) Ximian Evolution.
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During setup or anytime later, you can install a host of games, utilities, applications, and servers. Mandrake also ships with several groups of applications, called packages in Linux-speak. The KDE Control Center lets you access all possible configurations for the KDE environment.

If they aren't pretty enough by default, you can also control the antialiasing of your system's fonts to improve things even more. While the screen display still doesn't come close to a Windows XP screen with the ClearType font smoothing option turned on, especially on notebooks, Mandrake has given us the first truly readable Linux fonts out of the box. Once you have this OS up and running, you'll immediately notice its highly readable fonts. Mandrake 9.1 runs all of its desktop environments atop XFree86 4.3.0, the most recent version available of Linux's common X Window graphical user interface (GUI) system. You can then easily switch from one to the other, and if you choose to install any other window managers, you can select them at login. Mandrake ships with all the standard Linux desktop environments-KDE, GNOME, ICEwm, Enlightenment, WindowMaker, and so on-and installs both KDE 3.1 (with some slightly more useful icon groupings) and GNOME 2.2 by default-a nice touch.


KDE 3.1 improves slightly on the previous interface with a better grouping of icons and applications.
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(For example, the setup asks for a username or an e-mail address of a security administrator but doesn't explain what the request is for-most users can safely ignore it.) Overall, though, setup runs smoothly, and although the help text is not as extensive as Red Hat's, installation is more suited to Linux newbies, thanks to the series of relatively simple wizards. Mandrake Linux 9.1 offers a graphical process and throws out only a few stumbling blocks. Not long ago, Linux installations brought fear and trepidation to the uninitiated, but thankfully, that's no longer the case. Mandrake Linux 9.1 doesn't resoundingly trump Red Hat or SuSE, but if you're looking for easy reading and support for NTFS partitioning, give this one a try. It's also brimming with bundled apps and can now automatically partition a Windows NTFS drive, something Red Hat and SuSE can't do. Mandrake offers fully readable word processing documents, spreadsheets, and Web pages, as well as granular font control. Believe it or not, Mandrake's fonts make all the difference. How? Mandrake Linux 9.1's relatively easy installation process isn't the reason after all, easy, graphical installs have become the norm for recent Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Linux 8.0 and SuSE Linux 8.1. With version 9.1 of its Linux distribution, MandrakeSoft has come as close as anyone to making Linux truly competitive with Windows.
