'Expert' gives more flexibility but asks you a few more questions about your hardware. We selected Expert. Mandrake asked us whether we were sure. "Yes" we said and committed ourselves.

The next few steps were routine. We just said yes to Mandrake's detection of our mouse, keyboard and selected the languages to be installed. Mandrake gives you over 60 languages! The next window that popped up did confuse us a bit. Mandrake brought up a license agreement! We were a bit too eager to sit and view this so we just clicked on accept. Maybe we'll check back on this sometime. The expert install then asks you a few miscellaneous questions like Hard drive optimization (using hdparm), precise size of RAM, whether to enable num lock at start (very useful) and the security level.

Setup Filesystems

Hardware detection was smooth. In fact, we hardly had to make any selections. Hard disk partitioning was even better. Diskdrake again gives you a wide choice of partitioning including a choice of file systems. The great feature that sets this tool apart from other partitioning tools like Disk Druid is the fact that this does a great job of re-sizing your partitions. Previously, you would have had to use something like Partition Magic to do the same.

In case you have no previous partitions, Mandrake will install to free space in the Windows partition. You can do this manually or let Diskdrake do the job. The next screen showed the existing partitions/space on the machine. We clicked on the free space and selected Auto Allocate.

Diskdrake made 3 partitions: a root, a swap and a home partition with ext2 filesystem as default. We wanted to try out Reiser FS so we deleted the home partition and created it again, this time as a home partition with ReiserFS type of filesystem. All this was just with a few clicks of the mouse! Incidentally, Mandrake supports over 100 types of filesystems!

Why ReiserFS?