In the past, Mandrake Linux has impressed us with its overall stability and ease of installation, compared to the Red Hat distribution on which it's based. The installation process was ahead of its time, surpassing even SuSE's YaST for ease of configuration and advanced look and feel. So, version 9.0 brought high expectations.

Mostly, it meets those expectations, and Mandrake is still just about the most newbie-friendly distribution out there. You always know where you are with the excellent installation process: A column of tasks on the left of the screen is ticked off as you proceed. The install is almost as visually rich as the final installed system as well, which makes it very approachable and a far cry from the command line, which new users might find daunting.

Mandrake is normally pretty good at sorting everything out during installation, with good hardware detection and useful default configuration options set, but we had to do a bit of tweaking with this release to get a smoothly functioning system. To be fair, we normally use programs like VNC and Webmin, which an ex-Windows user wanting Linux on the desktop isn't likely to need, so we don't see it as a big problem.

For Windows users thinking of trying Linux, Mandrake might be more suitable than Red Hat if deleting Windows doesn't seem like a good idea - Mandrake can resize FAT16 and FAT32 partitions during the installation process to make way for a Linux-oriented file system (there are many to choose from) and set up dual boot.

Unfortunately, although Mandrake can read NTFS partitions, it's not possible to resize them or write to them, so Windows NT, 2000 and XP users be warned! Given the giveaway price of hard disks, though, it's worth considering buying a dedicated disk with what you save on the operating system and software.

Once installed, there are many usability improvements as well as some under-the-hood development. Mandrake now supports USB 2.0 devices, and plug and play has been improved. Like Red Hat, Mandrake has also tried to make sense of the KDE and Gnome menus, which is A Good Thing. The KDE menu in particular is a bit of a mess to navigate in its standard trim.

Experienced Linux users might prefer Mandrake's approach, which isn't as far-reaching as Red Hat's Bluecurve theme. Rather than replacing the menus with a completely new set, Mandrake has opted to add a 'task-oriented menu', which works to an extent, although of course the task you want to perform will invariably be missing from the list. It would have been nice to see other features like 'Write a CD' in the list next to 'RIP a CD' and 'Listen to Music Files', though.

A big problem facing Linux on the desktop is Windows interoperability. Sharing Office files with OpenOffice is a step forward, but many users will install Linux on a spare or second machine, or in an Office environment with other Windows machines. It's one thing getting Samba working to share folders on the Linux machine, but it's often necessary to connect to a Windows share to get files, and Linux is generally not very helpful in this matter.

You can connect on the command line with a few different methods, but it's not integrated into KDE or Gnome to the point where users can seamlessly browse available shares and connect at will. Mandrake does go some way further than Red Hat to remedy this via the Mandrake Control Centre which lets you specify SMB shares to be mounted at boot time, but you need to be 'root' to run it.

Despite minor niggles, Mandrake Linux 9.0 is justifiably gaining popularity. If you want a Linux distribution that you can run with few problems and little configuration effort, Mandrake might well be the relief from Microsoft licensing that you've been waiting for.