I finally was able to install Mageia on this new/old HP dx5150 AMD64 40gb hard drive. I wanted to wait till the weekend since I've been working 12 hrs/5 days shifts for the past couple of weeks, but hey, who doesn't want to try out the new kid on the block ASAP!
I tried during the alpha stages to install it on another old IBM machine in virtualbox but it stopped at the installing grub stage, so I end up aborting and wait for the next release. Since I purchased the HP machine and already had partition the drive in half, Win 7 x64 is installed on it, so I wanted to do a compare of OSes with Gnome. I downloaded the dual arch cd, which I didn't quite know what's on it other than 32/64 bit OS.
After booting up the cd, I didn't realize it was going to install the 64bit ver. by default, I assume it knew this was a 64 bit machine, I was thinking of using the 32 bit. I thought it would give you an option to pick which one to use. Another thing, during the installation, when it came to DE/WM option, it had LXDE checkmarked by default and I unchecked it and chose Gnome. To my surpise after installation, it booted into LXDE. This is why the installation was the fastest I've seen in a long time. Even after I installed a small Gnome without all the bells & whistles, it had to finish within 30 mins. of total install. Getting my WiMax usb/wireless router going was no big deal, it just wasn't picked up during the installation stage, or I didn't figure out how to set it up, so that may be why Gnome & LXDE were the light versions. (No internet access until after the complete install).
Overall, I'm pretty impressed from what I've seen so far, the devel team keep doing what they are doing, this could be a very nice distro for years to come. One other thing I don't like that default green color on the login screen, it reminds me of Opensuse, no offense. I'll work on changing it as time goes on. So for now, this is my first impression and I'll keep you informed of how things are going.
Steve