You are correct - I have the same book with the CD of RHL still stuck to the back. I don’t think I ever installed it, but I did install Mandrake Linux and used the dummy book to learn it. Why such an odd distro like Mandrake? I literally found it on the shelf in a Best Buy. I was already a heavy Unix user at work (we all had dumb terminals running Solaris) and I really wanted that experience on my personal system, thus started my life-long love for Linux.

Mandrake was pretty nice. It was the first Linux install I got a scanner to work with.

My first desktop Linux is Mandrake too. Reason? It had KDE. It looked like Windows. I've recently come back to KDE by way of OpenSuse. Both decisions surprise even myself. I never thought I'd use an rpm based distro again. (I am using Tumbleweed. Rolling updates+snapper snapshots on btrfs is what sold it to me. I would prefer zfs but had no issues with btrfs yet in two years)

Hey, I also first installed Mandrake. I got it in on a magazine. I always a thought it was a common distro, kinda like ubuntu some years later when they started shipping disks

I had that. Red hat 5.2. What memories.