Woo Hoo!!
And Mandrake would be decent to start off with, although I found Slackware, in my small time of use before leaving home, to be very nice as well. Apart from the installer(took a few times to get it right on the partitioning... first time with fdisk) the X started up great, mouse works, sounds works, internet works... Oh sorry, we were talking about Mandrake, right?
It should work well as a first distro I would guess.
No real personal experience with it, but a lot of people use it and recomend it, so I can only do the same until I try it myself.