Trying lots of distros can be fun, but sooner or later you will settle on just one, largely, I think because of convenience. You'll learn how to get things done in one distro and then because of that history, you'll stick with it.

I have used gentoo, LFS, debian, 'Drake and and RH. I now have 3 RH boxes at home and 10 here at work.

Works for me!

Cheers--
Charles

I'm currently running Redhat 9.0, Mandrake 9.1, SME Server 5.6 and LFS(currently building) as virtual machines under VMWare on an XP box.

This lets me play with Linux as much as I like while I pick my final distro.

On a P4 2.0GHz i get about 500MHz to 1GHz performance in a virtual machine. Thats plenty for my needs.

discussing distros is like discussing religion at the dinner table.

For anyone interested in LINUX, but unwilling to tak the plunge - give them a copy of KNOPPIX.

It is lovely to see someone realise that shifting to LINUX might not be that hard, when one version will just boot from the CD.

J Burford

Sure, you can save if you've got a harddrive; you've just gotta' mount. It's the ULTIMATE restoration tool if you gone and screwed your box all up. Every linux utility you could ever need and then a few... if you know your way around, you can bail yourself out of anything.

It's definitely a disc to keep around.

get the Slackware Live cd, even smaller than Knoppix

I've been using Mandrake 9.1 for several months now, and while I think they are the best distro for new people, my needs are starting to change. I am looking for a barebone distro. I'm certainly not ready to do linux from stratch, but what I need is a distro without all the extra's. I want to be able to install that on my own. I just want the basic library's, kde, and a browser. Mandrake bundles their distro with far too much programs. A newb doesn't even know what half of them are or do, let alone be forced to choose if they need it. If you could offer your opinion from past experience, that would be great. I'm looking for a distro that won't waste my hard drive space with junk. Something that could be used in a business enviornment. Thank you!

I started with Redhat 8.0, upgraded to 9. But I found that there was a lot of stuff I didn't need. I recently installed Slackware 9.1 - it's really nice.

There is a program for it called Swaret that can automagically update stuff, and it has a nice packaging system - pkgtool. I heartily recommend Slack to anyone interested enough, but there might be a steeper learning curve than with RH or Mandrake or similar distros.

I started with Mandrake about a year ago 8.1 I think. Well i am almost done getting my Slackware 9.1 box configured. It is really nice to see a program menu not overloaded with stuff I'll never use. Then i started messing with Fluxbox and its allover now. I love that desktop. It only has what i tell it to have. Thats cool!!! Slack Rules!!!!

The first of this year I got KNOPPIX, and was hooked. I saw it was built from Debian, and though okay, I'll give that a try. I didn't have a CD burner, so I ordered the 7-disk set, and could not get it to reconize my video hardware. I was, and am, still too new to Linux to be muching around with XFree, and the config files for it.

Next, I went with the Mandrake 9.1 Pro, and installing was a breeze, from the DVD. Some of my hardware had changed, such as the DVD player/burner, but the rest had remained the same. I had selected the software I wanted when I did the install, then spent some time removing other things I wasn't given a chose about. The one nice thing was that I could download and install the network configuration wizards, and that made life easy on me.

I have got a couple more boxes now, and I have installed Gentoo on one of them. I am comfortable enought with computes, even if not Linux, to give it a try. I do like thier package program, Portage, and helps ensure that I can update just the programs/packages I want, the main system files, or the whole nine yards - the choise is mine.

Differant distros, or methods of installing, for difrerant needs. I still have a winDOZE box that I had to do a complete re-insall of the OS on last week.

After having read the last 6+ months of posts in this forum, I still have the same question I started with: Where can I find the strengths vs. weaknesses of each of the main distro's?

I know that it would be impossible to rate them all (especially Seanix), but I'd like to know the up-side to Slackware vs. the down-side of Mandrake and so on. I intend to set up several different boxes, for several different purposes, and I'd like to know which distro to use for an end-user desktop/ a file server/ a web server/ an apps server/ etc...

And to answer the unasked question - yes, I do want to be THE sysadmin/techie guy on the job. And at home.

"I know that it would be impossible to rate them all (especially Seanix), but I'd like to know the up-side to Slackware vs. the down-side of Mandrake and so on."

You can try going here.

You will have to hunt around just a bit, but you will find a review of pretty near every distro.

Cheers--
Charles

I like FreeBSD , fast , strong

Speaking as a soon-to-be-ex Redhat user, (yeah, maybe the Fedora thing will work, but right now, I just feel like Lucy just yanked the football back), the thing I thought RedHat was good for was the automated update service.

Didn't mind paying for the update subscription. Even bought their boxed editions. But don't really want to pay twice as much as I've been paying (even after my "half off"), for a distribution that has many of the features I'm fooling with (Apache, PHP, SQL) disabled. (And, their yanking things this way just feels like an ethics problem, to me.)

Are there other distributions with similar support options? What I'm trying to do right now is to learn about that whole LAMP thing, with the eventual goal of going commercial, and don't really want to take time away from that just to learn about how to do software patches manually. (Although, I'd bet the knowledge would be usefull, later.)

i've done it... i dumped mandrake and i'm using slackware... and from just a few day, i think i can say adios to those french idiots.... woohoo.... i found my new distro!! (very impressed with its speed, stability, and its simpleness.