Charles> Well, Red Hat 9 meets all your requirements above, except the Charles> one that says you don't want Red Hat :) You didn't give any Charles> good reason why you wanted to stay away from Red Hat other Charles> than you "want to change try to stay away from GNOME". Well, Charles> Red Hat 9 has KDE too, and you can always get WindowMaker, Charles> Blackbox, Fluxbox, XFCE, or something else if you want a Charles> ligher weight GUI. http://freshrpms.net/ is a good place to Charles> find such addons. Well, part of it has been that I've been using it for so long, it seems like I should try something new and see how that goes. Another issue is that I haven't been wild about some of the system configuration tools they provide, but it's not a big deal. I dunno, it's more of an urge to do something else, not a true desire to move off. Also, I have noticed that alot of packages are still staying with 7.3 or 8, and that 9 hasn't seemed to be as popular. Hard to tell... Charles> The Red Hat Linux distro that we all know an love <g> is Charles> turning into the Fedora Core community supported and Charles> developed distro. Its direction, shape, package selection, Charles> etc. will be very much driven by what the community wants. Charles> In this way, it will be more like the Debian Project, which I Charles> believe will alleviate some of the reservations people may Charles> have had about using Red Hat in the past. E.g. WindowMaker Charles> and those other GUIs will be able to come back into the Charles> distro if the community desires it. Charles> Fedora Core will also support apt-get, yum, and up2date with Charles> third party repositories of software. This will include Charles> Fedora Core itself, updates, Fedora Extras, Fedora Charles> Alternatives, and Fedora Legacy (for those who want an older, Charles> more stable distro to be supported for a longer time). See Charles> http://fedora.redhat.com/ for more info about the project. But none of this exists right now, and I want to rebuild my system this weekend if I can. :] Of course, nothing says I can't play with this stuff later one. Also, some of the rpmbuild and rpm commands have really ticked me off, since I consider the syntax and errors messages to be really baroque and unhelpful. Especially when trying to build a SRPM package, and it dies for no frigging obvious reason. And since I'm planning a fresh install, I've got the Debian and RH9 disks to play with. So maybe I'll just go with Debian for now and see how it goes long term. Thanks for the input. John