okay. I'm sure that I'm not the only one that has been following the goings-on with respect to Red Hat (dropping the Personal Edition in favor of Fedora) and SuSE (being bought by Novell). I am looking for some honest advice here. I am NOT trying to start a flame war or a distro war. I will honestly take suggestions. I am running Aurora Linux on a Sun SPARCstation 10 (it's based on RH7.3) and RH9 on my laptop (Gateway Solo 9100) right now. I have been running Red Hat on my systems since 5.x. given what I have seen in the news, I think it is time to consider another distro, though. Here are my thoughts so far: I am feeling a bit underwhelmed with what i've been reading about Fedora from RH's website and from Aurora's list. I can't say with any level of certainty that I will stay and shift to Fedora. I will likely shift to another distro, though. I'm not considering Debian at the moment because I don't think that it moves quickly enough to keep up with updated stuff. Perhaps that is a flawed perception, but I don't look kindly on installing a baseline (from the CD) and spending a month of Sundays running apt-get to update everything. The last time i played with SuSE was around 1997 or 1998. I got the SuSE disc from CheapBytes so I could play with it. I liked the tools that it had (YaST was just getting ready to shift to YaST2, i think), but I didn't like the fact that many of the libraries were a couple versions behind what my favorite applications (of the day) wanted to find. I am actually favoring SuSE right now, if I can get what i need on CDs. (Andy, do you have any suggestions?) I cut my eye-teeth on Slackware back when Linux was still at 0.99pl10. My Dad sent me a box of floppies that had everything i'd need to get started. I had a blast! I don't know about Slackware now. I have not been following them (at all) since I shifted to RH all those years ago. Gentoo is not even being considered right now. My fastest system is a P2/400, and that is running Win98se. (My wife uses it to play the Sims. Games are all Win* is good for anyway.) My fastest *nix box is my laptop, and that's a P2/266. I don't have the time nor the resources to (re?)compile everything to suit my system. Given these thoughts, the Debian and Gentoo folk should understand that my opinions, as stated above, are open to change. Show me where i misunderstood, and i will thank you. :) I'm just looking for a Distro that will let me install my system with a minimum of pain, let me tweak where I want, when i want, and provides a neat way to keep things up to date (think security, etc.).... I've gotten used to the RPM system of archives, but I prefer tarballs. I have this "thing" about putting anything I add to the system in /usr/local .... :) Thanks for any advice. Best regards, -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- William Smith wsmith-at-chezsmith-dot-com Fall River, MA http://www.chezsmith.com Bad Joke #2 -- Q: How many Real Men does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None. Real Men aren't afraid of the dark. * TAG! v3.1 *