Jared & everyone - thanks for all your help & advice, I'm going to try Ubuntu I think if I can't get FC 3 to work out. The problem I'm having now is with the FC 3 install. I burned the four cd's and upgraded my old box & everything went fine, a bit slow but fine (install took about an hour). Now I boot up for the first time and as soon as it hits kudzu and checks for newly installed equipment the monitor goes to vertical colored lines. I read that this can be fixed by editing the xorg.conf (or something like that) file & setting everything to defaults & that the issue is basically with the monitor being set at too high a resolution but how do I do that? Anger Is A Gift. -----Original Message----- From: Jared Greenwald [mailto:greenwaldjared@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, April 23, 2005 2:43 AM To: Jerome Walczak Subject: Re: [Wlug] FW: MN-130? That depends on how you characterize "easier to work with"... If you mean - easier to install - you might want to try ubuntu linux (http://ubuntulinux.org). If you mean - easier package management - you might want Gentoo. I have to say that I'm rather biased towards Gentoo - purely because I used it in most of my systems that don't have to be Redhat/Fedora/Suse. (I work for a major software house and our main product is supported on the various Redhat and Suse streams so I have to have some systems running those OSes.) All of my home network servers, and both my home and office desktops are both Gentoo (I'm also currently building a mythtv box - http://mythtv.org - and that's Gentoo also). The biggest thing with Gentoo is that you compile everything - so when a new version of KDE comes out - you compile the whole thing - but you don't actually sit there and run make. The thing that I like the most is that the package management is really good. Everything is designed to pull the source kits (and any patches) directly from the project webpage for a given project. You just tell the install tools that you want to install or upgrade a package and it figures out all of the appropriate dependencies for your system (depending on what you already have installed and some configuration params) then it starts downloading source and building things automagically. Also, since you are building the system up from scratch (there is no gui installer or anything - all command-line) you get to decide exactly what is on your system and exactly how it gets setup. There's about 100 core packages (including kernel source, system logger, cron, etc...) but that doesn't include X or any of those things - which is nice for server installations. I've found that the Fedora installer hides too much for installing servers - for desktops its not really all that clear either. Ubuntu hides everything, but you go into it knowing that and it actually figures out what type of installation its doing (laptop/desktop). I had that on my laptop for a while and it ran really well - there's not much package selection there - its more a pre-canned set of binaries depending on your system type (it even knew to download the gnome battery applet for monitoring my laptop battery). So, now that I've sufficiently confused you... did that help at all? Keep in mind that I wrote this at 2:45A - so it might be a little incoherent and rambling... Let me know whatever questions you have and I'll try to answer them... -Jarred -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.10.2 - Release Date: 4/21/2005