[Nottingham] Best distribution with apt for a newbie?

[Steve Caddy]

> Redhat's RHN access is around £25-35 a year and you
> can move entitlements from one machine to another, so
> why not cough up a little money to support a good
> distro?

Can't say I've ever paid for RHN - just used the free stuff, and it's
always served me well. But then I guess I'm not frightened to go hunting
for RPMs myself, and installing them at the command line. Only had two
horrible moments, once with xmmsm when the redhat version wouldn't play
mp3s - I had to patch that myself (downloaded a new mp3 plugin), and
secondly installing ircii - which had a seemingly endless string of
dependancies, including ncurses, etc.

My redhat box is down at the moment - hardware fault that I haven't got
round to fixing yet - ok, the cooling fan in the PSU has packed up. RH9
has probably been the best for install and maintenance to date. Sad to
see the RH line go really... I'm not sure I want to upgrade to Fedora.
It's a DOS to Win95 sort of epoch in my mind.

Steve

--
Steven M Caddy, MEng -----------------------------------------------------
"Hardware - the part of the computer you kick when the software fails"
Email: steve.m.caddy at ntlworld.com