[Nottingham] distro chance

[Roger Light]

Danny,

> Ive been thinking about a distro chance (currently using mandrake). 

[snip]
 
> Debian is a maybe (apt-get is handy) and ive had a little experience with 
> it....but im worried it will be over my head when i need to fix 
> something...or set something up.

[snip]
 
> im not too keen on RH but maybe someone will warm me up to it with their 
> words :)

It really boils down to what you want to achieve by changing distributions. Is there something you don't like about Mandrake (if it ain't broke, don't fix it), or do you just want to experiment?

I have nothing against RedHat (you'll be meaning Fedora now of course), but Mandrake is (or at least used to be!) very similar to it, so I doubt you'd get that much out of it. Going for Debian, as you say, would probably be a bit more of a challenge, but you are going to learn more. You don't have to set everything up at once - as long as you can get graphics, keyboard and networking working then you can search the web for help and if that doesn't work then ask here.

If you wanted to go even more extreme, you could try Linux From Scratch - building your own system completely from scratch and only installing what you want. I don't think I'd recommend it though.

Personally, I'd take a look at Gentoo. It's certainly my favourite, although it'd possibly be even better with precompiled binaries as well. You do have to do all of the installation yourself, instead of having some graphical utility to help you, but the installation guide is excellent. It will take a while (everything is compiled from source unless you download the second CD) but you will learn a lot. Not recommended unless you have a broadband connection!

Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong anybody! :)

Cheers,

Roger

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