Hi Dennis
Just to add to comments made else where - Whilst you'd think there isn't much to choose from between various distros, there are several subtle variations..
Red Hat often use bleeding edge sources and leave the end user to do the bleeding. The compiler shipped with 7.x series (labelled as 2.96, even though the GCC group never released one), is one best avoided. Having just done a RH8.0 install, I find a program compiled with gcc-3.2 produces an serious error when an attempt is made to execute it - Unresolved symbol __dso_handle errors are well documented, yet RH appears to have included the "bug". Mandrake follow in the footsteps of RH, so most problems are likely in their offering.
SuSE tend to be a little more conservative in their choice of stable or beta sources - I've found the installs I've done with SuSE to be reasonably stable.
Debian - If you want stable and reliable packages, this would be the one to go for IF you can get to grips with the apt-wot-nots. You do at least, get the choice of installing stable or unstable packages (unlike RH).
For optimised installs, you can't go far wrong with Linux From Scratch or Gentoo - Both involve a fair bit of work on your part, and probably not suited to the newbie.
There are a number of other distros available - Conectiva, Caldera, Slackware, jsut do a quick search and you'll get hundreds. One I fancy trying is the Beowolf distro (if only I had enough machines to make it worthwhile).
Regards, Paul.
On Wednesday 04 Dec 2002 9:11 pm, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Unneeded service installations aside, should there really be that much difference between different distributions anyway.