Having nuked my Mandrake the other day trying to install Debian from floppy (bah humbug cfdisk), I'm impatient to get _something_ working.

I could get Progeny, and hence a nice installer, for £10 plus postage. Or I could get the first official non-US for just postage, or all 6 official non-US for £10. Not being so bothered about source I won't read anyway, I'm cool on the last option, but it does have two extra CDs of 'stuff'.

Anyone got opinions of which of these is the best bang for buck? Is the Progeny installer worth the CD it's burnt on? Do the extra 2 CDs have worth while stuff on them?

If I can get away with it, it'd be neat to get the single CD and use alien to install lots of packages from my Mandrake CDs. How good is alien? It sounds quite promising actually, but do packages built with it update all the right dbs?

Oh and of course, if anyone is willing to post or pop round CDs to Norwich, I'd be grateful. Can't make this meeting 'cause I'm in Holland, and I want something done before the next one so I can start setting up OpenGL again.

Alexis