I thought I would input my couple of pence worth to this discussion. I am very much a Linux newbie but I am not exactly an idiot when it comes to computers. I have been using computers for 10 years going back to my humble XT. I have recently installed RH5.1, SuSE 5.3 and Deb 2.0 and I would like to comment a bit about each of them. 1stly both RH and SuSE made a mess of my hard disk when partitioning causing me to play safe and use partition magic to do the bsiness untill I am confident with Linux
I am using Deb on a Logical partition and a boot manager to dual boot with Win98( I was using NT as it ran a my some of my programs batter than 98). Both RH and SuSE had no problems setting up my lilo.conf to work with this system. Unless I have missed it Deb install dosent do this it only allows for a primary partition to be activated. Needless to say using a floppy to boot and then writing a lil.conf file is no picnic for a newbie luckiy I had a copy of Que Using Linux(far to much RH for my liking) which had a sample conf file which worked with out a hitch. SuSE's Yast informed me half-way through installing packages that the partition was full and I was unable to proceed without re partitioning and re-installing. Now I do not know wether Dselect can do this but it would be nice if it estimated the space needed to install packages and reported any problems. RH ran fine when I got it installed but SuSE kept locking up for periods of 20 sec when it was executing a program. I am using Debian now as a friend recommended it as the most stable. It is a very steep learning curve but I will stick it out and some day I will say goodbye to win/dos for good. Noel