Newbie questions

[Rob Wood]

Hello CLUG, Rob Wood (Woodsey) here. I attended the meeting on 04December (introduced myself as marine engineer), it was great to meet everyone for the first time. I was amazed how helpful and welcoming everyone was, thanks for that. Sorry I had to leave early, but found both presentations very interesting. Rik's site "infohelp" is a fantastic utility.   I probably won't be able to attend again as I have to move to Auckland due to my girlfriends job, but before I go, would you guys mind if I ask a few questions?   Well I'll ask them anyway.   I have tried several Linux distributions in the past couple of years and got to various stages of success. My most successful was with Mandrake 9 with which I actually got online and managed to print something. That was just before coming to New Zealand from the UK. I still consider myself a raw beginner so I am going back to basics.   I presently have Smoothwall 2 as a firewall which connects to an ADSL router. Since receiving e-mails from the group, I have heard talk of IPCop. Is this a similar thing? Is it better or worse? On Smoothwall, I can't get the DMZ pinhole to work with my server so the server has to connect straight to the router. It's probably my fault but would IPCop do this better?   I have Ubuntu on my laptop (kindly given out at the meeting), dual booting with WinXP but it doesn't like my laptop pnp BIOS and only boots every other time with lots of fatal error messages. I can't find a way to disable the pnp BIOS. Is there any other workaroud?   Can anyone reccomend a distro well suited for use on a home run web server to run Apache2. My hardware is primitive so I envisage a small distribution without any "whistles and bells" I'm running on Win2000 at present but I'm not happy with it.   I downloaded Xfree window package for my experimental/learning linux box (486 with TINY Linux) and have a file that looks like a zip file under windows but has the name XTinyBin.tar What do I do with this now? (polite answers only please)   Any help with these questions would be welcome.   Cheers ~ Woodsey       --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.802 / Virus Database: 545 - Release Date: 26/11/2004