I guess I have more times than others to answer some questions today. It's all between office, home, and visitng my friends. There is no way to change to debian without major problems IMO besides reinstalling the OS. I do not want to make you change your mind about the distribution you use. The reason I mentioned it is my recent experience with both, Redhat and Debian where the second one turned out to be easier to maintain and install on different systems I manage. The way I upgrade the systems is using a second disk drive where I backup critical files first, then reinstall everything in OS section. Since my home is always on a separate partition it's not hard to completely replace the OS and preserve important files. Second drive is only as precautionary measure which so far was never needed for recovery but you never know. Redhat made a big mistake with major differences between 7.0 and 7.1 where the upgrade was impossible. Another reason is that in order to quickly download necessary security updates, Redhat charges $60 per system per year which is too much IMO when the alternative is free. I do not mind paying something for the software but there are limits. Debian has it's own funny ways of doing things and until you learn about it, you might have problems and frustrations. Some hardware is hard to get supported sometimes. That's one of the reasons I paid little attention to it until recent new release 3.0 aka woody. I don't want to start another distribution war, it's just my opinions since you asked. On Sun, Aug 11, 2002 at 06:44:28PM -0500, John J. Boyer wrote: > Rafael, > You seem to be the answer guy today. In your reply to my questions about > changing to ext3 you said that Debian had much better packaging than > Redhat. I have Redhat 7.1, with a bit of 7.2. How would I change to Debian > with a minimum of pain? > Thanks. > John > > > -- > Computers to Help People, Inc. > http://www.chpi.org > 825 East Johnson; Madison, WI 53703 > -- Rafael