Hello. The following are strictly my opinions from a novice admin perspective. I mean that I have used a form of Unix for years but never set up my own Linux box before. With that said, there are three main choices. Slackware, Debian, and Red Hat. I have no experience at all with Red Hat but have read that various config tools require graphics, so I would stay away from it for now. I fought with Debian for many months and installs but could never get it to work. Either the kernel would crash, the modules would not load, the drivers could not be found, or the base packages were incomplete or missing. Yes I read the instructions and I downloaded everything as I was supposed to. It could not support either my network (cable with dhcp) or CD drives. I gave up in complete frustration. By comparison, Slackware was easy. There are three different distributions of Slack to look at. There is the main version like what you would buy on CD. It is designed for a native Linux system and supports most standard hardware. It now includes a Speakup enabled kernel, the others do not. This is new with 8.0. It is smaller to download. You can either get the ISO images and make your own CDs or if you have a fast connection just get all the packages and install what you need. I found that by just getting the packages and nothing else it would easily fit on one CD. The other is just source code and extras. The con is that it comes with fewer packages. You get basic things like Lynx, ftp, Mutt, Elm, Pine, the kernel sources, and the like but you do not get things that are available in Debian. This is a guess though since I never got to see enough of Debian to tell. Also, Slack uses and odd package format (it is the standard .tgz) which is could for installation (installpkg filename.tgz) but is not widely supported. Red Hat by far has the most out there but Slack supports the rpm format. The others are for standard DOS/Win systems but let you get your feet wet while still being fully working implementations of the Linux OS. One is Zipspeak which worked very well but I am not sure if it would work now (8.0 and on, plus the new Speakup) because Speakup requires use of the proc file system which is not supported by umsdos. It is lacking many things such as program development which is almost necessary to do anything practical. The other is called Loopspk. It uses a loop filesystem but runs from a DOS partition. Basically it stores the complete OS in one huge file. I really like it but it was designed for the 2.2.16 kernel and the only talking kernel I could find was 2.2.13. I had to find an old Zipspeak (7.0 I think) site to get it, and the modules did not work because of the conflicting versions. It comes with the standard tools and I had no problem compiling a few programs with it. That would be my recommendation if you just want to get your feet wet without taking the plunge. I think the minimum space requirement is 180 mb which is a bit big but worth it. Feel free to correct or modify as you see fit. Permission to repost on any other site or mailing list is granted.
