Hi, Teddy. First, off I'll state that the word distribution is a fancy name for brand. There are many distributions or brands of Linux such as Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Debian, Turbolinux, Pclinux, etc. The differences often come down to personal likes and dislikes. Distributions such as Mandrake, Red Hat, and debian have a lot of Linux packages, and personally I find that good, because you can often find what you need either on the cd or on an expantion cd for thos distributions. Mandrake and Red Hat use rpm while Slackware uses tgz packages, and Debian uses dpkg packages. Anyway, the point is each distribution attempts to be unique by using a different package manager, installer, different selection of packages, , and so on. Which distribution someone likes usually comes down to personal preference, because it is all Linux. As for kernel upgrades and such every distribution usually has an updates page on their site where you can get up dated kernels, or buying a newer version of that distribution will get you the kernel updates. For example Mandrake 8.1 shipped with kernel version 2.4.8, and 8.2 ships with 2.4.18-6. Red Hat 7.2 shipped with kernel 2.4.7-10 and I believe Red Hat 7.3 ships with kernel version 2.4.18-4.
