Hello again,

I'm reasonably competent with M$ windows and TCP/IP Networking, but have only scratched the surface with Linux.

I have tried & installed various versions with some success with older distros like Mandrake 8.2 however I would like to look into the serious use of a Linux Box, mostly for some desktop application stuff (An earlier PII System) and I wonder if Red Hat is considered more stable and relatively user friendly?

I would like some proposals on which older version of RH Might be more suitable on an older (64+Mb RAM, 3-8 GB HD) system? I would not intend to install every application available on the distro to keep demands on the processor low, but would like to use USB ports without to many problems. Your thoughts would be appreciated gents - and ladies!

Jim

both of these will likely be a bit heavy for an older box, if your willing to deal with an even steeper learning curve i suggest trying out slackware, or possibly gentoo, depending on your skills so far gentoo may not be the way to go it is not easy for a newbie to install but once its up and going i have never found an easier distro, package management is simple, no dependency issues, searching for software is simple and everything is compiled to take advantage of your system, something thats becoming much less of a big deal lately but may be good for your older systems, i have personally not liked redhat so if you only want advice between those two i would say go mandrake but for my opinion in general i say slackware

Thank you,
So are your opnions here about the CURRENT RH/Mandrake versions?
I ask because I am really asking, about looking for what might be *Lighter* (older) versions of RH & Mandrake in comparison?

Thanks again.

Jim.

they are about *somewhat* older versions i havent tried the newer versions of each and probably never will, redhat and mandrake come bundled with all sorts of extra stuff that most people dont want and run daemons and background programs which most people will never use because some newbies will and dont necessarily want to install the stuff on their own being the nature of a newbie, but if your just using it on an old box you probably wont want it with all those extra things, therefore i recommend slackware, i started with mandrake but it did me no good, it taught me NOTHING until i moved to slackware which taught me a great deal, and you can have much newer and more up to date programs working on a box with less overall bloat sorry for putting all my ideas into one big sentence im kinda tired right now...oh and did i mention that i just really dont like the feel of redhat

also there are many threads discussing different distros try a search i should have mentioned that in my first reply there you will get opinions on mandrake, redhat, and many other flavors