Its been a long time since my last attempt to try Linux because of all the problems i faced and i gave up :-(
Now its summer and i have a lot of free time so i decided to give it another try!

I have a connexant HSF modem and now to get drivers for the latest kernels i have to pay for them. So i decided to install my old Red Hat 9 distro which i have the 56k free drivers and i had it working before.

What i want to do is to install Red Hat 9 but with the latest Gnome or KDE enviroment. Is that possible? If it is can someone tell me how to do it! Do i install KDE or Gnome from my RH9 cds and then upgrade somehow or do i install only a text based enviroment and i install Gnome and KDE afterwards?

I downloaded the latest firefox packages and openoffice to be up to date.

To summarize what i want to do is to keep the old RH9 Kernel on my system that i know the drivers work with but install the latest versions of all other programs!

Thanks for your help in advance!!!

You would be better off getting yourself a copy of Fedora Core 3 (or Fedora Core 4 which comes out on the 6th of June). Redhat 9 and below were discontinued by Redhat a long time ago and don't recieve any official upgrades anymore. Fedora Core and Redhat Enterprise Linux are the two products that replaced the old Redhat Linux. The time and effort you would spend trying to install the latest packages on such an old distro would be phenomenal, so its better to get Fedora and just do a clean install.