Everyone tells you it is easy to install and maintain Linux. It is not, it requires a lot of prior knowledge, and the learning curve is steep. Only once you reach a certain level in Linux education and you understand how the entire system hangs together it becomes easy. The main problem is that if you start learning Linux (and I do not mean installing RH9 from CD) by reading thru guides and howtos, about half of the words in each sentence are meaningless to you. That is a difficult step to make. Once only the words in a sentence that actually describe what you want to know you are learning fast.
Linux is complicated as opposed to Windoze, not in the least because the toolkit you get is an order of magnitude more extended, and all knowledge is available to you. There is not a single day I regret switching to Linux though.
Anyway... after this slightly philosophic intro: I don't know with which kernel Etch came 6 months ago. And I don't know whether dist-upgrade now upgrades your kernel. I was bringing this to your attention because during the dist-upgrade I did 2 months ago and 1 month ago, the kernel upgrade was not mandatory yet. I did it last week (on an AMD-Athlon, hence I used the K7 kernel) and it made a world of difference. One of the main problems is the way old kernels (< 2.6.14) handled devices and hotplugging.
jlinkels