i have the following distros-

red hat 7.3
suse 8
mandrake 8.2
slackware 8.0
turbolinux 7

the big question-which one do i install and use on my computer? any suggestions

of course i am gonna pick slackware 8.0, cause i use it and prefer it. out of all of those, you will learn the most with slack.

your going to get so many different responses though. what specifically are you using linux for is what i ask ? that will help us help you. if you want to learn the insides of it, getting your hands dirty, don't want too many gui interfaces to help you configure, then definitly go with slack.
if you want something easy to use, newbie friendly and don't care how it works, mandrake then.
suse and redhat i would say are the inbetween distro's to go with.
turbolinux if you are setting up a server and not going to run X. that is all i ever thought about turbo and that is their main focus as well, the server market.

thanks, i sort of figured the same thing about the distros, though i did not know that turbolinux was used basically for the server market.i had turbo on my computer for a couple of days, there was a lot i liked about it.guess turbo is the largest distro in japan, china, and korea, and one of the biggest distros. got to have some pluses to accomplish that.

i was going to go back to slack , kind of waiting for 8.1 to come out, was thinking it would be out by now.any idea when we might see 8.1.when i had slack 8 intalled , i did get opera installed, it was a nice feeling to get that done.my first tarball install.i was excited..

later-

Linux Forever-

What is so good in slack that all guruz recomend it for servers (second to freebsd)?

Slackware is as good as you make it - the reason why people recommend it is because they enjoy configuring things by hand, and so it is inevitable that one knows exactly what is going on in one's system.

I'm a recent Red Hat convert after becoming disillusioned with some of the Debian organisation (the distro itself is great though). FWIW, a port probe on http://www.grc.com reveals that all ports are hidden on a default Red Hat 7.3 installation, whereas on a default Debian Potato -> Woody upgrade, the SMTP is open. Linux is as secure as you make it.

I'm pretty pleased with Red Hat 7.3 overall, although I'm tempted to look for some non-RH package management tools, because RHN is a pain if you're on a dialup.

Slackware is great if you have less than three or four machines to look after. After that, I think the admin overhead is way way too high. For production systems, I use the Debian "unstable" tree.

In my experience apt provides the best homogenous package management system.