prety soon Im getting the parts to a new computer (hopefully they will work this time) anyways Im thinking that I would like to try another distrobution and I'v narrowed it down to two, either Debian or Gentoo, both of them have awesome package systems with apt-get and emerge but I'm still indecisve.

the advantage of debian is it gives you precompiled packages, whereas gentoo makes you compile all your own stuf once you go beyond the base install CD's (although a cool feature I heard that gentoo had is startup script dependency checking)

I hear to update gentoo you must do "emerge world" that sounds cool and all, but is there any way to update only things that have been found to be a security risk, cause I'm on 56k and I dont want to recompile GNOME every time a new version comes out? or at the very least is there a way to make a list of things i dont want updated?

also, is there an equivelant to "emerge world" in debian?

anyways Im on 56k and the only real access I have to broadband is at LUG meetings and I need to download the distro there.

"also, is there an equivelant to "emerge world" in debian?"

apt-get upgrade

"but is there any way to update only things that have been found to be a security risk"

Debian does this with apt.
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/se...ecurity-update
I haven't spent much time with Gentoo or it's documentation, so I don't know if they would have something similar in place.

"or at the very least is there a way to make a list of things i dont want updated?"

I know you can with apt, so I'm sure you can with portage as well.
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ap....en.html#s-pin

There is also a distro called Arch Linux which is like Gentoo, only it uses pre-compiled i686 binaries instead of compiling from source. Might want to look at it before making your choice.