I was just wondering whic distribution has the biggest package repositories, I know Debian and it's .deb based distros have the biggest and more detailed repositories but when it comes to .rpm based distribution which has the biggest repositories?

It could be SUSE, Fedora, Mandrake, or any other?

ever thought that quality was more important than quantity?? i think debian does tip the scales, but Gentoo's Portage is also pretty vast compared to most RPM based distros

Is gentoo rpm or deb based, and its is free to download? and more important, is it compatible with the most hardware?

gentoo is a source based distro. Fedora is probably ok if you're looking for a lot of different rpms and I hear it works on most common hardware. You could also checkout PLD Linux. They are very active with rpms.

no gentoo is not rpm or deb based. yes it is free, and yes as with most modern distros it is very hardware compatable.

gentoo has 2 drawbacks.

1. can take days to install, or it could at one point in time.

2. it is not newbie friendly and you sound newer to linux then i am, and i am staying away from gentoo until i know more about linux.

of the rpm and deb based i would sugest Ubuntu for deb based and SuSe for rpm based.

When installing from source on gentoo, do my programs automatically find their place in the applications menu like when installing .rpm or .deb programs or i have to run them from the terminal?

And I've been hearing good things about FreeBSD, but also the same question, since freebsd ports are on source, do they put thmselves automatically on the menu or I have to use the terminal?

And when trying fedora 3 and 4 it takes a eternity to complete load itself, i'm talking about 10-15 minutes, is this a normal issue or I'm the only one with this problem

if an ebuild contains files to go into the menus then they will, if they don't they won;t... same as any package really. most do.

BSD... well, I wouldn't expect you to really enjoy the experience, things aren't as feature rich under BSD in many areas. Nothign wrong with it at all though.

i'm sure you're not the only one, but having given us no useful information about what it's hanging on etc... we can't really help.

at the beginning it starts right, then after the "Activating swap" it takes forever to enter to the login screen and after that, a long time to load the desktop either gnome, kde or xfce, all of them take long to start.
Is it related to "smartd" because when loading the OS and gets to the loading smartd in the gray screen with the progress bar it says failed

When it comes to rpm based distros, I think Mandriva has the largest number of packages available followed by Suse. Fedora Core relies heavily on third party packagers. On FreeBSD, most programs will put themeselves automatically in the menu, but I have noticed that a few don't. Building large packages like java and openoffice.org can take a long time and lots of disk space so you have to be really patient. I tend to upgrade my packages when I am going to bed or working nights so that its all done in the morning. The good thing about running FreeBSD ports is that they tend to have the latest packages before binaries are available for most Linux distros.