My experience with Linux has been with installing Mandrake 7.X and 8.X which went very well, but that was for standalone PCs. I have never tried to install a non-GUI Linux distribution nor use Linux in a network. Now I need to install a non-GUI distribution on an older pentium class PC to provide a firewall and VPN gateway that can be web managed. So far I've tried SmoothWall 0.9.9-se which fails to install with the NICs I've tried. I'm looking for some suggestions, or referals to reviews, regarding these types of Linux distributions. I'd like to try some alternative distributions which are easy to install and configure and which provide a high level of performance, stability, and security.

Of particular concern, I need a distribution which will allow either automatic detection or manual selection of my NIC, a D-Link DFE-570TX 4-port NIC (uses Intel/Digital 21143 Tulip chips), and which will successfully install the drivers for this NIC.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Scott

well, there are so many to choose from... i use redhat (non-GUI install) on older machines and it has everything you need for networking - my router/server is running DHCP server, Telnet server (internal only), samba/file server, ftp and email server, firewall and IPSec VPN server. if you choose custum install, you can select not to install what you don't need

vpn info - http://www.freeswan.org/
and http://jixen.tripod.com/

Thanks. I may try redhat, but wonder how much I need to know about Linux to configure the firewall and gateway. I thought with my lack of experience and time, I'd be better of with a distribution which is, shall we say, fairly automated on the install and web managed thereafter. I love the web management aspect since it looks like it would be pretty easy to configure everything from a PC on my network. Does redhat have such a distribution?

maybe you don't really understand what constitutes a distribution. what your after is within the scope of any standard distro that youd care to name really.
i would suggest installing an ssh server on the box, and configuring it over that, not a web interface, i don't really see the need. and if you allow X forwarding over ssh then you can locally use a GUI to a program actually running on the machine. The fact that you don't want to run X on it there isn't hugely relevant i don't think. if you use a simple firewall / gateway GUI like Firestarter, which uses gnome, you can log into the server, run the application and have it pop up on your machine (assuming you're on linux) and it'll work fine. alternatively you *might* want to use a system like webmin which does produce a webpage.. but i really don't see the point.