Well...I'm not giving up. Maybe it's just mandrake 8.0 that isn't worth a damn...I don't know, but something is missing. So...I need some opinions on what flavor of linux to get. I used to be able to network linux with no problems. My 7.2 disks don't work any more...Can you guys give me some ideas. thanks in advance.
It works good enough though to get my cert, but it seems too unstable to run for a network and there are virtually no howtos out there for it.

well, I'm currently using a modified Mandrake 9.1 so I'd download the iso's for it and give that a shot. Should work fine.

I personally like the RedHat flavor. I tried mandrake 9.1...and...i had some troubles networking, and the realtek drivers were glitchy. I switched to redhat and aside from probing the drivers for my card, everything else has been ok. Works seamlessly with my Mac OS X machine, and...a slight ammount of tweaking samba and iptables to enable file-sharing. My windo$e XP worked great with it. 98 was a little trippy, but did a good map using IP address. I loved the linux so much...i am looking at buying an older P3 with 256mb RAM, and a 10GB hard drive, and then add a 200 GB HDD and a tape drive to use as network storage for my 3 machines .

daemon

DBear, if you have the bandwidth, and the time and inclination, I would download a number of different distros and give them all a try! Really! It's one thing taking people's advice on 'well, this is a good, friendly distro', it's another thing entirely trying them and coming to your own decision!

For newbieness, I would suggest getting Mandrake and possible SuSE (if you feel like installing over ftp). If you want more of a challenge, then try Slackware or Debian, or Gentoo. If you're likely to be using Linux in conjunction with your work, then you might want to familiarise yourself with RedHat since it is the favourite.