K, I have RH9 installed, got it installed last night and I was trying to change the resolution. Anyways i selected the wrong monintor and now I cannot get anything in X to show up on my monitor. I am thinking about reinstalling RH9, but was wondering if Debian would be a better solution? thanks for your opinion.

k, well i got the resolution to work. Did you guys know that a Generic 17" laptop monitor and a Generic 17" monitor are not the same??? I need to learn to read. Anyways, going to stick with RH9 for a while, but was still wondering if Debian was a better choice or not

I really have enjoyed RedHat 7, 8, and 9 but I have to confess I have not tried Debian. Frankly, as a noob, I have found Redhats support to be fantastic and extremely well documented. I use redhat as my home server and one of my servers at work. I use Apache at home and Postgres, Samba, and SSH at work. All these work great on Redhat and install easily. I know a guy at school swears by Debian because he is a 'guru' and another likes Mandrake because he is a GUI/Windows type. I recommend you try Redhat again but do some Googling to see if you find more support for Debian or Mandrake. Mandrake is well supported also and has nice Xwindows. Redhat just seems to really have their act together and updates are painless with the Red Hat Network. But the only reason I know this is because I have tried 4 different Linux flavors (not Debian though). Maybe give both a shot.

It depends all on the user. There are people that try debian and love it (like myself), and there are people that can't stand it. For now, I'd suggest doing what you're doing and use RH to get to know linux better. If for no other reason, it will help you with debian when you decide to try it out. Debian isn't necessarily harder to install, or a better system, it's just different. For my tastes, it's a good fit.

My suggestion to anyone that wants to explore distros is to keep the one that works for you, then install the new one(s) on another partition. This will make things easier, because linux configuration differences are often just skin deep. If you have your other distro to compare with the new one, it can take a lot of frustration out of the process.

For example, setting up X may be flawless with one distro, but doesn't seem to work with a second. All you'd have to do if you have another distro to compare it with, is edit your XF86Config to match the one that works. This, of course, works in both directions as well. Plus, if one doesn't install, you don't have to go through the process of reinstalling the other over again.

RedHat Rocks

Debian for sure but not a woody try sarge.

Thanks for your input. I am starting to get the hang of RH9, well atleast what I consider to be getting the hang of after only 2 days.

I got my GAIM, MPlayer and CD burning software all setup the way I like it. I had my Windows HD mounted in linux and was ready to go, now that I have completly Whiped the windows drive I am ready to get down and dirty with linux. I am going to try RH9 till I am good with it and then I might switch to debian.

Thanks again for your input.