Hi everybody !

I'm thinking of buying an old box for use as a small, personal server for FTP, Apache, mail, etc. I've been using Slackware for some time, but it seems to me (I may be wrong) that Slack's way too big for the job. I just need a few services available and to be able to connect to it via ssh, so I don't need X and KDE/Gnome...

So I was thinking : maybe there's a distro more "appropriate" to the task ? Or is Slack ok ? Heck, would *BSD do a better job ?

I'm venturing in a whole new world here so I need some advice. Thanks.

I like TSL
http://www.trustix.org/

SolarBear, if you are comfortable with slack, then stick to that for now. When you load slack, just install only the apps that you will need. This can be done with any distro that you use. As far as BSD goes, there will be a learning curve, just as there is with linux. Pick one, learn it, and then you can move on to some other distro.

Personally I would stick with Slackware. Just choose not to install most of the packages that come with Slackware and install the packages you need manually so that they are all the lastet versions. I use Slackware but do not install any of the applications I need (I.E. apache, sendmail, ssh, php, and others) then once the install is complete I install the very latest Sendmail, apache, php, and perl from there respected web sites.