Hi, at the moment i run my home server on mandrake because i heard it was really easy to set up, and using it as a desktop is great but it just doesnt like being a server.

My server is only a 450 p3 with 640mb of mem but it works fairly well.

But what i want to do is to change from mandrake, its not really designed for what i use it for, so i was then looking through the lq iso's and saw that slackware and suse are both popular and designed to be used as servers but i was wondering which to go for.
They both appear to have their pro's and cons.

Any advice would be great. Thankyou

Mandrake should be fine as a file/print/gateway server (which is what I guess you are using it for). When you say "...it just doesnt like being a server" what do you mean? If it seems slow, try removing all the gui options - you don't need a gui on a server (are you listening Microsoft? )

If you really need to go with a different distro, SuSE will be equally as slow as Mandrake and Slackware (while fast) will take a lot of setting up.

Personally, I think you (and maybe we) would learn more from trying to improve your current set up - so what problems are you having?

its a bit sluggish.
i use it for file, print, webserver, and mysql

It doesnt appear to let go of memory, when its just booted up and is sitting there its only using bout 100mb of mem but now its been running for about 5hours its using nearly 300 - 400mb of mem, and i dont have a lot of it to start with, and thats before i start running any vnc sessions. i was thinking of turning off the gui things cos i only really use webmin and telnet to adjust the settings etc

Its also got a weird habbit of just hanging, it dissapears of the network and i have to go and press the reset button but i cant find anything in the logs which says whats wrong.

Sounds like you have unnecessary services running. Open a console and run top and see what is running. If you have a gui, close it down, using the termnal only is all you need for a server. What sort of security do you have on the box? If it's connected to the internet you'll need firewalling and an IDS. Head over to the Security forum and read up on the links posted by Unspawn.

i have the security set to the minimal settings because i find it does funny things to remote access and file sharing etc.

I have a firewall in my router which is set to air tight apart from the webserver port coming in.

I think im going to give slackware a try on a spare hdd and see what its like.

Only thing which worrys me about it is it doesnt support rpm packages but im sure i'll be able to install webmin on it

Rpms are supported by Slackware. You also have the rpm2tgz converter to turn rpms into tgz files.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... they dont make that obvious on the website, thanks :-D

The rpm package still says "unsupported" when you see it in the install - but it's said that for a while AFAIK and I don't think anyone has had problems with it.

thanks for that, i'll download it tonight and give it a try at some point

I use Slackware and you have to realise that not all rpms will work on Slackware and there are very few GUI tools to configure your system, so you got to be comfortable with editing configuration files manually if you want to run Slack.

That sounds ok, im pretty happy with doing that. I've ordered a new network card for my comp so that linux will dhcp it to my router which will save me about an hour trying to get it to work.

Thanks for all your help