Suggestion for a distro
 

Hi,
I have a PIII 600MHz computer which i am currently using as a router/firewall for home network. It has ClarkConnect home edition on it currently. I would like to use the pc to watch movies on tv ( it has a nvidia tv out card). I need a distro which has the following -
Can be used as a router/firewall -- features similar to off the shelf linksys or dlink router.
Has a gui/web based based administration tool (critical) to primarily administer the firewall and optionally to control services on the computer and to start/stop the computer --> can webmin be used for this??
can easily install KDE/Gnome and Mplayer/xine on it and that it integrates fine.
should be able to use the tv out feature on the nvidia card.
Is not too hard to install/administer/update -- would like my friends who primarily use windows to be able to do it too. Also would not like to compile lot of packages to get going.
Once setup i would only update kde/gnome/mplayer/xine if new versions are available. All the router related stuff and kernel would not be updated unless for bugfixes or security related updates.

I have used ClarkConnect/fedora (this might be bad combo but i wanted to have the latest mplayer/xine on the system) with their new Xorg packages. I am not able to setup tv out properly on the system and xine/mplayer crash the system. I suspect it is primarily to do with the new Xorg packages. Also i am not too enthusiastic about mixing packages from clarkconnect and fedora. so i am looking to change distro. Can somebody please suggest something along those lines. Thanks a lot.

Try Mandrake, but if its sluggish, Slackware would get a ticket for speeding on that machine :D. Slack isnt easy to use, though, so Debian might do the trick. Still, try Mandrake first, because AFAIK, it has what you want.

Does mandrake have something like internet connection sharing which is easy to set up like clarkconnect/smoothwall? Can you point me to any links on how to setup router/firewall on mandrake?

I dont know any links, but mandrake has a control center which guifies that tash called drakconf. It should help.

Mandrake does have a fairly easy NAT setup (you can even set it up with your mouse, if you want) and a firewall too. If you want a good doc, get the Mandrake handbook (its available from the contrib tree on any Mandrake mirror). Its quite comprehensive. Set up your sources with Easyurpmi and don't look back. Two good things that keep Mandrake on my system as the "working" distro are Mandrake Control Center and urpmi, which makes rpms tolerable. You can also administer your system with Webmin as well. The hooks are good. You can make your system more responsive, of course, by turning off services like the new hardware detector and changing your display manager to XDM, just like with oter distros.

Slackware is a nice, responsive choice too, but it'll rquire more worl to get things configured.