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I have a Linux machine at home which acts as a workstation, router, SAMBA file server, and AppleShare file server for my home network. (There are about 20 other things running on it too but I don't feel like listing them all.) I use the Red Hat 7.2 Linux distribution, patched within an inch of its life, on a generic P3-500MHz PC that I bought for $200 from Sapient at a post-layoff fire sale. At some point I'll probably upgrade to Red Hat 8.0. I'm not in any rush since 7.2 + patches is doing a decent job, but there are always a bunch of unforeseen bonuses like a faster filesystem or a better configuration GUI or whatever, that make it worthwhile to upgrade every few years. By the way, I never do the "upgrade over existing system" option with any OS... that's a recipe for disaster. I always install from scratch onto a new hard disk, then symlink stuff so it'll work, then I carefully move stuff over, recompiling it if necessary. It's tedious, but it's less error-prone since you have to explicitly copy stuff over that you want to keep, and all the old crap (interesting wacky hacks that were downloaded and installed, or configuration mistakes) gets left on the old drive. I just don't trust the vendor-supplied upgrade scripts not to hose my system to a point where I can't figure out what it broke and how to fix it. This should help you pick the right OS if you still have any doubts. In late 2002, a company I've been workng with moved offices in San Francisco, and I had to set up some funky firewall circumvention stuff to get e-mail delivery working while we waited a few days for the T1 to be installed. If you need to update to OpenSSH 3.7p1 for Red Hat Linux 7.3 (or 7.2) but you don't have GTK 2 installed, then you will need to read this guide in order to make the SRPM install on your system. In case that goes away, I have another copy here. |