What should I use for a console-mostly linux box?

[davolfman]

I have a Pentium 90 with 32meg of RAM, a 2-gig harddrive, a 3Com 3c905b nic, and a video card from Number9 using an S3Trio64 chip. I am going to install linux on it, for mostly telnet-in console use and I was hoping for some suggestions. I was thinking about Slack because I like it's scalability, what I don't like is that it is not as recently updated as the Mandrake 7.2 install tree I just finished downloading. Also I am wary of the complexity that the Slack install may have since so-far the most lowlevel install I have done was for Mandrake 6.0. I would already have tried to install a slimmed-down Mandrake but the network install program freezes just after it finds the exported install tree (see my topic in Tech-support or software-related). I want to know if I would have the same problem with Slack.

PS. The reason I need to install over a network is this computer doesn't have a CD-ROM drive and I find swapping them between computers incredibly inconvenient when I should be able to just acess it over the network.

[RageAHolic]

If you are worried about how current the packages are...install Debian or one of its derivatives and use apt-get upgrade to get all of your installed packages up-to-date. I don't recommend dist-upgrading to Woody unless you are just fooling around with it...or if you need something stable. Woody is still considered unstable.

If you are considering Slack or Mandrake...I'd go with Slack. I've never done a network install of Slack so I can't really anticipate any problems.

Also, I'd recommend that you not use Telnet and instead use SSH...unless you want someone to sniff your username and password as a result of Telnet's lack of encryptiion.



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...your friendly neighborhood RageAHolic (http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/RageAHolic/index.html)

Rage fueled by: AMD Athlon

[davolfman]

This would be in a high school that is security paranoid, I don't think I have to worry about packet sniffing. Besides, the only ones who would know enough to do much will probably be given the root password anyway, my intent is to give them something to compile on if they want to learn to program for linux. It's going to be hard enough to convince them to give us access to telnet. The kids here just concentrate on getting the CMOS startup passwords compromised so they can actually reboot and get some work done when the security program causes the computer to crash.