choosing a distro and version

[Raul A. Gallegos]

Hi there.  You can be sure we don't get tired of new list members.  At
least I don't.  Anyway, as to your question on which distro to start off
with my approach was like this:

Slackware, Debian, Redhat, in that order.  With Slackware I had to do
the most configuring to personalize it.  I like it though and can learn
the best that way so that is why I went that route.  Debian was my
second style of distro to learn and it has an awesome package manager
called apt which to me is the best so far compared to all the other
distros.  Redhat is widely used and is very good as well and does do a
lot of nice things for you and can be very easy for the newby.  Again,
depending on how you like to learn and how you like things being done
automatically will make a difference on which one you go with first.

Your ideas on partitioning the hard drives are pretty good.  If you have
2 physical drives what I would suggest is the following:

/dev/hda 2.0 gig
/dev/hda1 swap 256 mbytes
/dev/hda2 root 1.5 gbytes
/dev/hda3 /var remaining mbytes

/dev/hdb 1.66 gig
/dev/hdb1 /home

But again, depending on what you want to do it may vary.

I have a linux server with 2 nics in it.  eth0 the outside nic is the
one that has the outside Internet connection.  My dsl in this case.
eth1 is the inside one and I have a dhcp server on this so that I can
plug in my laptop which I use at work and at home without having to
change network settings.  I also have 2 other computers inside the
network as well as my girlfriend's windows box.  All of them are on the
private network with no need for firewalling software since I use
iptables on the server itself.

Hope all this helps and if you do have questions feel free to write me.

-- 
If you are good, you will be assigned all the work.  If you are real
good, you will get out of it.
Raul A. Gallegos - http://www.asmodean.net