distro shopping

[awesome-dave1 at juno.com]

Hello,
    Due to the fact that i'm loosing my distro, rh9, that i've used since
the 6.1 days, i'm out distro shopping. A user suggested i check out
Debian, another suggested Slackware.
Now before i continue let me say that starting a distro flame war is not
what this posting is about. I am looking for practical and objective user
experiences and comparisons between the distros so i can make a choice as
to which one will most effectively fofill the role i'm going to put it
in, again no flaming please.
In terms of distributions as i've said i've used redhat since the 6.1
days, i'm not to impressed with fedora from what i've seen thus far and
yes i did eval it, i'm also not satisfied with the fact that there will
be no guarantee of compatibility between fedora versions. Finally, i am
very angry at comments i read on the net that the rh CEO made in
referenct to home linux users, so that's my reasons on that.
	Suse and Mandrake, i've not been able to get either of them to install,
i believe they both use rpm so that would make migration easier for me.
But from what i've read they're both heavily graphical both during
install and post install configuration, i'm not much in to that, i have
specific requirements, see below. So, at the moment those distros are not
on the front burner, I don't rule them out, but unless someone can offer
some major help in making them work i probably won't go with either.
	Slackware i've used previously, but it was more in the 3.4/4.0/7.0 days,
i haven't messed with it in quite some time and what i did do was more
fun than actual task oriented stuff, so that one is an option.
	Debian i've never used, i've however downloaded all 7 of the 3.0r1
rom's, in case i am able to get that one going.
I've got a box to put the distros on, for evaluation purposes, a 400 mhz
p2 machine with 192 mb of ram. I do
have some special requirements however, the first is that installation
over
a serial port be possible or some form of unattended installation, as
this
box does not have a monitor on it and getting one for it is not
practical. One thing i like about redhat is that i could install via
network telnet that was quite nice, as was the fact that i could point
the installer at an nfs server and as long as that server had the isos on
it, the install was fast and very easy, this would be a great feature if
another distro had. I
don't need a GUI, I'm going to be using this for local/network
printserving.
I'd like to use cups for this, so i'd like a distro that has cups as it's
default spooler, for i've found that replacing a default spooling system
leads to weird compatibility issues. My printer is an hp5550, and i'd
like to use
samba to share it among the network. If anyone can help with any of this
please let me know.
	The above observations on the various distributions are my opinions
alone, and i obtained them via research in to the various distros. Again,
no flames please.
Thanks.
Dave.
 

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