Knoppix, not ready for prime time. Yeah, it boots from CDROM but it's gawd-awful slow when doing it. This is not unexpected but it still sucks. That and it seemed to hang during basic stuff.

Debian, nice but still too geeky. The installer didn't do as thorough a job as one might like. Having it forget how to speak to the on-board Adaptec SCSI drive it just booted from was tedious, at best. Shades of NT3.51!

RedHat wins again. The installer for 9.0 worked like a champ. It found everything and did a very thorough job of presenting options and installing them. Time will tell if it's still as bad as 7.x was for dealing with .rpm foolishness.

The only trouble I'm having is the on-board ATI Mach64 VT chipset seems to trip up X. Trying to configure it for 800x600 in thousands of colors causes a hard reset. It just zoinks right out of X and straight back to a cold reboot, as if the reset switch itself was used. Googling as yet to produce a definitive answer.

It's an ancient Dell 2200 P3/333 dualie so it's not like I didn't expect something to go wrong. But it's been a tireless workhorse for SMB and HTTP service so it's not like I feel the need to put it out to pasture yet. If I can't get the on-board video to behave then I can always use a PCI card.

If anyone's got a tip on proper RH9 configs for this machine/card let me know.