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What do you mean by that, it operates fast enough. Unless you are a true Linux Geek, you dont compile.
I'm a Windows XP/2003 Server user and the thing I like about it is that I dont have to compile.
I dont spend 3 hours waiting for my computer to compile, no, I spend that time doing other things non computer related.

And If you want to start the whole Windows is insecure, I have a $150 (minus what Paypal takes) challenege posted on another forums to hack my Windows XP Computer (Full DMZ on Router to the Computer).

Peekay,

I bet you didn't know what kind of a "discussion" you were starting when you posted your question, did you?

Talking about Linux distributions is worse than discussing religion or politics.

So, since everyone else threw their suggestions in the bucket, I figured I might as well too.

Your best bet would be to try a few and choose whatever you like the best. It's really that simple. The ones you choose to try first should be based on how much time you want to spend learning the OS versus how much time you want to use it.

Back in the day, you really didn't know Linux unless you were using Slackware or Debian. Installing Debian was like a right of passage. Now, with the latest release (Sarge), I've read that it's not nearly as difficult as it once was.

Now the new favorite of L33T H4X0rs everywhere is Gentoo. If you go for a stage 1 build, it's a real pain the butt, which is fine if that's what you want to do. The supposed big advantage is that it's so much faster because it's compiled for your machine. The studies I've read indicated that the performance gains weren't all that significant. You do still get the bragging rights however.

At work, I manage about 100 Red Hat boxes. Personally, I don't care for Red Hat that much, but that's just me. Probably because I hate Gnome (as I hastily put on my flame retardant suit).

At home I've used Red Hat (before I knew better), Mandrake, Libranet, PCLinux OS, and now SuSE 9.2 and 9.3. For the time being, I'm sticking with SuSE. It does what I want it to do, and I like the way it looks.

Really, try a few to get an idea of what you like and what you don't like, and go from there. You might want to check out Distrowatch. It's a great site to learn about what's going on in the Linux world.

Linuxquestions.org is another good place to visit.

As for html editors, those have been pretty well covered in previous posts. I've used Quanta+ on a few occasions, and it worked well for me. Of course, The GIMP is the big choice for graphics.

Good luck to you. I hope you find the one that is the right one for you.


John

Peekay,
I don't know if any mentioned this, but distrowatch.com is a really cool place for info just incase you forgot. Personally I like Ubuntu. The install was easy, their package manager is really simple, and hey they promise it to be free.

don (el paso)

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I have detected a few alternative viewpoints! But there's obviously more than one way to skin this particular cat, so getting a variety of opinions is great.

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Is that what people who have no clue on how to compile a linux kernel call users who do?

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Please oh please don't even think of going there my slow friend. Please do not compare the bloat you call Windows XP/2003 to a streamlined dedicated linux box serving up webpages through Apache. Next time you are at your box just look at the number of processes running on a 2003 server as opposed to a linux box that is running Apache, mySQL and metalog and nothing else.

Boy, Micro$oft sure got you bad!

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No thanks. I have better things to do this morning.

Gonna do some serious reading on all this at the weekend and thanks again for your help, but just out of interest, is there *any* way at all to set UNIX file and folder permissions when working under Windows - and retain them (e.g when the files are archived in a TAR file using a Win archive utility).

I'm finding this a real headache when building XOOPS sites locally. Everything works on my PC ('cos' Windows doesn't care about permissions) but I have to set the permissions manually (for every folder that needs something other than the default) when the site is uploaded.

Does anyone know how Mac OSX handles this? Can you use regular Mac software and use UNIX permissions on folders and files?.

Hey Peekay,
if what you need is just a server have a look at these 2 also:
SME Server at contribs.org
and
Clark Connect at clarkconnect.org
Both of the above mentioned are server "appliance" software. Once they are installed, all administration is done via a browser, or through ssh (like PuTTy).
SME is a hardened Redhat with all the usual features MySQL, PHP. Apache, webmail, etc.. geared towards SOHO and bigger.
Clark Connect is a simple home user oriented system.
Good luck
Joe

McNaz:
keep your comments for yourself. I'v done enough Windows and Linux hacking/security it all depends on a system. Just don't try to tell me Linux is that much secure than windows, oh no! Thousands of ways and more than enough tools available. If you pay enough attention to security YOU can make Windows 2000,XP,2003 a lot more secure than most Linux. Of course there is a way of achieving the exact opposite. I've setup IIS with 15-20 sites and all of them working hard, efficient and NEVER hacked in to for several year, and yet had Apache flood problems. Yes it was my clients problem, because of update failure so what, there are critical updates for all kinds of OS's.So, stop your discussions about this, it's just a geek talk. For my personal needs I use Fedora and never had any performance problems and I did not compile the source code. If I were making a high performance production server where I want to use specific hardware and every bit of processor than yes, compiling is the way, but only if you care about those 5% in performance gain (which might be critical to what you do).
There are many views more answers and everyone is right. So keep up to the "NEWBIE" topic.

Been doing a little more work on this and have another couple of dumb questions if anyone can help!

I figured I would be able to access my XOOPS site installed on my Linux machine from my Windows PC via TCP-IP network. So I can edit and check the site using Win browsers. I'm O.K. with that.

I found a Windows application called WinAxe that allows you to open a window to your Linux server in Windows.

http://www.labf.com/winaxe/index.html

This I guess would enable me to open a Linux text editor in the WinAxe 'window' in Windows, so I can edit and save PHP files and cut-n-paste text. I'm O.K with that too.

What I figured I could *not* do was open a file from the Linux machine in a Windows application, edit it and save it back to the Linux machine preserving the UNIX file permissions. However, I found a Linux file-sharing solution called Samba

http://us1.samba.org/samba/

which appears to have some way of using UNIX permissions with Win apps. The online docs are heavy going and I am struggling to work out if it would do what I wanted.

Does anyone know if Samba would let me edit a file in Win Photoshop and let me save it back to the Linux machine with file permissions intact?

You could try SFTP program called WinSCP as far as I know you can configure external Windows program to edit files located in Linux. You just need to open port 22 (SecureFTP/SSH) and start SSH on your server. I use it a lot and like it, though I use it to upload files and manualy edit files (right click, Edit).

Good luck.