I installed some Windows Updates, and now my computer doesn''t work right, so I''ve formatted and now I''m trying to decide which linux/bsd distrobutions to install. In the past I''ve used RedHat, Mandrake, and Slackware, and I guess I liked RedHat the most of that group. I''d kind of like to install several different distrobutions. I have a 40GB hard drive, so I can install several. I was thinking maybe RedHat, Debian, and Gentoo? I''ve heard a lot of good things about Gentoo. I''ve also thought about FreeBSD, but I''ve heard it''s difficult to install (I''ve never installed one that didn''t have a nice walkthough install). Any thoughts?

Gentoo and Debian are both very, very good distributions. I personally like slackware best, simply because it''s a good lowest common denominator, and I have time to get things working the way I want them to work.

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

When I installed Slackware, it broke on me before too long (probably my fault though). I liked it until that point, because it looked clean and simple.

Speaking of getting things to work the way you want, and being clean and simple, what about Linux From Scratch? I''ve heard that is a good learning experience, and you can make a linux distro about as small as you want.

Definitely a good learning experience. I pretty much use Slackware as my LFS, redoing init scripts and recompiling libraries as necessary, while having a more or less complete distro that does everything I don''t want to mess with.

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

Gentoo''s great. The hardest thing is sitting and waiting for KDE to compile if you''re going to do that

Seriously, though, while the installation is "hard", it''s not really that bad because the documentation available on it is great.

I personally don''t like Redhat that much, but SuSE and Mandrake are both good "newbie" distros.