The thing to remember is that each distro has a particular philosophy and you will have less hassles if you discern and go along with the philosophy. For example, RH, Mandrake and TurboLinux installers are mostly linear, so you should make your major decisions at install time. On the other hand SuSE's YAST has a task menu approach where you can come back and change things. So if you are not sure which of the bewildering 6 GB of software to install, just install the minimal set and come back later and add the things you want. I believe dselect is similar in philosophy but it's been a while since I used that. Another tip is try to change the system config files as little as possible. Try to use the distro's mechanisms to customise your machine and rely as little as possible on hacks. When installing optional software, put them in /opt, /usr/local or your home directories. Do not install optional software in places like /bin or /usr/bin unless they come in standard or contrib packages which you can fetch again easily. Think ahead to what you would have to do if the disk got scrambled and you have to restore the machine from CD and backup tapes. Config managers are a mixed blessing, I would rather not use them, but it's unavoidable to use some of it, /etc/sysconfig/ for RH/Mandrake/TL, /etc/rc.config for SuSE. You need to know how much it controls and how much you control. Personally I dislike GUI config managers because if things get so stuffed up you can't even run X, you need to be able to go in with a text editor, which is still the best config tool. And I have a mono console anyway. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
