IMO Get Mandrake for excellent hardware detection and ease of install. You will be up and running quickly plus you will have a GUI (KDE) to work with. Next get postfix (already included in distribution), follow the excellent documentation links on spamassassin site and you'll be up and running (you can install either from CPAN shell or use RPM). Don't want to edit files by hand? Install webmin and it will allow you to edit both postfix and spamassassin from web based GUI. I myself use Debian 3.0 and postfix from backports.org, spamassassin from CPAN.

For the Car analogy. You might have driven cars and trucks for 40 years but linux is like those special race cars, it needs tweaking and knowing a little bit more than windows to know how to run it. With mandrake you don't have to know about the inner workings, if you want to get maximum benefit, you'll have to learn whats under the hood.

HTH
Mus

Grant Baxter wrote:

On Mon, 22 Mar 2004 11:41:32 -0600, you wrote:



Grant Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


I'm planning on setting up a mail server so I only have one SA
installation to maintain instead of three.

I've used Windows only for the past twenty or so years. I've never
touched any Unix variant, so I would like some recommendations for the
easiest Unix variant to set up and get running as a mail server with
SA (including all the pieces parts I need, if you feel like it).

I don't want to need to learn Unix to set this mail server up.


That's kind of like saying you would like to buy a car (for the first
time), but don't want to learn how to drive, put gas in, or change the
oil.

You might be able to make the initial purchase (install the OS) and
maybe even drive it for a few weeks (get the mail system up and
running). But sooner or later, you're going to have a problem which
will require you to open the hood....



First of all, that's a terrible analogy. I've driven cars, trucks, and
even buses for 40 years, and never once opened the hood on any of
them. That's what mechanics are for.


Second, you've just made the case for os's like windows, and why *nix
is a niche os. I didn't have to learn anything about the inner
workings of XP to have it running like a champ. I found a mailserver
called 602Lan Suite for XP, unzipped it, ran the installer, picked all
the defaults, and bam working mailserver.

Thus my question of which *nix can I use to get a mailserver and
SpamAssassin working together. I don't want to have to get a computer
science degree to install an OS and a couple apps.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not some kind of *nix basher or Windows nazi.
I could care less about the os/software I use. The day that I think
that some flavor of unix suits my needs better than windows, I'm
there.


I also know that *nix is a great backoffice tool. However, for *nix to
ever emerge from the backwaters of computerdom it's got to become a
lot easier to install and maintain.

Thanks for your insight.

grant








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