Been a While What Distro do I get 4825

Many Linux distros are available via free download. Unfortunately, HatRed (Red Hat) as we knew it is no longer available in that form. They have abandoned the small paying customers and split the distro.

The HatRed "Enterprise" sub-distros now have very expensive EULAs that read like those from Microsoft Corp., including statements that you are allowed to install (and install updates) on 1 computer unless you pay them extra PER MACHINE. There have been debates in Linux newsgroups about those EULA terms consbreastuting violations of the GPL. One bit of good news is there are clones such as Whitebox that are free. (See groups.google.com for the old debates.)

The Fedora distro is free for download, but there are a lot of differences from the old Red Hat 9 and earlier. I found it unsuitable for my purposes, and I'm not alone.

I have found MandrX (Mandrake, Mandriva, Mandrivoris, ...) to be a very suitable replacement for the old Red Hat. I pay club membership dues and get just about the same level of update support and such. (Having to use mirrors, some not being very reliable, rather than corporate update servers is a bit of a drawback.) One improvement over Red Hat 9 is that my script that does "rpm -V $pkg" across all packages no longer segment faults on several packages, and the RPM database doesn't get corrupted when updating more than a dozen packages in one shot.

Robert Riches (Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)