[ale] Which distribution (reprise)

[Don Allison]

Thanks to all those who provided me with information about the pros
and cons of the various Linux distributions.  Several people told me
that RedHat had a lot of advantages (ease of upgrading, lots of things
use the package scheme, etc), and others warned me about how tricky
Debian was to install, so I decided to try RedHat yet again.  This
time (4.2 instead of 4.0) it actually let me pick and choose what to
install and the missing pieces catcher proved helpful (I couldn't figure
out, though, how it decided what to use as the default install given my
package choices...it didn't make a lot of sense sometimes.)

Anyway, it looked like most of the RedHat problems had been fixed,
until I got down to the part where you install LILO, and then I ran
into the problem that's been there since at least 4.0--you can't
install a kernel on a floppy, and if you mistakenly select that
option initially, you are hung there forever--none of the other
options will work either--and you have to restart the process from
the very beginning to get one of the other options to work!  I wanted to
be able to boot Linux when I inserted the boot floppy and go to NT or
95 the rest of the time, but that just doesn't seem to work with RedHat.
Since I'd just spent a couple of hours waiting while it formatted everything
and copied over all the software, I wasn't a happy camper, so I decided to
revert back to my standby, Slackware.

Unfortunately, the latest version of Slackware appears to have been
"improved" as well.  Install went pretty quickly--gotta love that expert
mode!-- except for some problems with the syquest cartridge that had the
installation files on it, and when it got to the LILO configure part I put
the floppy in and told it to write to it, which it did--but it barely hit
the disk before it said it was all done, and when I tried to reboot, it
didn't even recognize the floppy as a floppy!

The files are on the hard drive...if I boot with the install disk, I can
mount the drive and look at them.  I just can't configure a boot floppy
to actually boot Linux and use them!

Any suggestions?  System is Intel-based, with a 500MB drive at address 2
that holds the Linux root, and 4 partitions on the drive at address 0:
the first is Win95, the second is NT 4.0 (FAT), the third is Linux swap,
and the fourth is for Linux miscellaney.  Syquest is address 4 and CD-ROM
is address 5.

It's gotta be something stupid I'm overlooking, but any hints would be
greatly appreciated--while it's "fun" to keep reinstalling Linux along with
the other OS's (don't ask how many times I've had to reinstall NT in a
week! :-), with the quarter well and truly started, I actually need to
use the compute cycles to, er, compute for a change!

Thanks!
don

(My current recommendation for a version of Linux to use is Slackware from
around fall 95...version 1.2.13(?) was pretty stable and even worked! :-)