Debian question

[skiflyer]

I'm getting annoyed with Redhat...

I have an older machine P2 500, with a measely 64megs of RAM.

It ran RH 7.0 fine, I upgraded to 8.0 and it's a piece of junk, I can't run anything in Gnome without wanting to toss the machine out the window. I realize I'm just underspeced like mad on RAM, and will upgrade it eventually... but in the meantime, the box is just a toy so I want to get some experience with some other flavors of linux before it ends up with whatever version I will actually keep on there.

My next target is Debian, and I'm thinking I should go ahead and do the net install, but there is no net install for the stable release, is the test release good enough that I should go with that? Should I just use an unofficial net install (in which case do you have a recommendation?)? Or should I download the CD's and go from there?

Any info appreciated,

Rob

 

[flugh]

I used a 3.0 iso image linked from this page:

http://people.debian.org/~ieure/netinst/

I have had no problems with it. Every couple days I run an "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade". It's running fine on my P166 with 56M RAM. No X though. It's just painfully slow

The most valuable aspect of running can be found on irc at irc.freenode.net in channel #debian. I found answers to all my 'properly researched' questions (the rest were met with a stiff "RTFM!!" ;-) ). Seriously, a great bunch of helpful folks there. --
JR