different linux distro's

[Apollo]

Looks like i'm going for it :O. Plenty of time to install Gentoo and I've been meaning to catch up on some reading... Do you guys reckon it will take more than 1-2-3 days on my old desktop with the following specs: 533MHZ, 128 MB RAM?

[Kojak]

It will take ages with that hardware. I had used Gentoo for roughly one and a half year, then I hated it. Compiling took forever and things broke badly in 2005 for me (and no, I wasn't using some insane flag combinations). Gentoo is imho a waste of time. If you want to learn something about linux, use Slackware. Faster to set up on your machine but as difficult to configure as Gentoo.

After years, using Slack, Arch and Gentoo, I was tired of those "geek" distros and after deciding to trash my Gentoo stage 1, I went to Mandriva. It is since then my main system and I am very satisfied with it.

[oz]

Crux Linux is another good distro and it's really fast. It has the slow install/compile times of Gentoo but once done it feels very much like Arch Linux.

[techieMoe]

Ok. This thread is turning quickly into another "which distro" thread, so I'm going to go ahead and stop it here. There are some good recommendations already, and if the original poster is still unsure, I suggest reading this thread:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...e-posting.html