distro for replacement of my dev box

[dang]

I'm currently running suse 9.1 on an old p3 500.

I am going to replace it with a newer machine.

I was thinking of putting debian on but the current stable is 7 isos. I dont really want to download 7 isos, so I thought I'd got with a net install, but the latest netinstalls on debian.org are between 1 - 3 years old. Does anyone know where to get a newer net install for the current release?

If not, I'll have to look for another distro. Just want something easy to install, easy to update (apt is easy) without having to manually configure my graphics card, etc.

[spankers]

The downside to Debian is the install. It still requires more manual configuration than some of the other distros. I like it though and the only other distro I'd trade it for might be Gentoo.

As far as the install goes... you could download the first iso and do the rest of the install from that by setting up apt for unstalling from the net... my way of doing things is to manually edit /etc/apt/sources.list and make my apt sources look like:

eherr@chernobyl:/etc/apt$ cat sources.list
# deb file:///cdrom/ sarge main
deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
# deb-src ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main

I've had good luck with Unstable... not too many problems.

The apt source at nerim.net is for some of the video/multimedia tools not included in Debian. MPlayer, transcode, LAME, deCSS, dvd::rip, etc.

I haven't tried it but you may want to try Ubuntu.
It's based on Debian but they release more often.
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
.

[dang]

sweet. I"m going to give ubuntu a try. Thanks spankers!

[llbbl]

Fedora!

[spankers]

Federa be piggy! Slackware! ;)

[spankers]

sweet. I"m going to give ubuntu a try. Thanks spankers!
No worries... let us know how the install goes.

[openbsd-flipp]

I have found myself getting quite happy with Gentoo. The hardest part is the install but after that to update is the same as installing packages, emerge --sync (nightly) and then to add or update do an emerge (program name) Of course there is always FreeBSD or NetBSD for development.