Alpha Newbie needs help netbooting linux

[Buck Rekow]

  Mike,

I'm a fairly experienced linux user, but not even close to the best. 
Here are some of the things I've noticed about debian:

* the X install defaults to installing xdm. Very annoying.
* the actual installer won't install half of what you need, unless you 
use dselect, which has a counter-intuitive and relatively 
incomprehensible ncurses interface
* stable supplies a broken gcc, and many applications compiled with the 
broken gcc, including mozilla which fails on some javascripts due to the 
broken gcc
* the CCC and CXX installers are difficult to use and infact barely work.
* you have to figure out the whole stable/testing/unstable thing, which 
i still haven't gotten used to after about a year of using debian on my 
alpha.
* dpkg is very powerful, and a very useful package management tool, but 
if you freqently need to manually compile things (like me) you *can* 
hose dpkg.

  I started on intel, and my first distro was slackware. I really like 
slackware. unfortunately the Alpha port of slackware just sorta petered 
out. So far the only big advantages I've found to running debian instead 
of slacware are these:

* it's quicker and easier to install some difficult packages, like for 
instance glibc.
* Unlike slackware, when exiting system maintenance mode the system 
properly boots, and does not shutdown/reboot.

As to redhat, yes, try Redhat, it should be better for a workstation 
than debian. I do use my debian box as a workstation, and infact have a 
PCI fire-gl 3000 pro ready to go as soon as they dehosetify X.

  thanks,
    Buck Rekow