Debian on the other hand may be more complicated than I want. I wasn't [too] encouraged when X took serious tweaking to get it to boot up.The main advantage for going "straight" Debian is when you need something that's not supported by the Ubuntu distro, and/or you are running a platform not supported by it. Ubuntu is limited to i386, "new-world" PPC and AMD64, whereas it seems like there's a Debian for just about everything.
commercial distributions feed the masses, debian is by the people for the people. so if your running linux on <insert more obscure or outdated hardware here> then other like minded users (and possibly yourself) are maintaining things for the hardware because they/you use it. that or a nice package maintainer is cross compiling, which is just fine and dandy as well ;) you may also find crux usefull, especially if your machine will be filling a server roll. but, as ive mentioned many times before - im very bsd = servers , linux = workstations kind of man. Dean -- WWW: http://dean.bong.com.au LAN: http://www.bong.com.au EMAIL: dean@bong.com.au or djzort@bong.com.au ICQ: 16867613