Linux Redux
I am AMAZED at Scott's violent antipathy towards Mandrake ("I'd rather eat glass..."). Wow. I hadn't seen anything like that anywhere else. He recommends RedHat, and honestly that was my first choice because I had worked with it before and it is so "standard". However, the shiny newness of Mandrake 9.0 caught my eye so that's why I downloaded that. I'm going to check out RedHat 7.4 beta (which it seems is just a test for 8.0). The thing I want the most is Gnome 2.0 which 7.4 includes by default, so it might be good advice going with RedHat. Though maybe the new version of Mandrake fixed some of those installation problems he talked about (check out his comments on my previous post). Even though I have a decent connection to the internet - decent meaning speed wise - it'll still take a few nights to download 3 CDs worth of data for the RedHat stuff so it'll take a while to evaluate.
Not that I can really use Linux right now. After some searching on the web, I found this forum in Spanish which showed me that I'm not the only one looking for a driver and that it's basically not coming for several months. I'm going to try to get my brother (the slacker - the word for the day) in L.A. to send me my ADSL modem I had when I lived in San Fran. Dave inherited most of my stuff from the U.S. when I moved here in exchange for storing the other stuff that I wanted to keep. However, he may be working at a Ren Fair in Northern California for the next several weeks, so it could be a month or more before that ever happens, if ever. And it may not work when it arrives for random yet inevitable reasons that always pop up...
If these intermittent DNS problems persist and I can't find a Linux driver, I'm going to slap some cash down and get a decent ADSL router because it's really holding me back. We'll see.
-Russ