I've been working' on ma backhoe as you know.
I've also logged many hrs trying different Linux distros to see which on
worked best on my old PII300 system, to listen to music to, over at the barn/shop.
Conlusion...:
The problem setting up linux was I have a serial mouse, and an ISA soundblaster Vibra16 pnp.
The new Linux distros don't play nice with those straight from the setup,
and I wanted that, rather than trying to set them up without a mouse.
I don't know the hotkeys well enough yet, and didn't want to mess with it
from the command line.
anyway, I tried...
Mandrake 10.2-beta = no good
Mandrake 10.1-release = no good
"" "" "" 9.1 = nogood
" " " 9.0 = closer but still no good
" " " 7.1 = worked, but was glitchy
Slack 10.0 = no good
slack 9.0 = no good
RedHat 9.2 i think = nogood
Redhat = worked perfect the first time.
I'm playing with Fedora on a PIII-1000/133 now.
I don't plan on spending as much time continually with it, as I gotta
get the tractor/backhoe finished and do some pipe-work. I just
had to have my tunes back in the shop back.