Is Debian worth it?

[Sadrok]

I'm thinking of getting Debian (either buy the distribution when I get a freakin place in south-africa that sells it, or download it when we finally get adsl, if we get adsl, if it's affordable)

I'm currently using Mandrake 8.0 but I'm having some trouble with the RPMs, I don't have all the apps' source so some of them I can't ./configure before hand and I'm stuck with whatever settings the binaries are in. Also I'm up for a challenge (setting up a small home network server/router/firewall/blah/blah)

Would I be good of spending time and/or money to get it?
I've read that the normal version doesn't have a gui installation but I don't care, like I said........up to a challenge :)

[jmatt]

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Turn an old comp , into a server or Internet gateway.
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Select your operating system here.
http://www.clarkconnect.org/download/index.html

Personal Web Server from , http://www.primocreations.c

[Stef]

Well, Debian's apt daemon is great to work with. With it you can download source *.deb's and edit their compile options or source code. Debian also has great documentation to follow and incredible mailling lists.

Just surf over to :

http://www.debian.org/CD/

and look for a Debian vendor in your area.

I would recomend that you attemp to install woody rather then patato. Patato is the current stable release but Woody will be replacing it soon.

Stef