Hi There have been some comments about SuSE in the last day or two and here is what I can tell you from a Novell point of view and I hope this will shed some light. Most of this is from reading between the lines. I am no LINUX pro either, I am a NetWare specialist (although novell had better ideas than to employ me), though I am following Novell through this "very difficult period" ;-) SuSE 9.1 personal is designed for home users who want to send and recieve mail, use thier printers, scanners, see the internet and write the odd spreadsheet and letter. That is why it is so simple and installs easily off one disc with no fuss. It is slow to start compared to other distros, but you will notice the kernel is about 1.8MB (on my machine) and for this reason it also auto detects nicely and the 'home' components work well for most machines. If you wanted to be a power user or compile your own kernel, perhaps 9.1 Pro is for you. I see that Novell now offers this as a free FTP install from thier site, something SuSE never did. If you want a server, then Novell recommends you use SuSE server 8.0, another free download, although limited time (90 day). I have been told it will cost about $650 per server (not per processor) to license. It is really, really easy to install and setup and really easy to integrate into other products. Example would be the demo I went to installed Standard edition, then eDirectory, then migrated users from Win/NetWare, setup Samba, in less than two hours, from blank hardware, the users where able to sign in and get to thier home directories. Obviously the copying of thier data will take longer. eDirectory is free too! I would like to step out and make an observation here that may cause the throwing of some chairs, but please bear with me. I would like to stress the importance of SuSE, perhaps not as the next big technological be all for everybody, but as the bleeding edge of a business model so many open source people have hoped for for a long time now. Novell is a large commercial concern and they are possible putting more than everything into the development and distribution of this OS than has been done before. Perhaps it is not the best distro there for you, but they are working in a commercial field now, so demographics and averages play a big part here. It is not likely to be the most powerful desktop in the market and it may have proprietry or non-compatible elements to what you are used to, but that is what change is about. Something new is good, even if it is something challenging or different. Please understand that Novell has large overheads (apart fom marketing open source software), so they cannot exist by giving away free software that meets all the needs and requirements of everybody and open source licensing prevents them from completely modifying everything. So, to generate income, they have produced products like NLS and ported most of thier existing application to LINUX. This creates not only viable and sustainable business migration paths, but also show big business that it is possible to do everything they need for less, better, with a well established and reliable software/server vendor. There is a state of mind in big business that free software fails and is dificult to support. Novell is working really hard to disspell this. If you are in the integrator market, you will see that Novell is handing out heaps of free training and publicity to push this. Try it thoroughly before you knock it, if it is not for you, then try something else. This is where I will be though. Throw your chairs. I have a copy of SuSE 8.0 limited time server if you are interested in showing your customer something new. I can make copies, over the weekends only though. Have fun and go easy when you flame me, I am new here. gund