By the way, is Red Hat difficult for newbies to use? There seems to be a lot of talk on this Dell support page about RH9. I think this machine is officially supported for RH9.

I have never used Mandrake, so I don't know if it is any easier to use than Red Hat for newbies. It is based on Red Hat though.

The problem with RH9 is that it isn't supported any more. Red Hat took the (in my opinion as a long standing paying customer of theirs) the decision to basically withdraw from the workstation/low end server market.

They have dropped support for RH 7.x, 8.0 and 9.0 completely. No more security updates, nothing. They expect people to move to Red Hat Enterprise, which I probably would if they actually provided an upgrade mechanism, idiots.

Any way, rant over. Suffice it to say RH9 is probably not a good choice for the future.

Red Hat "replaced" RH9 with Fedora http://fedora.redhat.com/ but it isn't a sensible replacement if you just want to install a server and run it on the same version for years, because they aren't planning on releasing security updates for very long after each release.