Thanks for all the replies on this thread. At this stage, I think I'll go with Debian. One of the things I want is a relatively mainstream distro that is likely to be supported by third party binaries, as well as source. I know Debian is supported by a number of the packages I'm like to use. Ubuntu would be the second choice for similar reasons. I'm not sure how I'd go with some of the other netbook specific distros. Sure, I can compile from source, but with the frequency of some updates, that just adds compilation time and management overheads, which I'd rather avoid if possible. I know pretty much everything I'm likely to run on the system has Debian packages available, and since Debian seems to be suitable these days out of the box (going by the replies in this thread), that would seem to be my first port of call. -- 73 de Tony VK3JED http://vkradio.com