Greetings Alan,

I'd agree with Jason that Linux is probably going to remain your best 
bet - in terms of scalability, availability, maturity and price, it's 
got some definite advantages; the choice thus becomes which 
distribution.

Personally, I'm not too partisan when it comes to such matters, with a 
background in {Open,Free}BSD and more recently OSX; I've always enjoyed 
Slackware as an unassuming and clean distribution, though it seems to 
be getting quite complex in later life, having expanded from 1 to 2 
install discs. Debian is of course another option, though if you don't 
have direct internet access, I get the impression you'll be losing out 
by choosing such a communally oriented distro. Perhaps not. ( Lex - 
care to interject? ;-) )

Why not the BSDs? Well, from what I gather, scalability is superior 
under the Linux kernel; FreeBSD 4.x has the locking problems of yore, 
the 5.x branch is messy/klunky; OpenBSD work is nascent; NetBSD is in 
FreeBSD 4.x territory from what I gather. And of course, OSX is 
somewhat irrelevant for your needs ;-)

And of course, when it comes down to the best affordable environment to 
develop Squeak in, you can't really go wrong with Linux.

Hope that helps,
kind regards,
Marc

On Friday, August 13, 2004, at 01:36  pm, Alan Grimes wrote:

> After a two and a half month outage, I finaly have a new HD for my dual
> athlon.
>
> The most recient version of Leenooks on hand is SuSE 8.0. =\
>
> I would like to find the best OS for Squeak develment and develment of
> my own OS project, Sphere, with a L4/psitachio environment.
>
> BeOS is currently out of the picture because it can't boot on the Dual
> athlon.
> Windows would cost me $610 (which I don't have).
>
> I strongly dislike bloated desktop environments such as KDE.
>
> One further limitation of my current setup is that the dual athlon does
> not have direct internet access, It can only FTP files from my BeOS
> machine. =\
>
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