Hi all Just figured I should add my views to the discussion about distrobutions and stuff I've used SuSE, RedHat, Debian and we also have Mandrake installs here at NIP... And from what I can tell its more of a matter of personal taste rather than specific reasions to use one or the other. Some tend to install a lot and aim to give you everything working, others install less and let you add what you need, but then, you can always customise what you need when your up and running... I've had some problems on Debian with Zope 2.1 and Zope 2.1.1 where the expat parser is not installed by default (although it seems to be on Windoze and RedHat)... From my discussions here it would seem that I needed to install some Debian packages to get it to work, but in the end the PyXML product sorted that... Generally we use the source installs of both Python and Zope... And they are pretty painless. Installing python2.1 as the default on a machine has caused issues where none zope related scripts and so on ending up broken... but doing a make altinstall when installing python and then linking python2.1 to python2.1 just means that new versions of python need a slightly modified start script pointing to python2.1 and when you compile stuff you need to remember which python you need to use (Zope helpfully tells you if you try and run 2.4 with an old version of python)... In terms of reliability and longterm pain free administration, particularly if your not the only one using the box you really need to sort out where things are to be installed and make sure that people stick to these! Also I believe having used them, that an instance home scheme is well worth the little bit of pain to get it up and running (remember to change the name of pythonhome to something else for 2.4 versions of zope - had me confused that one... :-)) Um, really I think the linux distrobution is not as relevant as how it is administered. Infact in may ways some of the basic text only installs may be more appropriate than the modern slick installers that are designed to get you up and running fast... In the end if it works :-) The other note I suppose is the regional thing, RedHat seems to have a hold in the USA and is fairly popular elsewhere... SuSE seems to be much more popular in Germany and so on... So I'm going to second Andrew Milton and say install what your most likely to get support with, if your mates run it then it only costs a pint (or whatever) to get it fixed!! Hope thats not all been said in the time it took me to write it... ChrisK