Choosing the right penguin

Dal was reminding me of reinstallation of two machine for the past 2 weeks. I , Daniel and Yadhu decided to go to the lab only after Ragam. Dal and FMB previous admins are their final two weeks of classess in our college. They will be handing over the lab to us next academic year by the way. As it is told to me i have to manage or maintain around 40 systems.

All of them currently have Fedora Core 6 installed in them. Most of them have beryl also. I am already thinking of the distro of the next year. And i want to try it on the two non OS systems now. I prefer OpenSuse 10.2 ; to me it was perfect in my laptop. It gave me the first trouble free installation of the linux I ever had. May be I will try with them tomorrow.

I know installation in 1 or 2 machines is ok. But for a large deployment i need to consider other options like installation from network through nfs or http. I am also considering the possibility of unattended installation. I tried to learn from the autoyast manual but it is not pefect. Still how to do section is not there. I know , yaa I tried with kickstart of fedora. It is perfect.

Even though the performance of OpenSuse in my laptop is fine it is taking too much resources. I don't know how lab machines cope with its requirements. They have 2.8 Ghz 512 MB processor and memory. But the hardisk are very slow due to constant read and write cycles.

My other option is some different. Going to an unknown territory. It is slackware. I have been for playing around with linux for the last 5 yrs. But never tried slackware based distros. This may be a perfect ocassion for trying it out. But for the first i will play safe. Another option is debian or ubuntu. Unless you run into problem they are perfect. But i don't think i will have so much time to tinker with the conf files of linux.

Opensuse, ubuntu, fedora? I haven't decided yet.

Yaa, it is like choosing the right bride. Because i have to play,share,fix,suffer with her for the next whole year!!!!