Linux ideas and recommendations

[Edward Glowacki]

OK, I admit, I've been pretty much out of the loop regarding Linux
for a while now.  I just ordered a laptop, and I think support for
the hardware is probably better in Linux than FreeBSD, so as
evidenced by my recent flurry of questions to the list, I'm trying
to get current on where Linux is at.

My plan is to use Debian again, but I don't want to use 2.2 because
it's already 10 months old... It looks like 2.3/3.0 is in "testing",
which from what I can tell should be fairly stable, so I may go
with that.  Any thoughts from the Debian developers?  =)

Any recommendations on things I should go out of my way to make
sure I install or setup?  I know most of it (I'm not *that* far
out of the loop!), but I was wondering about cool Linux stuff that
I'm sure I overlooked because it didn't run under FreeBSD, or
because I didn't need to run it before. One example of that is
cdparanoia, which is great for ripping CD's in Linux, but doesn't
work for FreeBSD, so I haven't kept track of it much recently.
Another would be a DVD player, since I haven't tried getting that
to work in FreeBSD or Linux before (though DPK mentioned one that
I'll take a look at).

OK, enough questions now... until I think of another one anyways...
;)

ED

-- 
Edward Glowacki				glowack2@msu.edu
GLLUG Peon  				http://www.gllug.org
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
                -- Jules de Gaultier