i'm back. I don't want to flame anything/anybody, so please keep trying to be constructive. exposure of motivations: The hardware situation: may be I'm wrong, but It xeems to me that we are in a period where hardware changes are slowing (I speak of central units/motherboard). I don't really know how to say that. power is growing and exceed most of the real needs. lowend today computer (say a Sempron, 256Mg ram, 80Mb Hard drive) is much stronger than most people need. However companies don't like to keep too old hardware an send to trash can they PIII 800 computers. It's on the point than one must now _pay_ to get rid of old computers an many small companies are happy to give them for free. So very cheap computers, 10 to 5 years old, perfectly running. on our side, there are more and more high band DSL lines. I have at home a 10/1 Mb line (Down/Up), fixed IP. So I can with ease take a nearly free computer, set it up as a server and start my own small local net. The software situation: Linux is ideal for such server, even if you use windows for client. Linux (SUSE, but others also) tend to follow the flow and give more and more bells and wistles. I really like some new Kde features :-), but these features have nearly no interest for a server. So what? We have at hand a great number of outdated computers, needing on the edge security and running perfectly with yesterday distros... but running pretty well with new Linus Distro, given you can install it. So I think we need to address this usership. if a people uses a Debian on his server, he will use a debian on his client... so he must use a SUSE on the server (to be continued) jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://dodin.org/galerie_photo_web/expo/index.html http://lucien.dodin.net http://fr.susewiki.org/index.php?title=Gérer_ses_photos