Tonight I went through the long and tortuous process of picking out a Linux distribution to install on my computer as an alternative to Red Hat 8, which is not detecting my modem (other people have had the same problem with their Pragmatic I56LVP-F30 56k internal PCI modems). After seriously weighing the eliteness factor of Gentoo and checking with other webloggers, I chickened out and decided to go with Mandrake 9. Actually, what I really want is a distribution that doesn't install a million and one games/applications/utilities that I'll never use. I'd really rather have a bare-bones install that I can customize, and selectively download the software that I think I'll use.