Quote Originally Posted by eco2geek
I'm still running BH8, too - although I have totally upgraded KDE (which I see I need to do again) and most of the apps (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, etc.) that I use all the time. It works fine, so I might wait until BHXII comes out before I start over.
I'm still using BH5 as the nice thing about debian is easy upgradability. Just out of curiosity, why do a lot of people reinstall now and then? Out of curiosity?

FYI, I've got some hard disk space to play with, so I tried SuSE (network install) and then Mandrakelinux. They're both OK. Mandrakelinux is still installed on my extra partition.
Tried both once. Hated Yast. Mandrake was ok but it takes a bit of disk space to have a GUI for everything.

Which leads to a question: How does one know when Debian Sid packages have been released to fix security problems?
I suppose you just need to dist-upgrade every now and then.

And another question: Is there a Debian equivalent to ZoneAlarm or Kerio Personal Firewall? I'm lazy and don't particularly want to learn the ins and outs of iptables/ipchains or whatever it's called, but I feel like I'm sort of naked without a firewall in Linux (even though I'm behind a NAT box).
Ipchains was for kernel up to 2.2.x. 2.4 and up it's iptables. Some front ends are firestarter and guarddog. You can find some ready made scripts for iptables here. A good NAT box seems to work as I haven't got any use of logging in iptables with the router stopping attacks.