Heh. Well, Freesbie is based on FreeBSD. In fact everything available today is based on something else - to get away from that you'd have to go back to at least AT&T's System V Unix, if not all the way back to Multics. But then it wouldn't run on a PC, and you wouldn't have TCP/IP to access the internet....

So sometimes it's A Good Thing to run a derivative. I can never seem to get X working completely on Slackware, so I really liked the fact that Vector installed easily and successfully on my machine.

But Slackware and Debian are the oldest Linux distros, so they've inspired a bunch of others even when the newer distro isn't what you'd call "based on" them. Debian's user friendliness has come a long, long way since the early days, and I think truly the apt/synaptic package-management system set a high - but reasonable - standard in the Linux world.

Good luck! And remember, if it ain't fun, you ain't doin' it right!

-- Ed