i've made my first computer, gathering parts from here and there, and buying quite a bit; i finally made a jump from a 486@33mhz with less than 60 mb available on the hd, to a 120mhz pentium with a cdrom and a 6.9 gb hd[!!!!], also i've doubled the amount of ram than my previous machine had, now i have a mind boggling 40 mb of ram.
as for the distro, i went with red hat 7.1, mostly because i would like to play a bit with all the ´niceties´ that a gui can offer.
installed last week, played a lot during the weekend, already running a 24 x 7 rc5 client, the only drawback is that uit doesn't detected my serial mouse, ´mouseconfig´ crashes and dumps core when i run it. don't know waht might can be wrong. anyways, to properly set the mouse in slackware 4.0 took me a lot of sweat, i expected it to be a little easier in red hat, particularly, 7.1.
thanks a lot to mike, johny, warchild and downtime for all the input.