running the perfect *nix distro 101

I'm fine with that. I wouldn't have really responded but I think it's good to show someone new to it that there is really no difference on which distro you use on your personal machines, as one that someone hates, may work great for them, and one that works great for me or you, may not work well for him at all.

On one of my machines for example, Debian and Ubuntu both work fine, yet on another they lag badly and SUSE actually works on it. I've been leaning more towards Slackware lately though.

Another thing I haven't seen brought up is Fedora. I'm not a huge fan of it as I wasn't really with RedHat either, but it does seem to have decent support on hardware.

I'm a Gentoo guy and I don't particularly care to try another distro.
This being said, gore's advice is always rock-solid (unless he himself gives you a caveat).

i think ive come up with enough on which distrobution to run for my main desktop,

Now though I'd like to know if anyone has any info on successfully running video card drivers on a distro , gettin opengl / direct3d or basic acceleration on there system or being able to run "new" games i.e. steam games (counterstrike , day of defeat) or world of warcraft .

I know im gonna get some **** from the uber boon's who spend hours writing scripts and think im a ****in idiot , and then its going to be "learn to read , now sit down and read 3-5 books on learning linux code i.e running the "bash" console or #root , i dunno im still in my learning phase

but id like to accomplish something i.e. setting goals

my goal is to run at least 1 accerated video game like maybe BF2 or WoW or steam

if anyone has any very good readmes websites or FAQ's on getting all of this setup on a distro , preferrably ubuntu or SUSE or SLACK plz let me know, who ever sends me the info they dont have to sit and write a 30 page readme just send me in the right direction,

the internet is a big place and i need some direction

KTHXBYE ,


p.s. LONG CAT IS LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG

I wouldn't worry much about Linux elitists calling you an idiot here, I'm about as elitist as it gets to some extents and I preffered to help you out rather than flame you. Quite frankly, here are times where just answering a question is WAY more productive than flaming someone because they don't have time to buy a book shelf, put it together, and fill it with books to read over while trying to et the system up.

As for graphics, honestly Linux has come a LONG way in the last 3 years there. Back in the day video cards had to be set up by hand, but now, installing SUSE for example, if you have an Nvidia crd, most likely it'll work right from instal, and then you can use YAST's YOU (Yast Online Update) to grab the Nvidia drivers for the card.

Older cards you'll have to find the older Nvidia driver for, but they support A LOT of cards. I go with Nvidia every time but my Fianee swears by ATI, and we have both, and Linx running on each machine.

If you want, you could download the drivers from nvidia.com, pop it on a flopy, or a USB drive or whatever it fits on, and then when you've got the sytem insalled, go through the process of installing the driver, which is fairly easy, all you have to do is type this:

sh NVIDIA*.sh

Hit Enter

It installs the actual Nvidia driver which is the same quality as the Windows driver and you're set after restarting X or rebooting (I don't have a brand spanking new video card so I'm not sure if Restrting X works still, if in doubt just reboot).

If you happen to have ATI, download their drivers. I'm not as certain of the process with them as my Fiancee did that after installing Linux and I was only watching, but it seemed basiclly the same.