which linux?

I have a simple question to ask:

I have never used linux before, but have read several books on it. What would be the best linux to download to learn linux, and also which would be the best to use while keeping windows on my computer until I can make a final decision between the two.

for beginners, i'd say Mandrake or Redhat...
if you really want to get down and dirty, go with FreeBSD (my fav)

http://www.linuxiso.org
http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.mandrake.org
http://www.redhat.com

Bad question you are going to get all of the zealots out of the woodwork on that one. Basically most modern Linux versions are a personal preference issue, my suggestion is to check outlinux.org and see what they have marked as for beginners. A better option would be to find out if there is a LUG (Linux users group) near you and visit them. LUG's usually do install nights where they help beginners install and setup the distor of there choice. They will also usually have different distros on the members computers that they will let you see, if you can look at a number of different distros that would be great. Then just pick the one that has a look and feel that you are comfortable with.

Try Knoppix, if it's just for a temporay install
Or go to Here
As for as which linux it's a matter of your own personal choice. My first Linux install was with
Slackware 6.0 and then Caldera which I didn't like. Go to the different distro sites and read about it's advantages and from there make a choice and want U plan on using it for. ppl say that Redhat, Mandrake, and Suse are best for beginners. But I never play with the other to
cause it's (I heard) was a easy install which I like a challenge. I hopes this helps U alot as I said in the beginning it's a matter of choice but I would suggest a BSD flavor or Slackeware;)

I would defenitly say SuSe.

I'm a newbie myself, and I've tried Red Hat, Mandrake and now Suse....
I must say Suse makes to step from windoze to linux easier than the other two.

Just my thought,

Greetz,

I'd go with phaza7 and try knoppix.
It requires no partitioning or installing, you just boot it from the cd.

As of now my favorate is debian but I am partial to redhat or SuSE, both being one of my first because of ease of instalation.

Heyas,

For beginers, who want a "windows" feeling I would suggest you use RedHat, SuSe or Mandrake. But if you want hardcore *ix action try Slackware or go to one of the BSDs, ie. FreeBSD. Note that Slackware and FreeBSD can both be a pain in the rear end when it comes to installation and configuration. One question you might want to ask yourself is 'how familar with a text-based enviroment am I?'.

http://www.slackware.com
http://www.freebsd.org

Well, bballad said it best, it's all about personal preference. I personally started with Red Hat - I came up as a Windows user so I wanted to go with a distro that wasn't too drastic a change at first. Most people will tell you (as they already have in this thread) that Mandrake and Red Hat are usually pretty good starting points for those who are new to Linux. So if I were to make a recommendation, it would be between one of those. But quite honestly, try as many as you can - experiment with them and then make your own, informed decision. It is personal preference, and the more you have experience with, the better off you are...


EDIT: Just wanted to add this (forgot when I first posted) - tampabay420's link to www.linuxiso.org is a great resource. From this site you can download all kinds of flavors of Linux - they've got a ton of them, and their download speeds are pretty good (for those large distros...)

I too go with others i.e go with Redhat. The issue of availability Redhat scores over others as well as for technical support. Redhat 8.0 has much of a feel needed for beginners moving from Windows. Try out KDE as most of the shortcuts of Windows work out there. And yes partitioning is still a problem for beginners but then u can take help of LUG's as mentioned or even the extensible help on the Redhat site .. so try it out

Personally id just go look at http://www.linuxiso.org and see wich one seems best to you, Linux isnt like wich ones better, it depends what you want to do wich makes one or another better.

I would like to thank everyone for their help in this matter. In case anyone is interested in this I decided to go with Red Hat 8.0.

Again many thanks to you all.

good luck to you and i hope you have lotsa fun starting Linux, me personally i am a total SuSe person, i love it. :)

SuSE, SuSE, and....oh yeah, SuSE.

:D

i just found this page for all our fellow SuSe users, i think its awesome so go check it out :)

http://susefaq.sourceforge.net/

I was never a big SuSE fan, I always use the cheapest possible hardware and SuSE never seemed to be able to handle it, but redhat would. As for choosing redhat, a good distro but I would suggest 9 over 8 it seems to have a better ease of use factor.

The choice has been made, redhat it is. But as a linux newbie myself, I would make one small suggestion. Buy a second harddrive, nothing big (You can pick up a 5 gig for 10 bucks at most service shops that have used for sale) this gives you the option to play with linux until you are ready for the jump without partitioning plus if you are on a dial up, it'll save you a lot of headache when you need drivers for your connection to the internet. I might be stating the obvious, but it's something I learned the hardway, lol.

start w/ RH. Mandrake, SuSE but eventully if you are serious about learning linux you'll move on to Debian, Slack, *BSD

personally I swear by Debian... almost equal to BSD w/ stability and security.. and it's still Linux.

" Note that Slackware and FreeBSD can both be a pain in the rear
end when it comes to installation and configuration."

Hmmmm......

FreeBSD isn't hard to configure and install if the user would print out
the 'Handbook' read it carefully they'd be ok my OS of choice is OpenBSD
it's the most straight forward I have ever used and it's easy to install
and setup I love compiling my apps and source code on it :)



Doc

just like me ,a begginer just use redhat with the newest version or you can go to

http://www.linuxiso.org
http://www.redhat.com

find some information ok n keep it cool

I started out with mandrake, but wanted to get into a more commandline interface than a GUI so after a few hours i reformatted again and got stuck into slackware and havent looked back.
I had a bit of experience with online linux tuts and shells, so it was easier for me and i was familiar with DOS. But if your serious about linux, its best to get stuck into it straight away.

as a user of linux i recommend u to use the redhat distr.
bcs it is easy to install
can be installed as second os
great text and GUI envir.

i'm using it ,and it's great.

there are several distr of linux:
redhat
mandrake
suse
go to http://www.linux.org/
to find more

well i agree with the others who say Red Hat or mandrake! they can configure many pieces of hardware them-self, so you haven't to configure them! but i don't like SuSe, sure, for me it was a good idea to test it because i have only a vaio notebook and a lot of trouble with the acpi (which works great under suse), but if you play around with your suse and have tuts on linux, it can be that things aren't @ the places described in the tut because suse makes a lot of things other than standard!

also a great idea is knoppix, it configures also a lot him-self! and it is possible to test it from cd, and if you like it you can install it to disk! (there are tutorials out about this)

i used debian now for a while but at the moment i have a distro named "College Linux" installed, which is also not that bad!

I might say that for beginners you should try Mandrake. However you might also try Red Hat. Debian's distribution is not bad, but is not as simple as the others. You also may try the BSD's distribution, but you need to have important notions in command line administration.

i just installed redhat 7.3, all i can say is 150 dollars for win xp , 1.50 for red hat (3 cdrs and 2.5hrs of dl) it was just as easy to install it seems just as pretty , browsing is faster for sure and it seems straight forward ,no complaints here

Uhm, it's rather simple, REDHAT.

Whatever you think of them they're the most user friendly, everything is available in binary for Redhat, go with them, no one has more support nor user-friendliness. I started on Mandrake, it was OK, but Redhat is what you want, just get it, and I'd suggest Redhat Linux 8.0 Unleashed.

Hey all,

I have been watching, and I have read most, of these which flavor of *nix threads for quite some time now. I have a very good familiararity with DOS and windblows versions. Needless to say I am not very proud of Microsloth. I have been looking for an alternative to the ol winder lettin in those flies. I also have a MIPS processor based system ( collecting dust ) by Silicon graphics, that is runnig IRIX 8. I tried Red Hat most recently and never had any luck getting it working. I tried it with it on a second drive and had a bootloader that started Linux by default. I finally gave up and rebooted picking win2k and went to bed. I awoke the next morning to even more problems. It seems that win2k ate the linux boot partition over night. So I decided to uninstall RH in an effort to revive a doomed PC.

Not! :killcompu

So, I will conclude this with a note to you statistical. Anything that "can" go wrong "will" go wrong, at the most inopportune moment. I for one highly reccomend using a seperate "box" to put your fav flavor on. This way if you f*** it all up it won't be your main box.

Also peeps, I have an even more dumba** question. Is there a windows emulator available for linux that will allow me to play my favorite windows based games?
:dunce:

RedHat and Mandrake use RPM's ( Mandrake was originally based upon RedHat )

When Mandrake was first released, it was RedHat made a little easier for the novice, with KDE included ( which, at the time, RedHat did not include )

The RPM packages are nice, especially for someone new to linux. Until you are used to compiling software yourself they make things much simpler ( IMHO ).

You said, 'to make the final decision' - No one's making you make a decision, hehe.. you don't even have to. Linux has rockin' everything - networking, programming environments, graphics & progs (GIMP Yeah!), sound card support, smashing choice of GUIs and all that ****.. and even a few versions of quake, hehe...

Windows.. has many many games... And good ones too.. but it's got it's problems.. they all do.. every distro and windows ver..

Linux runs on damn near anything... so if you want to experiment.. go buy yourself a cheap 233 MMX, with (or throw) an old ATI RAGE 64 or 128 bit-based (All-In-Wonder PRO) board in there, and a 16-bit ISA.. and everything'll be as straight forward as can be for installation and config options.. and a linux distro like Debian will SCREAM on it compared to a i586 specific distro like redhat 8.x. You'd have to drop to redhat 7.1 or something to get i386 kernels outta the box, which is a headache for a new user..

That kinda machine would cost you 200 bux tops in the paper to buy.. and you can leave your 10 or 20 gig windoze box as is.. windoze is a bitch, it needs the memory and processing power.. in order to actually enjoy windows, you might as well let it have the bigger better box.. all that.. might as well just have two to start with, to get you trained. Chances are your browser under blackbox or a lightweight window manager might outperform IE on the faster machine anyways, hehe...

So don't make a choice.. acheive a zen-like balance, hehe


I'd hate

****16-Bit ISA Soundcard is what I meant.. a traditional AWE 64 works real good...

there is a a couple of windows emulators ... WINE + WINEX (two programs.. ones' the emulation 'layer' and the other is like a directX layer, but, not.... functionally the same... one allows you to play solitare, two are needed for diable II or Ultima Online or whatever.. and your other option... Run BOCHS or VMware and simulate an entire PC in memory and an area of your disks, install windows + direct x to that and then all your games and stuff... but both options have there problems at this point.

Hey statistical Let us know how the installl goes. I foundly rember the nightmare of my first Linux install an HP386 and 200 slackware floppies :)

man i am mandrake freak...its very good indeed try out mandrake 9.1 i am sure u wont b disappointed

Generally speaking Redhat is stable and the best.... But for newbies switching from windows to linux takes some time........
latest suse is very good... This gives a feel of working in windows

WELCOME TO THE LINUX WORLD

i would normally suggest SuSE linux(great for war gaming although berkely linux is betta) but if you dont want to del your harddrive or drop 80 bones for partition magic (impossible to understand anyway) i would suggest downloading White Glove Linux it is in iso form (at least on kazaa) the official site is all.net/WG/

:D
ok so i have a sparc.. and im fishing for new flavors of linux..
i have installed so far..

redhat
mandrake
SuSE
Debian
Slackware
aurora...re redhat 7.3

and unrealated((net bsd)) this rocks..

in order of ease of use

1.mandrake
2.redhat
3.SuSE
4.Slackware
5.Debian

get a cheap pc. if you dont want to break your windows box

{lilo} can be a real dog to get off the drive

have a lot of fun

hi statistical,

Like u told, one day i was also a newbie had no idea what linux was ! I was desperate to learn it. Then i decided let me buy a book and lo ! to my surprise i found CD's with the book itself. I bought the book and started reading it line by line then i successfully installed linux and from that day my realationship with linux is goin on pretty good. Now, i am the main propellor for linuxx in my company.

Why i told you this was because like me you also can go and bring some good linux book (i had brought Red Hat Bible) start readin it and enjoy the experience. If u have any test machine then you are better off doing ur first installtion on it. So, u can be freed of any back-up woes. If not, follow the installation instructions carefully in the book then i don't think u will have any trouble. Once you get the basics right and start to get experience you will be comfortable with any distro of linux. It's like once u know how to drive a car it won't make much difference if any one gives you some new car to drive, just baring few things here and there you will find it pretty easy to drive it too ! So, it doesn't make much difference what distro u have. Once you start gaining experience u can use any distros ! If u get stuck on any problem there are numerous web-sites on linux (check linuxbasis.com) and LUG's too who can help you out. So with linux you will never be left alone ! There's always some to help you out of the situation.

And yeah..another great thing about GNU/linux is that you can never stop learing more with it !!! Take my word for it !

I hope this would have helped you to get you started.