Hi

I thought I'd start having a play with Linux, but there seem to be rather a lot of different flavours. Can anyone suggest a good starting point ? Just looking for something easy to get going and fairly mainstream to get a feel for it.

Many thanks.

Redhat!

Mandrake is the best for starters. Very easy to use. That was how I started. Redhat to complex for a newbie.

maybe so quite familiar with aix, and solaris, so red hat was rather simplistic.

[deleted] Never mind ... can't be bothered with yet another religous war over which OS is best

Redhat's good, the free 'Threads' linux is also good. Pretty much any flavour works fine.

hi'

I would say, go for mandrake ...

for a couple of reasons ...

1. the install

2. the ease of use (for a newbie)

3. the (relative) stability of the system itself

4. the no-need to hack the system to be satisfied (also for newbie)

anyway get yourself a second HDD, it will be named hdb by the OS.

the hda is the first disk, the one with windows(I assume this for you)

let the OS partition it, and go on ... (on the hdb)

let the system choose the packages to install ... it's always more than enough.

let the boot loader install itself on hdb1, and create a boot-floppy.

prefer lilo to grub ...(also for a newbie), leave it on text, better to see what happen on boot!

I assume also that your bios is set as floppy is the first boot device ...

just start from the floppy to begin

setup a boot-manager on your windows disk and you'll choose wich OS yo want to play with. (powerquest has a good one)

further question? pm me

anyway ... get a book for beginner for Linux, read a bit, you'll feel more comfortable then.

cheers and have a nice discovery

francois

Hello Crushdepth,

I’m a happy user of Redhat Fedora Core 2

To select your “flavour” of the different Linux distributions I can suggest you look which distribution has the best support for your hardware. Even the easiest Linux distribution can be very difficult if your hardware is not supported “out-of-the-box”.

If you use ADSL you have to make sure that your ADSL modem works with the Linux distribution. Most UTP Ethernet ADSL modem/routers work without any problems.

For 56k modems, if you have a 56k internal modem it is probably a software modem (also called Softmodem or Winmodem) this will probably not work with Linux or very difficult to install. Most external serial RS-232 modems work without to many problems. (If you are interested I have one external modem for sell)

Last advice I can give is take a look of one of the many Linux forums (http://www.linuxquestions.org is a good one) and look at the selection HCL (hardware compatible list) and the newbie forum.

With kind regards,

Richard

Thanks All, much appreciated.

Simon.