Oh wise and benevolent Linux gurus,

I'm new to the Linux scene and like many others, wish to dual boot on a machine that currently runs XP.

I want to learn the nuts and bolts of a Linux OS. I've tries different live CDs and most flavors of Linux have a pretty good desktop GUI, but which one would you recommend to someone who wants to get down at the command line and become an expert with the file system hierarchy, installing drivers, etc. - really know the nuts and bolts behind the GUI facade. (I'm an old MS DOS 5.0 / 6.22 / Win 3.1 hand who was used to dealing with config.sys and autoexec.bat on a regular basis, back in the day.)

My machine has an AMD Athlon 64 3800 CPU on an Asus A8N-SLI MB with 1 GB of RAM. The video card is an Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT. The network interface is through a WiFi LAN using a Linksys wireless adapter that talks with a D-Link router (which distro would likely best support my WiFi?)

Also my rig has 2 SATA hard drives and one EIDE disk for data files. I had tried to install Mepis before -with only one SATA and the IDE drive. XP was on the SATA and I partitioned the IDE for Mepis (using QParted from within the Live Mepis boot). I pointed Grub at the SATA drive, assuming it needs to modify the MBR on the primary drive even though Mepis was to be on the secondary IDE, right?

Well, after attempting to reboot I could not get back into XP - the machine kept repeatedly re-POSTing at startup and would not give me any boot choices. I ran recovery from the XP CD (FIXMBR and a couple of other commands to no avail) and ended up having to re-format and re-install XP on the SATA.

I really want to learn Linux.

Thanks for your sharing your wisdom.

You really want to learn linux? Then install linux from scratch. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Have fun!

You can learn a lot with any distro if you are prepared to look under the hood. If you want to try some challenging distros then I recommend Slackware, Arch and Gentoo.

Debian is another distro for advanced users.

Debian is for users at any level

Debian...A Sales Pitch

I recommend debian

I suggest pclinuxos. Simple and clean. It has both rpm and apt-get. It was one of the few that detected and cnofigured my wireless card.

Thanks for the advice apt get dude.

I did try the live CD version of PClinuxOS but never installed it or pursued it further because it wouldn't recognize my cordless logitech mouse. Well, actually the mouse would work for a couple of seconds and then freeze. Since I'm brand new to Linux, I don't know how to manually extract and install drivers (how do I handle files with tar.gz extensions?)

I'm glad it did recognize your wireless card. That is the problem I'm having now with Simply Mepis - wireless LAN no worky. I've been reading posts on different forums on the topic and have downloaded the latest driver from Linksys. Now I need to roll up my sleeves and learn how to install it. Which is fine - one of the reasons I want to learn Linux is to learn the directory structure, install drivers, doing the fun stuff at the command line...

Once I get good at the manual driver install thing I'll give PCLinuxOS another shot...



Reguards,

Ant jam

Gentoo will keep you going for a while if your after a challenge

www.gentoo.org

I have used Fedora core (version 2, 3, 4, 5 and RedHat 9) from last 3 years. In this short time I have also used SuSE (9.0, 9.1, 10.0), Mandriva 2006.0, Knoppix 3.2, Ubuntu (5.04, 5.10), Solaris 10 and FreeBSD (5.2, 6.0).
Now I am planning for a customized built linux. I heard about Gentoo and LFS. But they probably will take too much time to build. I know C, C++, Linux (only some commands, basic idea of Kernel). Am I eligible enough to build such systems ?

tamal to tell you the truth installing gentoo was easier than i anticipated. Yes it takes little longer to install but thats a one off. If you want to learn linux and up for the challenge i'd say go for it.

The more you learn about Gentoo the harder to leave it IMHO.

Cheers
Shelton.

Also recommending gentoo. After you go through the install manual and get a fully functioning system (if you follow the instructions precisely I promise that you will), you'll not only know alot more about linux (assuming you're new to it), but once you understand how to use portage, gentoo will become the easiest to maintain and customize distribution you've ever tried.

As a learning distro, it's great since it has a lot of hand holding in the great documentation, but it manages to not conceal anything from you.

Also, since the distribution is "from source," you will have far fewer problems with running a 64 bit operation, and you'll be able to compile alot of things native amd64 that you'd otherwise have to use 32bit with other distros.

Dependency is a major fact in Fedora core (along with other distributions) for what it installs lots of unnecessary packages. I have installed FC5 with minimal installation. The install.log looks like:

Installing libgcc-4.1.0-3.x86_64.
warning: libgcc-4.1.0-3: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 4f2a6fd2
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Installing sysreport-1.4.3-3.noarch.
Installing logwatch-7.1-8.noarch.
Installing alsa-lib-1.0.11-3.rc2.2.x86_64.
Installing alsa-lib-1.0.11-3.rc2.2.i386.
Installing nss_db-2.2-35.i386.
Installing tmpwatch-2.9.6-1.2.1.x86_64.
Installing parted-1.6.25-8.x86_64.
Installing nss_db-2.2-35.x86_64.
Installing initscripts-8.31.1-1.x86_64.
Installing vixie-cron-4.1-54.FC5.x86_64.
Installing dhclient-3.0.3-26.x86_64.
Installing mkinitrd-5.0.32-1.x86_64.
Installing bind-9.3.2-4.1.x86_64.
Installing caching-nameserver-7.3-5.FC5.noarch.
Installing kernel-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.x86_64.
Installing dhcdbd-1.12-1.FC5.2.x86_64.
Installing kbd-1.12-13.2.x86_64.
Installing cyrus-sasl-2.1.21-10.x86_64.
Installing sendmail-8.13.5-3.x86_64.
Installing glibc-kernheaders-3.0-5.2.x86_64.
Installing audit-libs-python-1.1.5-1.x86_64.
Installing mdadm-2.3.1-3.x86_64.
Installing pcmciautils-011-1.2.x86_64.
Installing quota-3.13-1.2.1.x86_64.
Installing acpid-1.0.4-2.x86_64.
Installing irqbalance-1.12-1.25.x86_64.
Installing yum-2.6.0-1.noarch.
Installing cpuspeed-1.2.1-1.33.x86_64.
Installing dhcpv6_client-0.10-16.1.x86_64.
Installing ipsec-tools-0.6.4-1.1.x86_64.
Installing rp-pppoe-3.5-31.x86_64.
Installing rng-utils-2.0-1.11.x86_64.
Installing bluez-utils-2.25-4.x86_64.
Installing policycoreutils-1.29.26-6.x86_64.
Installing util-linux-2.13-0.20.x86_64.
Installing hal-0.5.7-3.x86_64.
Installing openssh-4.3p2-4.x86_64.
Installing kudzu-1.2.34.3-1.x86_64.
Installing portmap-4.0-65.2.2.x86_64.
Installing ypbind-1.19-0.x86_64.
Installing openssh-clients-4.3p2-4.x86_64.
Installing selinux-policy-2.2.23-15.noarch.
Installing selinux-policy-targeted-2.2.23-15.noarch.
Installing prelink-0.3.6-3.x86_64.
Installing redhat-lsb-3.0-9.2.x86_64.
Installing redhat-lsb-3.0-9.2.i386.
Installing NetworkManager-0.6.0-3.x86_64.
Installing openssh-server-4.3p2-4.x86_64.
Installing netdump-0.7.14-1.2.1.x86_64.
Installing pm-utils-0.15-1.x86_64.
Installing system-config-network-tui-1.3.30-2.1.noarch.
Installing smartmontools-5.33-4.2.x86_64.
Installing nfs-utils-1.0.8.rc2-4.FC5.2.x86_64.
Installing yp-tools-2.9-0.x86_64.
Installing jpackage-utils-1.6.6-1jpp_2rh.noarch.
Installing lrzsz-0.12.20-21.2.1.x86_64.
Installing libgcj-4.1.0-3.x86_64.
Installing libgcj-4.1.0-3.i386.
Installing gjdoc-0.7.7-3.1.x86_64.
Installing minicom-2.1-1.2.1.x86_64.
Installing isdn4k-utils-3.2-40.x86_64.
Installing java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-1.4.2.0-40jpp_83rh.x86_64.
Installing gnu-crypto-2.1.0-1jpp_2fc.x86_64.
Installing jessie-1.0.1-3.x86_64.

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I have some questions here:
warning: libgcc-4.1.0-3: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 4f2a6fd2 : Why this warning occurs ?
Installing libgcc-4.1.0-3.x86_64. AND Installing libgcc-4.1.0-3.i386. : Why library of both architecture is installed ?
Installing beecrypt-4.1.2-9.2.1.x86_64. : What is the necessity of these kinds of libraries without a compiler ?
Installing libX11-1.0.0-3.x86_64. : Why the graphical library is installed in minimal installation ?
Installing gtk2-2.8.15-1.x86_64. : If a user wants to install only KDE, what is the use of GTK here ?
Finally, is it a minimal installation? If yes, then what is your opinion about the packages of LFS ?

Package managers do not just install packages for no reason. What would be the point of doing that? Dependencies are installed because they are needed by other packages. If you look at your list you have system-config* and firstboot which require gtk2. Most of the Fedora Core gui config tools are built using gtk2, so if you install anyone of those, gtk2 and its dependencies will be installed. Xorg is installed because firstboot and some of the packages you selected are gui apps.

As for the NOKEY error, it means that you have not imported the Fedora Core gpg key used to sign their packages. The gpg is used to validate the origins of the rpms.

I have been using Fedora since core 2, and before that i used Redhat 8 and various version of Mandrake, YUM is really great, and i guess the fact that im jused used to Fedora keeps me comming back with every version.