Ok, I have had it! I'm so sick and tired of RPMS I tried to use SUSE and YAST, somtimes it works and finds the packages sometimes it doesnt, I tried to use mandrakes URPMI but on a dialup trying to download all that info just to get it up takes like three years. Redhat/Fedora Forget it, i hate the commandline,xandros/desktop lx and linspire dont have alot of packeges available, I really want an easy to use installer, i come from the windows world, i need some hand holding for now, please will someone, help me! Im thinking of Slack or maybe Libranet, u know somthing easy to intall, but the packege manegement is the thing i want the most. when will the perfect linux distro come out for newbies?

I've used Mandrakes RPMDrake with some success, but I've had better luck and far fewer headaches going to the source and compling the programs myself. Even as a noob I've found the commands simple and easy to understand.

Use tar.gz, works everytime from the commandline as you shouldn't be dependent on crap GUI apps to install on Linux.

I'd say use SuSE for some time and then get ur hands dirty with something else.
Like SLACKWARE!!! - fast , stable and simple
u can also try gentoo

Slack is great, in fact, I started with it as my main distro going right from windows. I believe it has a false reputation as being difficult to learn. Mostly because when you come from a windows world like I did, it's expected the have everything "just works". Once I got over the brainwashing that windows does to you I realized that I could think my way through most problems with slack. Anyway, my entire point is, if you try slack, go out and pick up Running Linux by Oreilly. And excellent book to get started with.

You may want to read the slackware book though, it's online at www.slackware.com which should get you started on basics if you need it.

BTW, slackware 10 used x.org for it's X system vs xfree86. So in any documentation you read that says to use xf86config or xf86cfg substitute xorgconfig and xorgcfg respectively. Otherwise they seem to work the same. X.org is a rather new thing so it will take a little time to get the books updated I guess.

Also, try to search around for a local linux user group. (try googling for Linux User Group or LUG maybe). I've started going to one near me. It's very informative.

Brian

does slack have an easy to use pkg installer?

MEPIS is a debian-based live-evaluation CD. It has a graphical package manager called Kpackage. Kpackage is a front end for debian's powerful apt-get package management. MEPIS has great hardware autodetection. If you get it running as you'd like in live-evaluation mode, there is an icon on the desktop to copy your configuration to the hard drive. It is the easiest linux installation I have yet encountered. I have installed various releases of Mandrake, Red Hat, Fedora, and knoppix.

Slack has a package tool called "pkgtool" .
It is called from the command line by typing... well... pkgtool .
It uses packages in the .tgz format. (Slackpacks)
There are alot of .tgz's around.
I think you can also make your own.
In fact you can make them out of RPM's with the included
"rpm2tgz"

also u dont have dependency hell in slackware!

hehe . . . yah, when your package depends on something that is not installed, you have to dig it up yourself.

Thats the reason i gave up my lovely slackware and came to Gentoo Land!!

www.swaret.org

Has builting dependency checking. Just read the documentation.

I've never had a problem with dependency's even without swaret. Because everything I try to install tell me if I need something when I try to run it, then I just search the packages on slackware.com (they have a nice package search). Or grab it from www.linuxpackages.net (a great slackware pkg source). Or, failing that there is always compiling from source.

Brian

i use gentoo

it uses portage as the installer, and its very easy to ... tho i never used rpm's before i used gentoo all i used was text based distros, and compiled from source a few things a day (trying to get a working system ....)

also theres no real dependency problem (the small one is that you have to set it up right so some packages arnt installed, like kde ... i don't want kde or gnome so I'm careful to check what a package wants to install before installing it )