Hey Doctor!

I am using PCLinuxOS installed. There are upgrades via synaptic for KDE3.4 and a 2.6.11 kernel, however, the latter needs installing and if you have nvidia video or sound (intel8x0) a few bits have to be corrected manually as well. But by doing so you have a working HAL/DBUS system which means that you can make icons appear and disappear as you plug/unplug them, and there are no problems with (un)mounting.

Pre_9 should be out soon with all this built in. Yes it's beta, but it's STABLE (big caps double underline).

Hi Everyone,

Though it seems like a simple questions, the answer is not....
It mostly depend on, how cold the water should, into which you want to be thrown.

My Story:
I started my carreer in GNU/Linux about 2.5 years ago with SuSE. As I had installed WinBlows several times before, I wasn't much of a challenge. As a system, that can be installed and just works, it's fine - But if you want to installed any costum packages, you pretty fast run into the depency hell. I switched to Gentoo about 1.5 years ago, and I stayed since. I tried a few distros, but they didn't really convince me...

Slackware is great for the "Linux feeling", but it gets ugly when you want to update one or two packages - or this was my impression.
Debian sounds like a great idea, but it trashed my PC twice.... I'll give it another try when Sarge get stable this month.
Knoppix, Ubuntu, Mepis.... I havn't used them, but as they are debian based and from what I've heard, they must be great. Knoppix is probably the best LiveCD ever...
Fedora: no comment - I still have a noghtmare from RedHat...
Gentoo is a great distro, but I takes an awful lot of time to setup and to understand whats is really happening - Well I grew with this distro...
Commercial Distros: I can only repeat what has been said: not worth it! But often the best for beginners/switchers

I havn't voted yet, as I am still not sure which distro I should recomend.

Geronimo

It is not hard to upgrade a package, just type installpkg -u <package name> , that is all there is to it. Just thought I would expain it. Not offence meant by it.

I agree fully with the dependency hell thing. I spent many a night cursing at my PC and myself, lol.

But with all distros, they have there ups and downs.

I burned the Knoppix Live CD & I'm running it right now. Having a little difficulty though, can't seem to configure my soundcard. Since I have quite a few questions about this distro I'll start a new thread in the proper forum with them.

None taken... What I meant was not the installation itself, but the searching/browsing ftp-servers for packages. Compared to Debian or Gentoo where you just `apt-get upgrade && apt-get update` - or the other way around, I cannot remember - resp. `emerge sync && emerge -Du world`do...
Darn, I should stop taking about I distro I haven't used for so long... I don't want to start a flame war here... Slackware is a good distro.

Hope that cleared some things
Geronimo

I personally find that mandrake is the best distro for newbies.

But If you want to learn Linux properly, I would say Gentoo, and you get a lot of experience right away. Gentoo helped me learn linux alot. Even if I dont like the Gentoo Community, I like the distro, and it's the best Ive used to date (Apart from Free & OpenBSD )