hi everyone.. just surfed over here and registered myself..
as u might have already guessed im a TOTAL NEWBIE on linux and how it works!! however, i do wish to learn how to use it.. i hope u guys/gals can help me out a little..

anyway, heres my first question..
i have a spare pc lying around, so i thought i would use that to install linux on it and hopefully learn something about linux!!
so, wats the easiest linux to install and use for me??

thanks

good morning.

1) please use USEFUL thread titles (my pet hate i confess)

2) please use the search features of this site. they are good. if more people used them then maybe this question wouldn't get asked 3 times a day.

3) use mandrake

4) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=19727

5) do we have to have yet another 20 replies to this thread now?

6) linux rox.

mandrake is for windows users. IE, fantastic to get started, but annoying if you want to learn how stuff works under the hood.

To properly answer yr question, ANY distro is good. They all use the same kernel after all, and most come with very similar apps and utils, they just have a different installer, and maybe a few different drivers.

Get mandrake, but also look around for other linux disks, apps or OSs, as they will have stuff on that you will want to install too. (mandrake doesn't install make by default! ridiculous! and i have to get out my old red hat 7.0 CD if i want to run pico (which i do) since mandrake DON'T include it on their CDs!)

hmm, shame some people don't know what they are talking about.

1) to install make, just select the development tools on install

2) pico is part of pine and is very very much part of teh Mandrak 8.2 release.

???? okay, thanks for that, sorry, if i don't know what i'm talking about. I'll just shut up in future if you want.....

and i know how to install make, i just said they don't put it in the default install. why you should need to select development tools just to get make is beyond me. But then i was going to shut up. wasn't i?

To Calum:
Not everyone needs development utilities or lynx, links, pine etc. Linux is in such a stage that there are more and more people who don't want it and don't need it at all. And Mandrake is adressed to them. One of my friends installed MDK with default installation (not expert). He realized he don't have gcc after about 4 months (when he started to write his program, after all)...
Most newcommers to Linux don't want to use configure/make/make install combination. Installing an rpm by Software Manager is much easier.

yes, well often you can't get rpms of stuff, only .tgz files.

I know about all the different situations et c, i was just a little taken aback by being told i didn't know what i was talking about. I've not used mandrake much, so i don't know much about that particular distro. all i was saying was that my first impressions were that the ./configure make make install was not working due to make not being present, and when i try to run 'pico somefile.txt' at the prompt, no dice.

Whatever, linux is linux is linux, i think i will be installing pico from my red hat CD regardless of what anybody says. I'm not here for a fight, so if i'm going to get challenged all the time, then i'm off.

I understand that MDK can be VERY strange for someone who's long with Linux. That's why I always use 'expert' method, newcommers choose 'recommended' and everyone is happy

no arguments, just be careful about using CAPITAL LETTERS and sounding so definite. it can often give people the wrong impression about a query they have

try these words...

probably
think
believe
guess
likely

useful words, which i use a lot!

also tho, you take a windows hardcore user and just *try* to suggest to them that they should COMPILE the software before they use it... no chance. it's daft to the average user, and the average user will not have problems getting average programs in rpms. installing make means installing countless other libraries and such.. which takes up what.. over 150mb possibly?

once more, i must humbly apologise. i had to read my post twice to check whether you meant my capitalisation of IE or DON'T.

Since we are talking about total newbies here, i must say that after another quick look, pine did not install on my new mandrake system in the default install. i had to install it myself. pine IS on the mandrake CDs contrary to my previous post however for those of us looking for pico, it was not immediately obvious, since we did not know it was part of pine, having never used pine.

Anyway, compiling is hardly hard in linux, easier than they make it in windows, that's for sure.

Yo kids, now calm down!,
hehhehe, this isn't only about being correct always, it's about being wrong many times and about learning what we think is right sometimes is really wrong, i.e. earth being thought to be really flat.

But anyway, what acid was saying about compiling just meant that if you told some kid who uses Windows only to compile some software and then run it, he would just look at you with a big "UH??"

To azn_dude, you can try the Mandrake distribution, or SUSE, or RedHat. Just when ever you do install linux, don't try to rely so much in the GUI configuration applications, the command prompt has more power than you will ever imagine. Beside, the real Linux is not GUI at all,
These three distribution I've mention come with boot cd's which you just plug in and wala! they will pretty much install Linux for you.

Now, a personal recomendation is. If you have more than enough space in your hardrive to space, like if you hardrive is 10 gigs or more....don't even think about installing any distribution with the default install, definately go to Expert installation and simply click on "Install EVERYTHING", then you won't go after a couple of months....."Oh what a jackass I was, I should've installed this...."
I have an 80 gig, and the complete install takes only 3 gigs, so I did everything...then I got pretty much nothing to worry about later on...

Anyway, if you got any more questions, ask'em, we're all here to help you, even if a question is asked more than once.

zLinuxz

Definitely go with the install everything advice.

As for recommendations of distributions, SuSe is almost the friendliest that I have used, but I personally found, as a newbie that it is a bitch to configure video settings, especially on an NVidia card and wanting "non-standard" resolutions (1600x1200).

Red Hat is easier on that aspect, but uses Grub as a boot manager which I found impossible to configure so that I could still revert to windoze for gaming. In the end I had to delete it and re-install to select Lilo which I would certainly recommend for newbies as a boot manager of choice (no doubt some old hand can give me 1001 reasons why Grub is actually excellent and I am just being a fool, but I digress). There is also the small matter that RH7.2 will not mount NTFS partitions out of the box, but you could view this as a challenge, I have another thread in here somewhere that I am still working through to enable this.

overall between the two, Suse just edges it as a desktop Linux Distro, on my laptop with no wierdy video settings it rocks, especially as I still have to have windoze to run a couple of apps here and there (I will look at wine when I am more comfortable with running Linux apps on Linux).