I'm very graphical person. I have used mandrake before and pretty much liked it. I downloaded the linuxPC os to try it. I haven't installed it yet. I downloaded all five of the ISO's I would assume that they are different flavors of linux? I'm I right or not?

Thank you
Mission

You could try ubuntu, very stable & ideal for folks using GUI

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I thought that maybe you have dopwnloaded PClinuxOS, but there are more than 5 versions of that distro-

http://www.pclinuxos.com/?page_id=10

Without actually knowing what distro (or disros) you have got its impossible to know, but I would guess that you have downloaded several different versions of one distro. If I'm right, the main difference between the .isos is the desktop enviroment.

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Graphical -- try http://www.pclinuxos.com/?page_id=215

not! different Desktop Environments (DEs) and/or WindowsManagers (WMs) is all -- same distro.

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Welcome to the forums Mission! My advice is try a few Live CDs and install the one you like best. It is a rite of passage.

Make sure you choose a distro with good support and a friendly community. Good luck!

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Heres a couple sites that may give you some insite

http://www.lesbell.com.au/Home.nsf/b...c?OpenDocument

Or perhaps you've been here

http://distrowatch.com/

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ubuntu is the best newbie distro in my opinion. it has basically an infinite number of packages made for with once you learn how to add new ppa's. it has a huuuuuge wiki with lots of information, and it's, by a landslide, the most commonly used distro.

if you're looking for an ubuntu with lots of packages preinstalled (codecs etc) plus preconfigured to look good, then look into linux mint.

I think, and probably everyone else reading this thread thinks, that you mean that you primarily intend to use a Graphical User interface, rather than wanting a good selection of graphics apps (Gimp, krita, darktable, etc, etc) or that you have a particularly graphic turn of phrase; is that right?

PCLos or Mandrake: Mandrake or PCLos?

Probably somewhere between. When people (often, but not exclusively newbies) refer to a 'flavour' they usually mean 'a distro'. Sometimes, they also mean 'variants within a distro'. So a distro is something like Ubuntu/Mepis/Mint/Debian and the variants may be 32 or 64 bit, different GUIs (Gnome/KDE/XFCE/LXDE). Sometimes there are also other variants (server, Long Term Support, premium) too. given all this variation, you can see why the word 'flavour' is a bit ambiguous. (And also the Ubuntu variants get named with a slightly different convention to everything else; for most things you might say 'I've got such-and-such a distro with kde (and you might have several GUIs in one distro); in Ubuntu, the kde variant is called Kubuntu, LXDE Lubuntu, etc, etc...you can still install more than one GUI, but it is unclear whether it has a proper name).

As well as distrowatch referred to earlier, you might enjoy using this distro chooser.

I find that applications I need and hardware I have play a part in my choice.

Hey wow...that's a lot to chew on...but very helpful. I appreciate everyone's help. I think I will try the Ubuntu version. I installed pclinux os today and set the partion to install it, along with win7 and winXP and using easyBCD but it still does nothing when I choose linux to boot into. My other OS's are good to boot, just not linux. Do I write the MBR in easyBCD or what I'm not sure?

Thank you;
Mission

if you install ubuntu it should preconfigure the grub bootloader to be able to boot into windows or ubuntu, or whatever other os's you have installed. it can also auto configure partitions for it to work well with it aswell, though i've only done manual partitioning.

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I used PCLinuxOS when it first started out - it was really great. It was based on Mandrake (which is now Mandriva). Both are great, but I wasn't all that happy with the stability - but others are, so that's just me. Ubuntu is a wonderful distribution, based on Debian - which is known to have one of the largest repositories of available software. openSuSE is another great one - I played with it recently and it "just worked" out of the box just as Ubuntu does.

However, I started out with Redhat 9 back in 2003 and since then, I have always preferred command line and configuration files... Meaning I like minimalistic OS's and low overhead (the reason I am using Arch - after multiple failed attempts at running Gentoo).

So... if you were a Windows user, you might be satisfied with Kubuntu - the KDE based Ubuntu distribution. If you were a Mac user, then Ubuntu might suit you with its Gnome desktop.

Good luck in your search! You might consider installing VirtualBox, Virtual PC, or VMware on your existing OS and then, instead of wasting CD's, you can just have the virtualization program mount the .iso's and test them virtually - before you try them on your physical machine.

Two words: Linux Mint. This is the distro I usually recommend to those who don't want to do a whole lot of command-line tinkering (at least at first ). It's basically Ubuntu with preinstalled multimedia codecs and a few other extras that Ubuntu doesn't have for one reason or another (one of those being that the multimedia codecs are patented, and thus have restrictions on redistribution/use).

Try Mandriva nice desktop, very easy to use etc.

If you are able to boot your two windows versions and not PCLinuxOS you haven't modified the windows boot files correctly with EasyBCD. If you are going to use EasyBCD, read some of the documentation. Also, if you are using EasyBCD, you should have selected to install the Grub bootloader for PCLinuxOS to the partition on which you installed it.