well yea i tryed to explain that a lil yea i know it is a good distro for begginers but i see you in love with fedora lol like me if you like it hat badly then just get fedora download he iso an burn it to a cd an install it an if you have anay problem go to fedoraforum.org an you will get help there becasuse i see you keep say you like fedora 7

Do you have the free version of Xandros, or did you purchase it? That RH hat version is definitely obsolete, I'd scratch using that one.

Xandros is the first distro I got to work about 95%.. . 95% was the furthest I'd gotten on any distro to that point. This was about 2yrs ago. Only thing I never got to work was my TV card, despite following several online tutorials(I kept running into problems the tutorials mentioned, but none offered a solution). A couple minor annoyances, for some reason, I could not get GAIM to work. It would install fine, icon in menu, etc, but when I'd start it, I'd get an hourglass for about 30sec, then the application would not start. So I was stuck with Kopete, which I absolutely hated. I used it for about 6mo.

After that, I got Fedora Core 5. Finally got a distro to work 100%. TV Card, etc, everything. Everything worked, which thrilled me, but I didn't like the "feel" of it. I kept messing around with various Live CDs Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Suse, etc, but never stuck with them, for one reason or another. Used Fedora for about 6-7mo.

At that point, I learned about Ubuntu, and download Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper. 100% success, and I felt like I finally found a distro I'd like. There was a learning curve of course, but Ubuntu ended up turning me on to Debian, which I really like. I run various versions of Linux on my laptop, with Debian being the "main" one. Been using Ubuntu on my main PC since and am now running the beta version, which is running well for me.

I still try live Distros a lot, but none appeal to me like Debian/Ubuntu. There's various reasons I prefer Debian based distros, mostly due to its superior package manager. Another one I really like, is LinuxMint, which is more or less Ubuntu with a different GUI. If you have a CD burner and a high speed connection, just download some ISOs, burn them and try them. They're free.

http://www.ubuntu.com
http://www.linuxmint.com
http://www.debian.org

IGF

Me too. There are other good package managers out there, Mandriva (an rpm distro) has an excellent one called urpmi, but the Debian apt manager is the only one that truly rocks. Since I've started using Debian, I've hardly ever needed to get software elsewhere. This makes for a very secure system because you know that everything you download has been thoroughly tested on your particular distribution. Ubuntu and Xandros use this system too - which is why I think they are both better than Redhat, or Fedora for that matter.

Most of the full-on modern distros have a pkg mgr of some kind, so there's no real advantage of eg .deb based over .rpm based.
In either case, if you stick to the mgr you'll be fine.
If you manually download individual files (deb or rpm), you'll get the same dependency issues regardless.
When you install whichever distro you've got, run the cmd

uname -a

at the cmd line and post it (output) here so we can help you figure out which one you've got. The installer will most likely tell you exactly waht you are installing anyway.

Actually, I find that with .deb, you can install the package using dpkg -i, and then run apt-get install -f to fix the dependency issues. I haven't found this to be true with .rpm.

I've also found deb based distros easier to upgrade as opposed to requiring a clean install for new releases.

I've used both .deb based distributions and .rpm ones, but I really do find that it's considerably easier to download and install new programmes with .debs. I encountered this dependency problem frequently with the rpm distributions, but I have yet to experience it with Debian/Ubuntu. I think it's a simple question of size: the Debian repositories are so huge that you almost always find what you want there. But there are advantages of choosing .rpms over .debs, of course - especially if you use pure Debian. Debian tends to be more 'out of date' than other distributions. For instance, Debian Etch comes packed with Openoffice 2.0, whereas we are now on 2.2 (I think). And as Debian releases are far from frequent, I'll probably still be stuck with Openoffice 2.0 when Openoffice 3.0 comes out! Likewise, Firefox 3.0 is soon to arrive, but it'll be a long time before I get my hands on it. There are ways round this, and Ubuntu is considerably more up to date as there is a new release every 6 months, but I prefer to be patient and have a reliable system. The choice is, I think, between Debian stability and ease-of-use (as regards downloading and installing programmes that is) and .rpm up-to-dateness. But that's one of the things that's great about Linux: the choice is huge, and it can be bewildering to beginners.
Anyway, let's not turn this post into another .rpm vs .deb debate! That's been done before! The point is, what should nasirjones73 choose: Xandros or Redhat-Fedora. What I want to say in my posts is that I personally believe that .deb based distributions are easier for a beginner (on condition that you don't use pure Debian, that is) than the .rpm ones. This I think is borne out by the ever increasing "newbie friendly" distributions like Ubuntu and Simple Mepis basing themselves on .deb rather than .rpm.
Do tell us how you get on nasirjones73: we're all itching to know!