After coming to Slackware I personally prefer to see and know what I install and what this package does. Please, you must admit that using source packages is more accurate and cleaner too.

I agree with ttolst - use a distro such as Fedora or Mandrake. They are much more forgiving than some other distros. Once a user has made it over the first hurdle (and discovered the better world with M$) then he or she can choose another distro to try. Nothing wrong with Slackware or Debian but they are not ideally suited to a newbie. Your analogy of switching to a bigger better car is about as silly as learning to drive in a high performance car. Possible, but most people benefit from starting slowly and changing up to a faster/better/glossier car as their needs develop.
To answer the original question - simply insert the CD/DVD in the drive and reboot the machine. Both Fedora and Mandrake will guide a new user through the installation process with relatively few problems. Good Luck. Jan

Oops - typing mistake! That should be 'the better world WITHOUT M$' - but you will have all realised that, otherwise why are you reading this Forum? And another continuation of the vehicle analogy - Linux and Microsoft = Sports Car and walking stick. Jan

At the risk of coming across as being a "know it all" rather than "knowledgable"...

The original poster indicated that he had installed Red Hat to play around and learn Linux, and had been having difficulties getting access to the Internet using the Red Hat tools. What the poster didn't say was which version of Red Hat or what kind of system it was installed on.

Certainly going to something like Fedora or Ubuntu should give a newbie user a bit more help in finding the configuration controls.

However, I think that when the user has the new system up that the problem will remain until we can help him address his network issue. And in that case I hope that once he has settled on a distribution that he will post information such as machine, network card (or cards), and general setup over in the Networking forum so that we can try and address that issue as well.

Now, as for which distribution I use after having tried all of them and even building a custom system using Linux From Scratch... well I don't know that it's really applicable to this situation

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Ranting and rambling here since 2002

Actually, he did state that he is using redhat 9 ;-) Which can be quite annoying to setup on modern hardware. And i don't really find the older redhats particularly friendly as desktops, although redhat 8 scored points by being the first with a unified look.

And yes SlackerLX, i do like source packages, as long as i can uninstall them again, am running a self compiled development snapshot of KDE for instance. I tried running a linux from scratch system, was fun for a few months, then it became a chore :-) But i am a software developer and system administrator, and not a newbie trying to learn to use linux :-)

Trial and error, people, trial and error!
Essence of learning! If to be completely honest I have used Slackware install disk about 20 times in my box only, not counting the instalations I performed for my friends. What can I say....Only one thing....PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT!

Regards