Hi, I'm a newbie with a few questions:

1. What Discro (I know, this is probabley a faq). Really I have no experince but I want to learn and get to grips with the high level distros like slackware, but learn as I go along. What do you recommend.

2. I'm building a new PC at the moment- which processor works better with Linux, Athlon XP or Petium 4. Some obne told me that Microsoft secretly controls Intel so their CPU' are delibratly crippled for Linux...

3. How do you order WineX?

1. I recommend you head over to www.distrowatch.com and read up on all of them. Find out which one best suits your needs. You will get many answers from people here advocating certain distributions, and many will recommend their personal favorite (like mine, Slackware), but it is ultimately your choice. That's what's so great about Linux--choice. Exercise your right to choose from the get go and check out www.distrowatch.com

2. I think you can use either one you choose (again, a choice you can make!). As far as I know, there's many people out there who use both. I don't know about the MS/Intel Linux crippling thing, but who knows?

3. You can do a search on Google for Linux at http://www.google.com/linux for WineX and I'll be willing to bet that you get more than enough websites to download it.

4. Hope this helps some.

1- dist are just personal taste some have tool to make your life easy i would recommed mandrake cause it has some tools to help newbies.

2-i am not sure about it. but as Texicle said there are people using both and no complaing about it.

3-you can download it from ftp.gelecek.com.tr

1. In no particular order, Mandrake, Suse, and Red Hat are usually suggested as newbie friendly. The concept of an "advanced" distro is partly fact and partly fiction. It usually has more to do with whether a distro installs and sets the system up for you automatically than what can be done to configure and use it later. The "advanced" part comes into play as you need to know and understand how to choose and set up a system that does not do it automatically.
2. I, also, believe you are free to choose which processor you want to use.
3. Don't know.
Good Luck.

Another question- do you recommend I replace Open office with Star Office?

The obvious suggestion to the answer of which is best is to try the free version first, because if you get on with it OK, the you haven't had to spend any money.

You WILL ultimately have to spend if you are going to try the current version of star office. But, as open office is based on it, then what's the point in paying for the commercial version.

If Star Office comes with your distro at no additional charge (I am thinking Mandrake Power Pack has an OEM Star Office (??)) I would be inclined to install it rather than open office. I believe Star Office includes the database (Starbase?) while Open Office does not. There are probably other things as well.
On the other hand, if you have to pay extra, there is usually not a compelling reason (other than you wish to support Sun's efforts) to use Star Office over Open Office. They are almost identical.

StarOffice 5.2 came with my purchased Mandrake 7.1. It's claim to fame as far as I'm concerned is that it handles some email attachments that Netscape can't open and most of my correspondents are using some version of M$. Can someone tell me if OpenOffice has that capability? I would like to try it sometime in the future.

Sega91,

As someone who has just gone through the basic decisions (3 weeks ago), I would recommend Mandrake 9.0 and AMD. If you get the Mandrake Power Pack, it does come with the OEM version of Star Office. I didn't and have just been playing with Open Office so far.

I tried two other unnamed distros, but ended up trashing both of them because of install problems caused by my lack of knowledge. Mandrake was completely automatic and only took about 30 minutes total.

Why AMD? Because all of my machines are AMD-based and I think you get more for your money from AMD. Biased I am.

A fellow

1. Distro: if you ask me and you say you want to learn: Gentoo
2. Processor: both AMD and Intel work just fine, but my impression is your money is better spent on AMD.
3. WineX: dunno, search google
4. OpenOffice does most of what you'd want from an office suite (including M$ formats). Try it out, it's free. If you find you need something more, then try StarOffice.

The idea of buying the mandrake 9 (power pack) on dvd would make sense, I was pleased with just the "standard version" as the bit's that were mildly irritating where already in place and ready to go (i.e. the nvidia drivers and the alcatel speedtouch usb microcode).

So yes, I feel that would definitely make sense. Though I also doubt whether you'd actually bother d/l'ding open office if you got the distro with star office - lets face it, they would be the same, except the additional bits that you get with "Star".

As far as the choice of chip/mobo is concerned, Yes I understand and agree that you probably get "more for your money" using an AMD, though I would add the caveat that, with a P4 (or whatever intel model) you get the correct cooling fan etc with it, and I understand that with the AMD chips, you have to buy the fan as a seperate item, and you would need to ensure that the fan you buy has the "wherewithall" to cool the chip - It's fact, that AMD chips run hotter than the intel equivalents. And it would be a bit of a bummer if you mismatched chip/fan and had snags with it i.e. having to get extra cooling facility or worst case scenario burnt it out.

That said, if you look around, you can get a P4 at about 2.5 gig's for a reasonable? price, though if you are looking for "the mutz nutz" you will end up paying an extortionate premium.

I would say it's largely down to your budget and doing a little research before parting with your cash, Tom's hardware guide is probably as good a place as any to start looking into this.

Just my 2pence worth

regards

John

There are also amd-chips with cooler "packed-in-box". That's how I got mine anyway.

Ha, I can blackcat that one yngwin, I was looking around the other day and found the "Uber Cooler", a case made of perspex, with lots of holes drilled in it, but fitted with an internal pipe layout, that connects to an external water cooler. Not only that, but the pipe layout was also fitted with "L.E.D's" that had a programmable lighting sequence.

Flash or what !!!

Prepare a week linux feast ;-)

1. Go to www.linuxiso.org -> download your distro of choices.

2. Wintel = fishy. Go with AMD! Best bang for your buck. Invest better sub-components.

3. See above posts.


Have a lot of fun!

Just one last question:

Can two distros "co-exsist" or do they have to be partitioned seprately. You see I'm getting Mandrake and Debian.

As for my CPU, I'm stuck between the 2800+ and P4 2.8ghz (I've seen the price of 3000+ and 3.06 P4 :0), but probabley get Athlon as it sounds as if it's more powerful than the P4, and the new Barton chipset sounds cool.