Hi.

I am considering a switch to linux from Windows 98 SE (for reasons too numerous to mention) However, as your bog-standard end user I am in need of much coaching. I use my system, primarily, for photo-editing, browsing the internet, listening to music, web design (Dreamweaver at the moment) and word processing. I am looking for a Linux distribution that I can install on boot up and have going in the time I could with a windows install, and have little bother getting setup and going.

My systems current specs are:

AMD Athlon XP 2200+
Asus A7N8X-X (DDR M/Board) Nforce2
512MB DDR RAM
Geforce 2 Ti
2 x Maxtor 30GB HDD
Nvidia Nforce Audio (inbuilt)

Thanks for any advice you can give.

I'd recommend either Mandrake or SuSE for starting out on your first Linux intro ( easiest to install and get running ). Fedora at a push ( no cash ). But theres loads of others, and basically everyone has a favourite. Try a few out. ( Its Free ) all it takes is a bit of time. Download and burn discs from a few.

Photo-Editing - GIMP 2
Konqueror/Firefox - Internet
KMail/Thunderbird - E-mail
Juk/XMMS - Music
MPlayer - Video
Quanta - Web Design, Latest version is the closest thing to Dreamweaver.

All these will come with every single Distro.

I believe Mandrake will be your best bet as well. It will be a great starter distro, and as mentioned, will certainly come with the tools you've asked for above. Photo editing, IMHO, is much better in Linux than in Windoze, along with the web design tools. Good Luck, and don't give up too quickly, the learning curve might be a bit, but it's simply because it's new/different, not because it's worse.

Cool

Thanks leonscape, MasterC. I am downloading the SuSE Live-CD to trial it. Is there any special process I have to do when burning it to the CD, or will a regular burn do the job?

Cheers.

Regular burn should be fine. its a standard ISO image.

Cheers leonscape.

You should have a look at the imagemagick suite of programs for batch photo manipulation too.

Curious - I downloaded the SuSE LiveCD-9.1.iso file, from the US server as the UK one appears to be down, I burnt it using Nero onto a blank CD but on boot up the computer does as it always does - no Linux boot up

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Make sure your BIOS is set to boot from CD first rather than hard disk.

Jon

Cheers jon1591, I've been into the BIOS and told it to boot from CD-ROM first, no luck, so I went to the extent of telling it to boot from nothing but the CD-ROM, no luck. I have restored the BIOS to default now. It just doesn't seem to be seeing the boot disk at all.

Aetheired: Look at your CD in Windows Explorer. If you have one big file on there the CD is not right. You just burned a copy of the .iso file to it. You need to burn a CD from that .iso image. Look for some switch in Nero that looks like "Burn from Image" or "Burn from ISO". You know it worked if, when you look at the CD in Explorer, it has lots of different files and directories on it.

Ah, I see, yeah, there is only one file, cheers, back to the burning..

It is also a good idea to check the md5 sum of whatever iso you download to make sure the image isn't corrupted - there is a free windows tool called md5summer that lets you do that.