hi everyone,

i have finally had a enough of windows and i want to change my laptop to linux, firstly what is the best distro that people recommend, i am trying to decide between ubuntu, fedora, mandriva and ultimate.

secondly how do i go about installing all the drivers on a acer aspire 5920G laptop, and where can i download these from?

any help is greatly appreciated, and if possible just in simple english as this is really new to me

I wouldn't say there is a "best distro" out there.

I would say gentoo linux is the best but quite honestly everyone would have a different opinion.

Its a matter of what you like and what you don't like.

I like Gentoo because It goes MUCH deeper into how linux works. For obvious reasons this wouldn't be good for somebody just starting out with linux.

Ubuntu has been known to be easy to use for people just starting with linux. (I find xubuntu to be faster and easier than ubuntu but thats just me)

Drivers in linux are included in the linux kernel. Any support for the hardware is included in the kernel that comes with the linux distro. You don't have to download drivers like in windows.

I hope I didn't use to many linux related terms.

Oh yeah and the linux kernel has nothing to do with popcorn... err... just so you know!

Also in case you are wondering, I have two computers one with gentoo linux and one with windows xp.

I primarily only use the windows xp one for games. Even then thats not very often.

i might try to download a few different live cds and see which one looks best, i didnt realise that all related drivers were included, thanks for your help so far

@ nasa_pete:

Personally, I have found Ubuntu to be the distro which made some driver issue go smoother. Thats not to say that with more education and knowledge other distros are not MUCH better. Any way, the live cd thing was what I did too. Have fun man !!

If you don't feel like burning a thousand CD's on linux distros you should check out unetbootin.

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

It allows you to run any linux distro on YOUR hardware but without actually installing anything and you don't have to burn a new cd for each linux distro.

Just download the version for windows and run the program. From there you can choose which linux distro to test and it will download and set up your PC accordingly. Then you can restart and choose the linux distro from the windows OS boot menu.

After you are done testing the linux distro you can reboot back into windows and run unetbootin again and it will remove the last linux distro and then you can try another one.

Its a useful tool. It really is.

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