I live in Ecuador and have a cousin that lives in New York. My cousin wants to try linux but may have problems installing it. I think Debian is a great distribution to use but not the esieast to install. I know there are distributions like mepis, ubuntu, guadalinex and others that can easily be installed on the computer and then try it. WIch one woul you recomend a new bie that wants to use and nice and easy to use distro.

Greetings

well actually I would recommend to stick with debian (the stable version was just released last week...)
Now, since sarge (the new stable) debian comes with a very nice installer that is very easy to follow. Actually the default selection should work for most people...
In brief, I would advise to download an .iso from http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ burn it to a cd, boot, and follow the instructions...
Also, for someone who want to learn linux debian seem to me to be a very good option because it is rock solid... once it is setup you can forget about it... it is probably not true for some debian-based distro that call stable a release were plenty of package come from unstable...
Good luck!
A.

Ditto!

yep yep Good ole' Debian can't be beat.

But, if you want a distro that pretty much come setup and is Debian based try ubuntu. It has an awesome community and great how-to's in their forums.

yes i recommend also ubuntu or kubuntu

I am a _noob_ and used 3.1 Debian and the installer is easy. It leads you through the installation perfectly. It doesnt have the fancy gui but it does have basic gui for the installation. I recommend to use it.

Pic Knoppix,.. try it run it...

Then run Knoppix installer and you have Debian on your HD

I only installed Knoppix last night, but I am impressed so far.
If you have any hardware problems develop run knoppix-config, (I think that is the right command, I am not sure as I doing this from windoze).

UBUNTU FOOL!

That's what Mr. T would say.

I would think Debian is a lot less bloated than Ubuntu

You would think wrong sucka!

Debian is not that hard to install. Depending on your configuration, there can be some hardware recognition issues. I would recommend using netinstall to get Debian Sarge. Since you don't have experience with linux you will probably want either KDE or gnome. Most newbies prefer KDE. This will get you started. Kubuntu and Ubuntu are just Debian optimized for KDE and Gnome respectively. Still I would go with big, bad Debian. I think that you will have more packages than with Kubuntu of Ubuntu.

Morphix - great choise, but I had to fix some things