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As you can see, this is my first post and I'm sure you've been asked this kind of thing a million times, so bear with me...please.
I'm currently a user of XP Professional and I've decided recently that I would like to try Linux. I don't want to do the full on switch right away so I'd be dual booting for now. I've tried Ubuntu 6.10 for a very short time but for some reason it just didn't seem like it was right for me.
So, what I was wondering is, what is a good distro for a newbie? I'd be using it for the usual things...internet browsings, e-mail, music etc. Also, which is the easiest for adding hardware etc. I have a ATI Radeon 9550 vid card and I also have a second IDE HDD that has movies, music, documents stored on it that I would like to access through Linux.
So, does anyone have any suggestions, and to be honest, I'm not very good with command prompts and stuff! lol Thanks very much for any help that you can give me.
My personal preference is Mandriva. The free edition will do most of what you need out of the box, but for proper video support, you will either need to buy the Powerpack edition (prefered) or configure the system's package repository with commands provided at http://easyurpmi.zarb.org and manually install the drivers from there.
I like it because I find it the most useful and easiest to work with for the new user. As a test, I had my mother install Mandriva 2006 on my laptop from DVD, and within an hour, she was on the net, browsing her favorite forums.
One of the students in my class even installed it on his dad's system, put the XP background on it, and his dad never new the difference. Of course it really depends on the usage model (don't expect every game to work for example), but the usability is getting quite good.
MandrivaONE is a live cd version, meaning it runs solely off the cd. It can be installed, but it is limited in what it has initially. I don't know how well it would interact with your hardware, but I doubt that you will have full support for your ATI video with it. 2D, but not 3D support.
This is the distro I use and recommend, Why because it works right out of the box. No need to configure Everything, everything just works. It also comes as a 1 CD install that is a live CD that you can install later if you wish.
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