Hey...Right now I'm an XP user seriously considering reformatting and setting up a dual boot system with an installation of LINUX. I don't want to be confined to basically just another windowed-type interface - I worked with DOS back in the day and I'm also a C++ programmer, so I'm not averted to typing or using a command prompt. Also, since I'm keeping XP around I can use that for fancier graphics / multimedia, and what have you... I don't need some distro without window support or anything like that, but the command prompt is fine with me. Any suggestions on what to use? I'm working on a Dell laptop (Inspiron 8600), so I may have some hardware compatibility issues (I have a wide-aspect display), and I have a Centrino processor if that matters...Any advice you can give me would be much appreciated. Right now I'm thinking Debian, but I'm flexible...I've heard that many of its packages are very outdated. Thanks!

- Daniel J. Rozeboom

Debian is as up to date as you dare. Stable is old, Testing is recent, Unstable is leading edge.

Get the testing CD to install, and upgrade to unstable once its installed. If your comfortable with the command line, the ncurses installer will be a breeze. But Linux's fancy multimedia is coming a long a treat, KDE could always use another c++ programmer.

Thanks for the insight...Do you think Debian is the right distribution for me to be looking at in the first place, and have you tried anything else? And do you know if it's likely to support my hardware?

Also...

Didn't quite follow this sentence - could you rephrase please?

Thanks a lot.
- Daniel J. Rozeboom

I've tried quite a few ( Redhat, Gentoo, SuSE amongst others ), once installed Debian is the easiest Distro to keep uptodate.

KDE is a Graphical Destop Enviroment for Linux. check www.kde.org If your into C++ Thats what KDE is written in.

The best thing to do is to try several distros, then make up your own mind as to which best suits your needs and preferences. One good central source for many of the most popular distros is www.linuxiso.org Experiment with a few first, then decide. Good luck with the project and welcome to LQ. -- J.W.

Thanks...the only thing is that I have dial-up so I can't effectively download these distros, I'm purchasing something on CD.

- Daniel J. Rozeboom

I am a laptop user myself and I have nothing but great things to say about Suse 9.1. I have tried many distros (RH, FC, Mandrake, Knoppix, ... ).

I have yet to try College Linux, Slackware (Just came out with RC10 or something like that) and Debian, but I have also heard great things about those as well.

FC 2 is a good distro, but like any, it has its drawbacks.

All in all, with all the things weighted in, I am a Suse 9.1 user with *at the moment* no need to go out and try to find a better distro. (Wireless internet and nvidia drivers are my biggest pro's about Suse, and YaST is very good too ... if you need a file, rather than finding it on the internet and having to configure, make, make install it, just go into YaST and it will do it all for you) ... not that compiling yourself is that hard though.

Mandrake is the only distro that works.

The rest are just crap ;-)

int sarcasm = 1;
/* closed minded much? */
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I use mandrake 10.0, and i love it. i have a dell dim2400, stock, no hardware conflicts of any type, other than my winmodem, but that is to be expected. as for distros, you may try slackware if you're up to a bit of a challenge but nothing too impossible. mandrake is for the complete newbie, very fluffy *me*
want impossible, try gentoo
as for the iso's, gotta friend with broadband and a burner?
SuSE has been rumored to have VERY good hardware support, lots of power, not too fluffy, and a reasonable installation. you may look harder into this.

SuSE rules!!! great for hardware configuration, easy updates and package management (YAST and apt-get) and easy to work with. if you're up to a bit of a challenge, and really wanna get your hands dirty, try slackware...you have to work it, it's not all done for you.

oh yeah...THEY WORK!!!!

All the distros have their good and bad points, and I've had to deal with a lot of Mandrake bugs over the years. But after a while you get used to a distro and get to know it, and that makes it easier to use that distro over others.

I used slack initially as it was the only one I could get to run on my 386 with a 1 gig drive (I think that was it, but it was a long time ago). RH 2 just wouldn't install as I needed a cutting edge kernel at the time. I went to rh 4.x later and stuck with that for a while, eventually using the KDE beta's... Then there was the KDE fiasco, so I went to Mandrake, and have been there since the beginning.

I've tried and used plenty of others alone the way, but mandrak is familiar and in the comfort zone, so I stick with it. It's fluffy on the outside, but it's still linux underneath and so I can use it for whatever I want.

Everyone will have their favorites for various reasons...

If you want to learn the ins and outs of Linux I would suggest Slackware, You kinda learn while you install it and have to configure it, so you learn how to do things. Gentoo and Debian are good also. If you dont really want to play around go with mandrake or suse. They are all pretty much the same except for how much you want the distro to do for you on install and some distro specifics. Good luck.

Isnt it illegal to download the softwares from http://www.linuxiso.org :P?

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Linux-Distributions and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Hmmm...thanks everybody for the information, lots of useful stuff here. It's as I feared. I'm gonna have to make up my own darn mind. I'm starting to think SuSE, b/c I know I'm going to have compatibility issues putting it on my laptop (video card, power management, stuff like that...) - I looked at some hardware compatibility sites I got at another board and it seems I may be in for a bit of a challenge. I might actually use the second hard drive on my desktop first just so that I can play around with the distro and get used to installing and setting up the OS, because I'm very nervous about putting my baby in harm's way. Can I safely assume that when working with the dual-OS setup on my laptop (one hard drive), if I mess with hardware settings or do something bad accidentally in my Linux OS, it won't mess up my Windows installation or data? Thanks.

- D.J.R.