Hey, I have been on and off trying to install gentoo for the past 6months or so =) because I liked the themes and graphics =) But now I realize I don't know enough to install gentoo succesfully =) (after a lot of trys at stage 1, and 1trys at a stage 3, but that's not the point) Debian looks hard, Mandrake you have to pay for and I hear it messed up many dual boots with xp.

I want to get linux up and running but I don't want red hat, I don't know what fedora is, and I really need a easy installation because I have been through hell and back with gentoo (the un-gui install that has a install guide that is a few dozen pages long).

So I have been on the forums for a bit now, and I am looking at suse. It seems to be a good operating system. But I also have windows xp on /dev/hda1 (first partition).

Can somebody please tell me if Suse is a good system to dual-boot with xp? Any suggestions to a different operating system (not including: gentoo, debian, mandrake, red hat, knoppix, lindows) I have looked at alot and I think suse is good, so please advise.

IMO, Suse is a good system if you want something that "just works". It always seemed more stable and reliable than either RedHat or Mandrake. My personal favorite is Slackware. It will probably require some work to set it up, but it's far easier than Debian or Gentoo.

Thank you, best answer I could ever hear.

btw- i was thinking about slackware also, but it is a little complicated, and now I do want a unix enviornment that just works so that I can actually learn about linux and not installing linux (like my "fun" with gentoo install)

I will try out slackware probably in vm ware soon (when i get suse up)

thanks

**update

so i install this by entering the cd...

then i type

linux install= ftp://ftp-linux.cc.gatech.edu/pub/suse/suse/i386/9.0

then it should be a gui on screen step-by-step thing? i really have to watch out for partitions because i have a dual boot with xp... tips anybody

So ne1 know if that is right? (type in the above code, then its step-by-step)
Also how do I save my windows xp pro partition and install suse?

SuSE is the best newbie distro ive come across. its true, it 'just works'. once u familiarize urself with linux a bit, try taking off the training wheels and try more advanced distros like gentoo, slackware, or even LFS

If you have the cd just reboot from the cd????

Maybe you could give Arch Linux a try. Good for people with a basic understanding of Linux (and for people comfortable in the command line) and it gives pretty good step-by-step instructions.

But honestly, there's no way you could mess up the Gentoo install. All you have to do is follow the docs. You can install gentoo if you can type what's in the docs. That's not hard, is it??

SuSE is pretty bloated and really doesn't give you choices. If you are okay with having numerous packages that you will never use, having to use RPMs to install your packages correctly (and from binary, mind you) and if you're okay with using only crappy WMs by default, then go for SuSE. But I really think that you'd be better off with Slackware. There is not a possibility you could mess up the install in slackware. It's idiot-proof. See, you have to work a bit at getting Slackware set up as a full-blown workstation distro. In fact, I learned most of my basic linux skills by doing a lot of extra work on slackware such as upgrading to the latest and greatest kernels (slackware has always been behind the latest and greatest by at least one or two versions, ever since 8.0), I installed enlightenment on 9.0 which wasn't offered, so I learned about the X Windows System... and I didn't use GNOME or KDE ever because they suck, and I learned a lot because there was no graphical file manager (because they suck) -- many simple commands that many newbs never learn because their hands are being held by crappy WMs I learned because I used the command line for almost all my tasks -- however, my machine was still very easy to handle and I had no problems at all getting tasks done -- they were much faster on command line, they just take more knowledge to do.

It's much better in the long-run to be minimalistic because, like what Slackware is trying to do, they want you to use as much Command Line as possible (thus getting its "unix" title) to learn linux. Then you can progress to greater things like Gentoo, which is the biggest treat for a linux expert you could ever have.

Hope this post helped out at all.