New to Linux, and not sure which distro to use.

Looking for one that won't have to much trouble with newer harder. Box will be an AMD XP 2200+, Asus A7V8X-X (on board sound), Geforece4 Ti4200 and a D+Link Nic.

Other than drivers something thats good for a newbie to get the feel of it.

Any recommendations for file systems, and the possibility of dual booting with XP (not completely ready to drop it yet, least not until I get the gaming aspect figured out). Hard drive will be 80gig so space isn't that much of an issue.

Any thoughts welcome.

whatever distro you agree with.
different distro's have different philosiphys.

as for hardware compatability, if linux supprts it, but your distro doesnt, a quick kernel re-compile will bring any distro up to date, but you definatly want a distro with a newer kernel as possible, newer kernels will support more hardware. at the time of writing this, the newest kernel is 2.6.7, but all 2.6 kernels will be similar.

you say you want gamming... well i can tell you now that you have the best graphics card.
nvidia is very linux friendly. and is supported by ALL distro's (except the anchant ones)

www.nvidia.com -> click drivers -> GForce -> linux IA-32 (assuming you dont have a 64bit machine) download the driver, read a nvidia install guide. easy.

Sonek - head over to the Linux-Distributions forum. This question comes up very very regularly. It is all a matter of opinion - only you know what the best distro is. What the best distro is for you, for what you want it for.

Check our reviews section, look at www.distrowatch.com - there are loads of opinions out there. Most of us have tried 5 or more til we settled on one we like.

And welcome to LQ

Moved to a more appropriate forum, to live with
all the other more or less identical ones :)




Cheers,
Tink

I agree with the above comments.. choosing a dist is a very personal preference type of thing..

For ease of use, most people recommend Mandrake, Fedora, SuSE and various others.

Personally I like my OS/dist to be fast and easy enough (i'm not afraid of the command line in any sence and like to get my hands dirty messing around with config files etc). Hence why i have made the move to Debian. Some may argue about how out dated the "stable" version is, but thats what the "unstable" and "testing" tree's are for. These terms might scare someone off but there really isn't any major issues with it. I have tried many debian based dists (which is what i suggest all beginners do), such as MEPIS, Knoppix and Libranet (only an old version unfortunatly).

I'd recommend giving Knoppix a go, the live cd means you can have a play and not damage anything, and if you like it you can install it to your hard drive quite simply. MEPIS is also very good and similar, its also a live cd that can be hard drive installed and definatly worth a look. I only recommend knoppix over mepis because knoppix is more up to date at the moment.

apt package management is great and very easy to use when combined with KPackage or Synaptic

I play games a fair bit, and installing Cedega (formally WineX) to play windows games couldn't be easier with a .deb package being available off the site. Yes there is .rpm but i don't really like rpm dists anymore, due to in the past having a hell of a time with dependencies and things just breaking all the time. I have heard that its advanced a bit now though and you can even use programs like Synaptic in rpm based dists and its very easy to use. But i'll stick with my debian

Anyways, i suggest you try a few dists (if your bandwidth permits, lol) and use what you find to be best.

I do favour the debian dists but dists like fedora and mandrake certainly do look nice and have some great features.

I has your setu (apart from the DLink) and everything worked with SuSE 9.1 Pers
off their FTP.

I was a noob too (a month ago) and it was really nice with me.

-Riddick

...and I am happy to report that SimplyMEPIS 2004 RC4 -- a live CD-- configured my desktop D-Link card without a problem. It's a G520 (802.11 g) Atheros chip card. I have tried many distributions and configured many a file, all without success until yesterday. (yes, I tried the Linuxant driver a few months ago with SuSE 9.0; it was a no go) I have not tried SimplyMEPIS on my Sony laptop yet (it has other issues with the CD/DVD drive) but I suspect that it will be just fine when I finally get it to load.

If you're looking for a distro that likes D-Link atheros cards, give this a try. If it works for you, then I strongly suggest that you make a contribution to MEPIS.

Mary Tee