Sup
I am fixing to give Linux a try. The hardware I will use will be the following.

ASUS Intel 815 cusl2
P 3 900
Geforce 2
256 of pc133 maybe 512
maxtor 40 gig
hp cdrw forgot model at work right now
Do not know about sound or lan at the moment have to see whats laying around.

I ordered RH 7.3 personal. The thing is I do not have a lot of time and figured 7.3 would be the easy way to get my feet wet. I am not that great with any wriiten commands in fact I get lost in dos alot. The reason I am doing this is I am just tired of MS dealing out the big brother bull. I have had no problems with windows. All of the systems run well and I do not experince crashes belive it or not. So I would like to learn Linux. This box will be strictly RH unless some might think it would be better dual booting just so I can access the lan to get files I might need and store them on that partition until I get the lan working on the Linux machine.

Is this the right distribution for an individual to start on with limited time on his hands? The simplest to install and get up and running? I have no aspirations to become a guru at it just would like to try something different and not to difficult.

Thanks for all replies. Peace

Absolutely. Anything RH based would probably be easy to "get your feet wet" with. Everyone is going to have their favorite distro, but a general inquiry of "anything but windows" will work with an answer of "anything with linux". And as for ease of use, that too would be debatable, but I think would fall more under the Yes category, it is easy to use. A few pointers to help you on your road to freedom:

Don't get wrapped up with using the SAME program in Linux that you are used to using in winbloze; there are plenty of alternatives to most programs, and alot of them are considerably better if you give them a chance.

Comparing the "speed" of X (the gui in Linux) to the speed of winbloze gui is also not a good idea. The huge "selling point" on Linux is it's speed and usability at the console (in the command line), the gui is there to help you visualize things along the way. Although it's also for many other things, and does work VERY well, don't get over worked on the speed of it.

Do not be afraid to try new/other things. Just because something "works" do not assume that there isn't something better. On the same note though, if you find something you like, work with it, and use become comfortable with it, but do not limit your bottle of knowledge to one thing. This is another of the greatest things about linux, there are 13 ways to browse the internet, and that's just what's there by default.

Allow time for learning. Don't expect to be writing your own distro 3 weeks after you configure your first kernel. Do not stress over not figuring out how to build that first kernel either. It will come, just let it. Read alot of threads on here, just random searches for whatever is fine.

Take a trip over to www.linux.org and try out their tutorial. Very good info there, for general Linux knowledge, not geared towards any distro really. Also will help you to move around via the command line in Linux, which is where (hopefully) you will learn to do alot of things. Just because you may have struggled with DOS at one point or another (or even currently) doesn't mean it's the same thing in Linux land. I still "struggle" when trying to use that wanna-be command line OS too, but can navigate a Naval Fleet of AirCraft Carriers around Linux . Well not really, but I think you see what I am saying.

Best distro might pop up a few times in this thread, do not worry about that yet. Work with RH, it's linux, no more, no less. Get comfortable. Then go for it, try out others. Give Mandrake, or Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, Lycoris, Caldera, SuSE, LFS, Peanut, Yellow Dog, or many many others a shot. Contour the distro to you, or find one pre-contoured. The flexibility to do what you want in Linux is enough to keep you using long after MSFT has gone belly up for forcing so much upon the user.

There are probably volumes of info, on this site alone, that will help you learn so much about running Linux, but until you try it yourself, you won't know. So once you get your CD, strap it in, blast through the install, and find out what it truly means to run a free (as in free speech) OS.

As for your hardware, you should be fine. As long as you have patience, and like to read, no problems really doing much in Linux. Remember you have the "man" pages, so if you have a program but don't know how to use it:
man programname
will give you loads of info. You also have www.ldp.org and www.linuxquestions.org of course. For your video card, it may not work "out of the box". Check out www.nvidia.com and find the linux section. There are plenty of threads around here to help get that going if you don't understand the instructions very well, plus at the bottom of the instructions it links to a forum site that could probably answer just about any other question you may have.

Your burner, depending on how it connects = how easy it will be to setup. Again, loads of threads for all types of hardware, check out the Hardware Forum: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...?s=&forumid=18

As for sound, I think there are very few cards that are actually producing sound that aren't supported somehow in linux.


Anyway, so after you get it installed (or if problems arise before then) check here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/search.php
AND here:
www.google.com/linux

Those are probably going to be your 2 best search engines for a while (and even more of a help later).

If you don't find an answer to your problem after searching there, by all means ask. There are plenty of true Guru's here who are more than happy to accept a challenge, or if it's something they know well, happy to share the knowledge.

Good Luck on Linuxing, and hope the stay isn't short

1 more thing... Welcome to LQ!

Cool

MasterC
Thanks for the reply.

A year or 2 ago I was looking into installing a Linux system on a machine but it still looked a little complicated to me. At that time I did do some research and even downloaded slackware, mandrake and rh. Just never did anything with them.

After MS came out with xp and the registration I said enough is enough. Like I said dont have a lot of time but I have a long life I hope, So a little at a time will be fine. I am very good at the hardware side but not that good on the software side. I have very few people that I know that even care about computers. Most of everything I have learned has come from forums such as these and people like yourself.

Orginally I was thinking about using an ECS k7s5a mb with an xp1600 but decided on the 815 p3 setup because somewhere I read that Linux might perform better on the intel stuff. I am not concerned with it being a speed demon just stability at first and the rest will come later.

I am looking foward to getting started.

Thanks for the reply. Peace

EDIT Thanks for the links also.

I am basically "in the same boat" as you. Although there are tons of people I work with into computers, none of them are even the slightest bit interested in Linux.

As for the intel thing, it used to be that way from what I hear, but the problems have since then been cleared up, and things are looking good for AMD now. No biggie now, and I am sure you are going to be fine with that setup. Plenty of system to run just about anything you'd like.

And you're welcome, I like responding to threads like this

Cool

Sound and lan......if you not interested in 5:1 then a vibra 128 pci will be the best option, and for the lan, any realtek 8139 based card will work fine. The only major thing to look out for is modems, avoid internal modems, most of them (99%) are soft modems and the few that work in linux are hard to set up.

Big Bro Bull, LOL. I thought they have been selling global survillence trojans since '95.

RH is a good start. There's a better one for newbies. Many know the obvious answer.

With RH, you're standing between super newbies and intermediate users. For sure you'll get your feet wet with command line once in a while.

Your box is quite solid. To start out with Linux as the sole system software IS the easiest and surest way to get on with it. Remove PnP OS in BIOS, set boot order and ditch cable select jumper on HD. That's it.

I'm running RedHat 7.2 on an XP1800 AMD, SiS 300 32M video, 256Mb DDR ram. As for sound I use a soundblaster 16PCI card & a 3Com 3c905tx NIC both work fine for me the onboard sound on my mainboard wasn't supported by 7.2 (not sure about 7.3) so I disabled it in the bios & put in the card. As for the p3 900 Mhz chip use it or the AMD, whichever best suits your needs. The only problem you might have is with the video card as stated earlier, look on the RedHat site for hardware compatibility list http://hardware.redhat.com/hcl/ do this is for any hardware that you might have laying around & use what you have.

Also expect a learning curve Linux isn't hard it is just different
Welcome to Linux

Bubba169

Just like to say Thanks again. All good advice.
It will be a few days before I can start because of work but I am still doing some reading.
Peace