Advice for an total noob
 

Like it says at the top,

First up some info to help you understand me and what I want....

1: I work with big machines and my choice of tools is a hammer
2: Technically an engineer but in reality I can plug in cards and understand relatively simple stuff (I can solder a transistor but get bored at 3)
3: Want my PC to work
4: Dont mind a challenge and CAN use google but a tad too short tempered to spend most of my time "tweaking" (read win2k) an os for it to actually work

So, having read a lot of stuff about linux....

most of it scares the hell out of me, and the bits I did understand means the rest might be a tad complicated,

Would any of you be kind enough to suggest a distro I could try that will not leave me in tears and give me some hints on what I can use as software?

P.S. edited as my typing is still as good as it ever was

I would suggest... a... LIVE CD. no, seriously. Maybe a mint live cd or ubuntu would be a good choice. When you find it annoying pop it outta the drive, reboot you're back to the familiar.

Basically... before I can suggest more than that... what are you wanting to do? Learn linux? Build a server? Set it up as your desktop? etc... I'm unsure where you're headed so it's hard to point you in a specific direction.

Thanks for the fast response,

Basically it will just be a desktop, not going to sell kicking windows out of the house to the other half. in a nutshell: email, secure surfing, pictures and at the end of a long day the ability just to shoot something a lot.... Oh, and if you know something that will work for an ipod I owe you a beer

and to the other question I'd like to learn linux but need something simple to start on, it seems to go from working when loaded to needing everything set, what I'd like is something that does work but with enough scope in it to be able to mess about and break/improve it

P.S. running on a second bodged HD, so I have my main HD ready for a clean install of anything bar windows

testing mint :D

It has less letters to type in the name and I AM that lazy

If you boot from a live CD, will you still be able to try injections and monitoring and stuff?

To NoOnee, if you boot from a live CD, you may be limited by the size of the ramdisk that the CD can create. For example, you might not be able to add plugins to Firefox (even given that the plugins would all disappear upon a reboot).

For the OP, I updated my Dell Mini9 netbook today from Ubuntu Netbook Remix 8.04 to 10.10--I blew everything away and reinstalled from scratch. It worked like a charm. I could have accepted the defaults all the way through and everything would have worked. (I didn't, because Netbood Remix defaults to no separate swap drive and I prefer the traditional means of swapping to a separate partition, but that was the only change I made from the defaults.)

The installation took less than 30 minutes. Netbook Remix is smaller than a full Ubuntu installation (that's the "Remix" part--they've left out stuff that they figure most persons would not be likely to use on a netbook but you can add all sorts of stuff later).

Linux is not harder than Windows. It's just different. The biggest stumbling block for many is the terminology, expecially as regards the file structure. There's good primer at http://linux.about.com/.