Ok....i am without a doubt the biggest newb to linux in the world, except that im dedicated to switching and i want to do everything right. From what i have been told so far mandrake will probably be the easiest for a windows user to operate. So i was hoping for opinions on that topic please.

Then i would like to know how mandrake operates, graphics, or command or both, becuase i would like to learn command prompts.

I dont want to dual-boot

Also my laptop is a compaq

Ok so like i said it is a compaq presario and it has a amd-k6 3d processor. I have about 1,479,974,008 kb of free space and a 1.37gb hard drive. Is this enough? I was hoping to get rid of windows during the instalation process in order to secure enough space. Is that possible? please help me out.

In regards to teh Mandrake Discovery 10.0 box, does that also come with like a guide or help book of somesort?

please help me.

Screenshots of about everything
For learning commands check out the wiki
To delete the windows partition, you will see something very similary to
this. Just select custom disk partitioning, click on the big thing that says C:\, click delete, and click in the empty space, click new, and make it about 2x the size of the amount of memeory you have, and select type 'swap'(this is like memory on the harddrive incase your computer doesn't have enough). Then select the rest of the free space and do the same thing except make the 2nd partition as big as possible and make the type ext3 or reiserfs (this will probably be explained a LOT better in the manual) The rest is a breeze. You are buying a boxed set? Good idea for a beginner and it supports mandrake. I would assume that the box would come with an install manual because mandrake prides them self on making super easy to use products. Check out this page for more content info. And to answer your question about the manual, according to amazon
If you have any questions installing or anything else feel free to ask them here.

Good luck!

ok exactly what is the kernel in regards to linux and to mandrake.

does it require constant chaning or attention.
does it operate on its own?


just if you can fill me in on other info like that it would be great.

Kernel info

The kernel is the core of the operating system it handels everythings that needs to go on inside your system. The link above explains it very well.

Not unless you want to give it the attention. If you are starting out with mandrake you can generally go by the rule, you won't see, know about, or be bugged by the kernel unless you want to be.

Yeh, you can do things like compile or patch your own kernel, insert or take out modules but in mandrake you really won't need to do that, so yes.