Huzzah for long post titles. Anyhow, as the topic suggests, I've never used Linux . At all. Heck, I doubt if I've ever even seen it being used in my life. Right now I'm typing this on an old(er) Dell PC that I'm wanting to make run a Linux distro. Now, I've asked around a little and some people have suggested the following distros for a newbie like myself:
Fedora
ReHat
And MiniSlack (If I recall correctly.)

But I just don't know where to head. I'd love to have a GUI, but I've heard good distros with those are usually bad. So, can anyone recommend an easy to use distro for a Linux fool?


Thanks much!

Chris

Yep. kubuntu, as used by my 50 year old mother. The soundness of the apt-get package management system, the benefits of debian, and the ease of KDE for your GUI.

Well, welcome to linux. Your best bet is focusing on what you want your machine to do (i.e. run a webserver, check email/browse the web while learning linux, high end computational physics, etc...)

Each distro has pros/cons. Everyone is going to push their views. My personal favorite is debian, but I've used red hat, suse, knoppix, openbsd, fedora core and a litte gentoo. If you have an older computer then most of the hardware is compatible.

Google around and look here at linux questions' tutorials page to get an idea of what's going.

First though, get knoppix and burn it to a cd to try linux out without really installing it.



*** Wow, someone beat me to the punch!

Welcome to LQ.

If it's an older machine I'd stay away from fedora, there is a lot of new apps in there and from what I've seen it runs pretty slow. If you are looking for something of a reasonable speed and don't mind doing a little bit of learning (that's what this site is here for) then I'd take a look at slackware. Minislack is based on slackware and to be honest I doubt that deviating from one of the mainline distros will make it easier for you.

The best advice anyone here can give is:
1) Search about the forum, this type of question is asked quite a lot (obviously don't hesitate to ask specific questions)
2) Try before you don't buy. If you are using a freely downloadable distro then there is no harm in trying a few and seeing which you like the best. A good tip when doing this is to create a seperate /home partition during the installation this way you can keep your data in tact even if you change your OS again.

Well, when I say older I mean

2.0 GHZ p4
512 Megs of DDR Ram
128mb Radeon 9600

(Older as in two years basically.)


But yeah, basically I want to be able to get on the net, screw around a little bit and just learn how to work Linux!


Thanks. I'll do a search in a few.

Xandros and Linspire are easy to install and use. There are probably others.

However, I've been using Xandros for a while, and I wouldn't say I've been learning Linux. It's a GUI vs. OS thing.

www.enlightenment.org/

Okay, quick question (I haven't used this windows machine in over six months, been going with my Mac.) Anyhow, am I going to want to Format the hard drive from the windows boot disc or from a command prompt (I honestly forget how to do it from there...)


Edit: Wow... I feel so stupid doing this...


Can someone walk me through installing a Linux distro on a formatted disc (Or unformatted one, whatever.)


Sorry if I sound like an idiot, I feel like one.

It is formatted during the linux install

Okay, I think I've found a distro I want. Mandrake.


Is that too advanced for a newblet or is it okay?

Mandrake is newbie friendly. There are a lot of posts in here about Mandrake and urpmi (the way mandrake installs packages) just search www.linuxquestions.org when you get that far.

mandrake is a good choice. i got my wife into linux with it. (now called mandriva). if you go to the forum main page, scroll down to distrabutions, then click on mandriva. you'll find any answers you need in there. just dont get frusterated. be patient and you'll have a great time.

I just started with linux last april ... I'm running suse 9.3 and really like it .. very newbie friendly ....

Seems I've hit a slight snag.

Basically, my Mac is my only CD-Burner (And the CD drive on my PC is pretty much worthless for anything but installing off of and making funky noises)

BUT, it would seem I can't burn ISO's, or rather, I can, but it's tedious as all hell. If I try to select all the files from the ISO when it's mounted and drag them to the disc and plop them odwn, it says the disc doesn't have enough space on it. But, if I got through one file at a time, no problem. Well, okay, there is a problem. there's over 847 files at times, and my wrist, nay, no wrist, is made for that kind of activity.

And I can't find any bloody software that doesn't cost bundles to do this too.


Any suggestions?

I hate bumping threads but it'd be great for some help right now (As ISO number three just finished downloading.)