Debian for the first time.
 

Hi.

Im a young man who's going to install :
DEBIAN-30R1-I386-BINARY-1_NONUS.ISO
for the first time.
Ive never used linux before and i wondered if I need some kind of drivers or spesial packets for my computer.

I have a AMD 2000XP 1.67GHz
Two 80GIG Ibm hardrives
One 20GIG Seagate hardrive
712 MB DDRAM
Windows XP/SP1
MSI K4 Ultra with 1gig LAN ++

Nothing against Debian as a distro but I'd really suggest something else if you've never used Linux before. Debian's installer is the worst in the known universe.

Uh. Nice box. *g* Debian has a hardware compatibility link on their site somewhere. Odds are most of it will be recognized, but not all of it. But unless your stuff is mentioned on the site, you'll just have to install and find out which is which.

My favorite distro is, naturally, Slack, but the easiest install I've ever done was probably Mandrake.

i personally didn't find the installer to be all that bad. if you want a very good walkthrough on installing debian look at my sig. also if you want a list of all of the packages here you go
http://packages.debian.org/stable/

just a word of advice. the walkthrough has you install "synaptic".
this is great to get a system started but once you install "Xlib" you will not be able to run synaptic as su. you will have to log in as root into X and that is not good.
this is the reason that i sent you the link to the packages list. also you may want to upgrade your kernel so my sig has instructions on how to do that also.

Yeah, people say Slackware's install sucks, too, and I thought it was great. :) So I should have said "was the worst" *to me*. And, actually, it isn't. Core doesn't even really have an installer. That was worse.

Still, I just worry about people's first exposure to Linux being the Debian installer. I know I'd have run screaming if I'd have actually started with Debian like I wanted to to begin with. But maybe it's just me. ;)