Sorry-

I've got to STRONGLY disagree. I've worked as sysadmin for 4 years, I'm running 2 linux machines at home- one as email/web server and one as workstation.
The server is GREAT. I love Apache and Qmail. I'd suspect that the learning curve on a server would be far more advanced than on a common workstation, I found the opposite to be true.

The workstation is just that. WORK. flash website? sorry, you're running linux. want to use that rio? sorry, you're running linux. want to install that software? sorry, you running the WRONG DISTRO of linux. Or, the header files for you kernel are not in the 'expected location' - what the hell is that!?

ultimately I blame KDE and the fact that since linux is open source, there are few ENFORCED 'standards'. Standards for where key files are located. Standards for how devices are organized.

I'd be more inclined to put my mother in front of an XP machine than any distro of linux.

To the very "newbie" newbies................ You might want to try the distro of Lycoris. VERY easy to install and use and even looks a little like XP. It does real well at finding the correct hardware in your system and from what i have played with in it, it's all pretty straight forward too. give it a shot
www.lycoris.com

I will have to try lycoris and see how much easier it is than Mandrake 9.0. I'm a very newbie newbie. I've only used linux 5 times and that's including the last 3 days i've started using mandrake 9.0. It has recognized all my hardware and is running smooth. I even got the apache server running w/cgi/perl and mysql (well still trying to get the mysql to work with nuke php). Under mandrake in KDE 3.0 everything is coming along.

my system:
AMD XP 1800
512 DDR ram
3 hard drives:
80GB 7200rpm maxtor
13GB 5200rpm Wester Digital
3GB not even sure what this was is
Nvidia Geforce4 Ti4200 (which is working great thanks to this site)
Soundblaster Audigy platinum
Yamaha CD/RW 16x10x40
Creative DVD 8x
Haupgage TV tuner card (which works great as well)

And everything was recognized right the only thing now is learning how to install non-rpm files. Which i'm learning quite fast. Another good thing about mandrake is it comes with a software control panell where you can install and uninstall software quite easily for linux.

I'm a

I tend to agree with jglen490. The learning curve for Linux is not any more steep than for any other OS. It's all a matter of familiarity. Most new computer users invest time learning Windows or OS X because that's primarily what is available in stores. When they encounter something other than Window or OS X, they automatically assume that the app is broken because that's not the way it works on their OS of preference. Personally I happen to find OS X very frustrating and inefficient in spite of the fact that mouse only has one button! I spend more time on Linux, Solaris, and OpenBSD so I'm not that comfortable with a Mac.

In addition, you can't blame KDE for some a lack of standards. It's one of the top layers on the cake. It's up to the distro creators to make an effort to conform to standards, whatever those may be. Some distro creators prefer different standards- ie, BSD vs SysV init scripts. What's even more annoying is having to configure a Unix system to accomodate some broken standard in Windows.

Some Windows apps have similar problems- ie, installing under C:\ instead of in the "Program Files" directory. You can't really blame that on Microsoft though. It's that app builder that decides the defaults.

The first Linux OS I tried was a free version of Corel Linex 1.1. It was very easy to use. The problem was it was old, and Corel was no longer providing support for upgrading it. However, Xandros took over the Corel Linux OS, and I imagine that it is just as easy and more up to date.

The problem with up to date Linux distributions, is that if you install them on older computers (ie, with ISA modems or sound cards), you may run into problems. I ran into this issue with SuSE 8.1, and ultamitely had to get a PCI modem and sound card for it to work. So, if you have an older computer, beware. Ask if it supports ISA ports. Also, many internal PCI modems are winmodems (meaning, they don't work with linux). A hardware PCI modem will cost over $100 (Canadian), whereas an equally good ISA modem will be $20 to $50 or so.

Anybody out here in LinuX Land Familiar with a MOTOROLA EXTERNAL MODEM Model #3512 CODEX ,It has 4 readFOUR inputs on the back and one connection for a NIC -network or router interface and a hookup to a phone or isdn line. Quite exotic,difficult to set up..... It should be HAYES Compatible

I noticed a few poeple here triple boot with what I am trying to do. XP (Primary) and Mandrake 9.1 with Redhat 9.0, cant seem to make them run, is there a trick to this? I am loading them with Grub for Redhat and Lilo with Mandrake and one knocks the other one out. Please understand that I am new to the linux community and am willing to learn and eventually make Windoze my secondary OS rather than my depended on OS. Not to familiar with editing the .configs to make them work. I have worked with the file system and editing some but not a lot. I hope that someone can help.
Thanks

you can remove Lilo and just configure Grub to point to Mandrake and you shall be able to tripple boot...

you can configure grub by editing grub.conf

First I use Win98SE, RedHat 7.2, Mandrake 8.2 all on one harddrive (a 60 Gig) hda1=Win98SE 20 gigs (Fat 32), hda2=RedHat 7.2 19.5 gigs(EXT3), hda5=Mandrake 8.2 19.5 gigs (EXT 3), hda4=Linnux swap 1 gig and hda3= an extended partition that houses hda5 with mandrake 8.2 on it. As was said earlier only use one bootloader Grub or LILO I use Grub at like it.

bubba169

The tricky part for me was where it says (hd0,x) the x part will be one number less than your hdax number for example hda5 will me shown as (hd0,4) look at my Mandrake entry to see what I mean here's my Grub.conf file:

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
# root (hd0,1)
# kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda2
# initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=30
splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat 7.2
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda2 hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi
initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.7-10.img
title WIN98SE
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
title Mandrake 8.2
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-6mdk ro root=/dev/hda5 hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi
initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.18-6mdk.img



Bubba169

I found that my mandrake system may have been a bit more difficult to install then my win2k but all of my hardware runs better and the drivers where already loaded for me. I downloaded mandrake 9.1 from linux iso and it took longer to burn the cds then to configure the os, apps, and hardware. Never have I been this happy with an os linux or otherwise.

In my opinion, the learning curve for Linux is easily much steeper then for Windows. That's because Windows gives you access to everything you need to access (or that MS will let you access) through a centralized point-and-drool interface. With Linux, you don't know what's really under the hood until you dig through a lot of hard-to-find docs, try to remember a lot of strange command switches and make a lot of mistakes.

I came to windows from Unix and found windows exceptionally easy to learn.

As far as the easiest Linux for newbies, you might want to investigate the smaller names. Although they aren't hard to install, I wouldn't recommend Slack, SuSE, or Debian for first-timers. I've heard Mandrake is good, and the base versions of RedHat (although I just hate to plug RedHat out of principle).

In my experience... the easiest to install is defintitely Mandrake... Red Hat is a close second.... any of the two will be easy for newbies... although i disagree with DecimalPoint some of my friends who are just newbies installed Slackware and they seem to be doing well... Slack is also easy to install but is no doubt a little harder to configure... plus, Slack is a one of the stable distros...

My very first distro was Vector Linux 1.8 which was Slackware based I installed it and then had to learn about uncommentting lines, creating symlinks, startx, all that good stuff. I then went to Redhat, then Mandrake botnh of these did the "hard stuff" for me like setting up the symlinks for my cd-roms, setting up my sound card & NIC all through a GUI installer it was pretty easy and painless but I still think back to the very first time I heard sound coming from my Vector Linux box I thought it was so cool. So I don't think Slack is too bad it just takes a little more desire to learn to get it all setup.

My $0.02

Bubba169

chilibowl, the two easiest to use Linux distros are Lindows 3.0 (soon to be 4.0) and Xandros 1.0 (soon to be 2.0). These two LInux Distributions will configure most modems, even the hsxxx series, get you on line with kppp modem configure, cd burner, cd player, limited scanner support and both have online updates. We have run most Linux distros and have had hair pulling experiences with all but these two.

destry