Hi All,

I am currently working as a developer in the MS Windows environment and am looking forward to broadening my horizons but delving into the Linux World. Obviously as a noob I am going to ask a lot of simple questions at first. To start with;

Could you let me know which version of Linux would be recommended to an absolute beguine, I would prefer to install it on one of my USB HDD.

Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Go to www.distrowatch.com and try the top 5 or 10 from there.
They're all free. There's no 'best' in general.
Typical recommendations inc K/X/Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva etc ..

Thanks Chris,

I'm just about to install Fedora 9 and give it a go.

I know a few people who use this Distro so hopefully I can get some help along the way.

AS someone who was in your similar situation a short time ago and spent a lot of time trying out different distros, I think Fedora 9 is probably a good choice. openSuse with KDE is what I decided on a while back and have it installed on my desktop and laptop (by far my favorite), but I still like exploring the different distros and as far as the gnome desktop goes I felt like Fedora was the most intuitive and I carry the live USB version of it to play with. If you have trouble with the multimedia aspects of it, I can throw you some really straightforward installs that will get all that working for you: DVD's, flash, wmv, etc, etc (that's what I had the most trouble with initially).

I do kind of think KDE is the way to go for a brand new linux user and Fedora 9 only comes with KDE 4, which seems really difficult, buggy and trying to be to flashy to me. As much as I love 3.5, I can't stand 4. Fedora is my choice for gnome though. Suse 11 you have the option of KDE 3.5, 4, or gnome.

Just my inexperienced two cents....

BTW, as its a strictly 'free' SW only distro (ie no codecs for proprietary formats), you'll prob want to do the following:

1. Add the Livna repository : http://fedorasolved.org/post-install...ons/yum-config
2. uninstall the default totem mediaplayer (use Add/Remove SW menu)
3. install MPlayer (use Add/Remove SW menu)

enjoy.
Welcome to LQ.

OK, so I ran through the install and all seemed to go well. When I try and boot from my USB drive (where I installed Fedora) it loads up to a GRUB> prompt.

Is this normal or did I do something wrong?

What are the next steps?

Oh, forgot so say, I got the live version running on my USB Stick.

No problems at all :-)

OK, so, I've been looking around and come across a possible solution;

GRUB> find /boot/grub/stage1

then something like

GRUB> root(hd1,1)
GRUB> setup(hd1)

Any ideas anyone?

The 'Live CD' (or equiv) is just for testing without impacting your HDD. IOW, it doesn't actually install.
Some Live CDs have an option to actually install on your HDD, but I don't know about the F9 you've got.

Sorry, I didn'e explain that very well. I D/L the LIVE CD and USB software and made the Ferdora LIVE CD run from my 4gig pen drive without ant probs. I also D/L the full Ferdora 9 x64 ISO and istalled that to a new partition on my 250 gig USB HDD. When I try to boot from the HDD I am getting the problem.

All sorted

Online with Fedora 9 right now.

Great!!!!

Great! Keep us updated on your travels with Linux