Thanks guys. You've helped alot. Looks like I need more ram for Ubuntu. Everything else looks good though. I'll try a few different distro's before I settle on just one. :)

clipse

That's funny because I have a friend next to me on Fedora core 7 and he had to pack himself something like 50 packages which didn't exist. He's very good at it, lucky him. What is stupid is that he is packing software that have sometimes already been packaged by others... He is still playing with grep for checking some reverse dependencies or such. This is built-in in apt.

On my debian, I had nothing to pack myself, everything was there.

And...

$ apt-get install <TAB>
Display all 26456 possibilities? (y or n)

I like this number :)

So, I took the "Which Distro is right for me" test and it reccommended the following.

-Freespire
-Ubuntu
-Kubuntu
-Mandriva
-OpenSUSE

I just got the Ubuntu ISO downloaded and writen on a mini DVD-RW. OpenSUSE is a pretty big download. I'll try Ubuntu first and go from there.

I'm starting to realize that I really need more RAM. 128MB just isn't going to cut it. :)

ubuntu
 

You may want to download the alternative install cd, not sure if the regular cd will want to work well for low memory. You can try Xubutu, it is made to work with lower end machines, basically ubuntu with a different window manager, one that is not so needy, it has an alternate install cd to I think.

Good advice...

If you use Freespire over any of the distros you listed, You'll be sorry. IMO, it is one of the most bloated distros there is.

Xubuntu has an alternate install cd and should run well(only requires 64mb of Ram). What are the specs of the machine? As for the things you mentioned in your first post that you want to do, there's a gazillion apps that can let you do those things.

IGF

One thing that some newbies have a problem with is too much choice, but just realize this is a good thing. ;]

Personally (K/X)Ubuntu seems to be a good choice for new users in my opinion, and a good enough choice for everyone else as well. You could actually probably do fine with most distributions, with some perseverance. There are only a few I'd tell a newbie to steer clear of, being Gentoo, LFS (not really a distro), and probably Slackware. They're fine in their own right, but not for first-timers.

Don't be afraid to try out several distributions. It'll be a good experience and help you make an informed choice.

I'm sportin 640mb ram now so Ubuntu will work fine i hope. I'm so sick of Win ME