Hello everyone, this is my first post.. I have been an avid Micro$oft supporter for many years now and have gotten tired of there os's so this weekend I decided to take the plunge and install a distro of linux. Now my question is, what distro do you guys n' gals think would be the best distro for me to get started with, I have used Redhat in the past (about 3 years or so ago) but havnt touched any distro since. I attempted to install suse linux this weekend (9.1) but ran into issues with my RAID controller...... My hardware is listed below and any suggestions, tips, or the like will be GREATLY apreciated.

i suugest that you install fedora core 2
you can d/l it from here

www.linuxiso.org

hope i help ...
roy

Do you know if it supports SMP?

im dont even know what is it in my self im newbie ...

best one if your used to Microsoft is Mandrake... they have a free version online, but if you need better drivers, you'll have to pay... Try linuxiso.org they have alot of other distros there too, but mandrake was voted the "easiest to use" by Microsoft users...... and more......
Mandrake is also the only distro that is being shipped commercialy on PC's. HP is starting to ship them out... cool eh?

you may have problems w/ your graphics card though... but it should work with a little convincing...

welcome

i'm a windows-convert myself (switched about a month ago) - had some experience with red hat 4 or 5 years back, and got tired of windows after my most recent crash.

i'm running mandrake 10, and have had a great time with it. installation went well, even with my wacky wireless USB network card, and it's as friendly an interface as linux can be to a newb with a computing background. (i didn't want a hand-holding distro - wanted to be able to configure things to my liking - but at the same time i didn't want to kill myself on the learning curve).

i've got samba running to network with my XP laptop, and had no problems at all with that. i posted some details in my blog about setting it up.

and if you have any trouble, post here! any quirks i've run into have been answered here - usually within minutes!

I am a new linux user,and my opinion may not mean much,but I recommend suse linux.I just purchased suse and I love it.It pretty much is just as easy to use as windows xp.

How on earth did you end up with Mandy, then? :)

Only Xandros could be worse in this respect.


Cheers,
Tink

any distro will do you fine, but coming out of M$ world as i have like you i found RedHat to be very nice.

Fedora Core 2 has plenty of issues with it, i tried it and had to many problems with my hardware so i dropped it.

Mandrake 10 is an other nice distro that has not been around as long as the RedHat line (i still use RH9 on my laptop and love it) but again i had major problems with MDK10 destroying my OS when i did one of their updates. mind you it also took more then 10 days to finnaly connect and get the updates so i was more then unhappy with MDK10.

SuSe is a very powerful server type OS for linux. if you are coming out of the domain world of M$, then you might want to check this out.

WhiteBox this is the RedHat enterprize server for FREE.

all of those distros have very nice GUI based installs, and offer very powerful drive support along with some of the offering updates and patches during the install so you can start your system up the first time WITHOUT having any major security issues unlike anything windows offers.

heck how many winXP boxes have been built lately that get infected before you can even connect to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and download the patch... way to many.

i have not used SuSe, but have helped someone install it. it was just as easy to install as any windows OS, and very simular to the RedHat installer.

my personal preferance is the RedHat line (not FedoraCore, at least not yet) and WhiteBox. next to that i will try SuSe as that is the next distro i realy want to look into for its networking capabilities that come out of Novel.

What about Lindows? Or is that not even considered Linux? ;)

Lindows and Xandros I'd read to be even more "windows-user-friendly" than Mandrake. Honestly I'd intended to use Debian, but I had a "hairy" XP install I was trying to save when loading linux the first time, and went with the one that seemed to have fewest installation issues with my hardware.

I may switch someday but I'm fine with Mandrake so far!

I can't even figure out how to install redhat v8.
I'm trying to find out my hardware info (chapter 2)

I should of asked what 1 disc (run from the cd drive) linux would be a better first timer choice. I have dialup and how would i download it with dialup?? Oh, with installation instuctions in english.