Hi Guys,
as a beginner, I just want your thoughts on how to install linux or other OS coz I am planning switch to a much stable os and learn more.... Thanks & More Power to linux Guru!!!

Hello and welcome to the new world
As a beginner you have to install KDE desktops like opensuse 11.4 because its really beautiful and stable.
dont remove your windows at first because you may have issues on connecting to internet and without internet linux is nothing.

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The bold text, thats all wrong. And all your preferences. Linux is all about choices. There are a lot of other distributions those are as much if not easy, good looking and stable. Ubuntu is one of them and so is Fedora. Both are stable and based on very popular and stable Debian and RH respectively. You can also use Debian in its own avatar instead and it is not too difficult either.
Its all about your preferences and uses. Just find out what you need to do with your distro and choose one that is closest to your needs.
And remember, Linux is NOT windows and it will not behave like it.

Hello
Depending on how determined and patient you are, you might wanna try a more bundled approach, meaning one in which you make as few decisions as possible. Ubuntu is fine for a beginner, it ships with GNOME desktop environment, which is rather intuitive and pleasant. Also, the graphical installer is easy to follow. There's also Kubuntu, whose default environment is KDE. I find KDE more visually appealing, but you probably should try both at some time to formulate your own opinion. Another system worth mentioning is Linux Mint, which the creators claim usability-oriented, so it might save you from problems early on. I wouldn't recommend Fedora. It might be cutting-edge in some respects, but I got a feeling of instability last time I tried it. Besides, it didn't come up after a software update, which left me angry with it .
If you're not afraid to get your hands dirty, and learn a lot in the process, you might try Arch Linux. It doesn't give you much of a default installation, but there's an excellent Beginner's Guide to hold your hand throughout . I recommend it here, because I love it, but if you don't feel like exploring, don't. At least not now.
If you're willing to keep your Windows partition, you might need to shrink it. One tool suitable for this is GParted. It's a live cd with a rudimentary operating system for manipulating partitions. As far as I know, partition resizing is still a bit risky, so you might be better off backing up your files, repartitioning the disk, reistalling Windows on one partition (before you install Linux, because of booting issues) and then installing your distro of choice. A reasonable partitioning scheme for a home system is a swap partition (some recommend it to be roughly of the size of your RAM), a / (root) partition for system files (15-20 GB should be all you need, even if you install loads of software) and a /home partition (the rest of the disk) for your personal files. It is recommended to keep / and /home separate in case you need to reinstall the system or try another one. With such a scheme you'll have 4 partitions total, so you can make them all primary (since BIOS only understands 4 partitions, if you want more, you have to resort to logical partitions, which is a way to lie to BIOS ).
Sorry for confusing you with a rather long post, but I hope you find it helpful.
I wish you a fascinating journey through the Unix world.
Wojtek

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• Go to http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download

• Click the big button marked 'start download'

• Whilst it's downloading, read the rest of the page which explains everything you need to know about installing it.

Before you actually install it to your harddisk, make a back up of any important files just in case something goes wrong. (Of course you have back up of all your important files already right... )

Once you've got it installed just try using it to do whatever it is you want to do. If you get stuck, Google. If you're still stuck, ask somewhere, such as here.

As someone else pointed out already, Linux is not Windows. Do not expect Linux to work exactly like Windows does then get all annoyed when it doesn't. (I've seen people do that with both Linux and Macs.)

Hello,

Thanks for that very helpful intro about partitioning wgac! You answered a lot of my questions I was looking for about partitioning. I'm a complete nOOb at Linux and am just trying things out. What would you say about the size the /home partition needs to be? Also, is it necessary to have a /var partition, and if so how big should it be?? I've got about 200GB to play with, so I should have plenty of room. Thx!

On a personal computer, you only need 2 or 3 partitions:
/ -- 10GB should be enough for anything
/home -- as much as you can spare, since that's where all your files are going
swap -- only required if you want to hibernate, but advisable is you have less than 1GB of memory; make it a bit bigger than your memory

/var is for servers, which use it for a lot of stuff.

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Install anything. It will take you a year (years) to finally decide to which distro to stick for longer. Simply feel free to experiment - don't hesitate to broke your system if you want. It is funny to see "kernel panic". And so on. Today install ubuntu or mint or debian or puppy or ... tomorrow install something else. If a device won't work pick another distro. It may work. Try to install using VirtualBox - it is also funny. Or maybe a small distro living on a USB stick? Be the root! The Big Guy. This is what any linux user dreams of : to be the root. Ubuntu out of box gives you no chance to be the root: all this stupid sudo. So how to be clever than Ubuntu designers? It is not so difficult, really. "Destroy, destroy!" (DoW).

Do this now. In the future when you will have several hundreds of GB of precious data it won't be possible.
Greetings.

Are you the original poster under a different account?

Thanks a lot for the info guys! It's most appreciated!

Nope, just another user that just happened upon this post.