Sounds like slackware would be a good start for you then. I fixed the link. By the way, there is an edit button, so you can avoid double posting.

slackware 10.2 torrents page: here
slackware 10.2 iso mirrors page: here

2 good tutorials/walkthroughs for setting up slackware:
by grogan and shilo's

i have used the cd1 and cd2, i never have used cd3 and cd4, so you can do just fine with only the 1st 2 cds, or you could get all 4 if you want all the extra software available.. or you can just install with cd1 and cd2, then download the rest when they are needed. good luck

Slackware is a very good distro, but for a newbie I would recomend Mandriva / Fedora (new name for Redhat Linux personal version) for easy installation (RPM) it makes re-installing and updating the system much easier! One thing to remember is whenever you want to try more complicated stuff a terminal is only 1 click away! Also you can still install from source etc if you want to.

Ok I downloaded and burned the ISOs. I just have to get home and go through the install. Wish me luck

http://www.slackbook.org/

I reckomend atleast flicking through this if not printing it (since it's your first endeavour into Linux + Slackware)

Well, I've got it all installed at home. I've gotten to the "Root@darkstar" prompt. Today at work I compiled a list of things to do on there when I get home.

I was looking through screenshots of Slackware desktops and I noticed what looked like a "multiple desktop" feature. Is that specific to a certain windows manager? Does GNOME have it?

sorry.
wrongly posted here.

how is this wrongly posted? I'm a newbie.

@deadalus: i think ruudra meant his/her own post ...

Well, I got exerything done up to "Startx" and wouldn't you know it? It doesn't work. Right now I'm not sitting at my home computer so I can't tell you the exact message, but it told me I had a fatal IO error. I'm thinking it my have something to do with either my graphics card (Or my chipset). I'm using a dell 2300, so I went to the dell website to find my chipset. I did (Don't have it written down here at work so I couldn't tell you what my chipset is (Something like BG846). I couldn't find that chipset so I told it to chose something generic. As for my video card, according to my system specs on the dell website, I have integrated 3d extreme graphics. I looked everywhere on the internet but I couldn't find how much memory was on it. Anybody go any ideas?

It sounds like something that could (at least temporarily) be fixed by changing the chipset name in the .conf file to "VESA" however i think slackware uses X.org now instead of XFree86...so this may be outdated, and i haven't done it in a while so i can't get too specific it's in the /etc directory i believe.

Since this thread is so long nobody new is likely to look at it, I think you should start a new thread to get a fresh pair of eyes. And don't post until you can give all information like chipset/video card and the error that you get, we can't help much without it. Also googling the error message would be helpful too more than likely.

Good luck.

Good Point, Thanks.

whats the output of 'lspci'? it should list your video card (whether integrated, PCI or AGP).

did you create a user account or were you trying to use root to startx?

also, yes, slack10.2 uses X.org