Hi there

I would strongly recommend that some of you newbies get a copy of slack ware 10 install it. Its not as easy as it sounds...but at the end of this installation, you will have gained so much experience, that any other installation of other distros will seem like a breeze.

Thats how i started out, and i have never regretted it, besides slack is by far the fastest distro around.

I've only tried SuSE and Fedora and I would have said Fedora was easier. One prob I had with SuSE was that they have two versions one that comes on many disks, I think its call the pro version and another that only fits on one CD and is free and downloadable called something like enterprise version.(I think)

Anyway I tried the slim line version and it did not ship with GCC or MAKE!!!!! Made it quite hard installing. :-) I got the rpms for them and sorted that but the setting for thier ftp server will not work so I can't install anything that has a dependancy. But i've not tried that hard to fix it, i'll leave that job till i've finished playing with Fedora.

I started with redhat 7.1.....but I am loving Fedora Core 1. YUM helps alot!!!

I use Suse 9.1 personnal but I would not recommend it.
The good thing is that hardware detection is good but I do not find the Suse rpms are that easy to install.
I am thinking about going to a Debian based hard CD eg Knoppix or Mepis as apt-get is meant to be brillant and Knoppix and Mepis are meant to be easy to install.

davholla, saw you sig and noted you use Vector and Mandrake. That's the combo I happened to have on my drive when I joined LQ! Can you tell?

I changed that some time ago to Suse.
Regarding Mandrake I had 8.2 and it was really slow so I changed to Vector after unsuccessfully trying to get Mandrake work able.
The only problem with Vector was that I could not get it to recognise my ethernet card and I was not that good at Linux then so I went to Suse 8.2. However I am thinking of going to Arch or Mephis (or possibly back to Vector) because :-
1) I can not get Suse 9.1 to be as fast as Suse 8.2 or 9.0
2) Suse is expensive
3) Allegedly apt-get or pacman are meant to be better for installing software. I really do not want to spend ages installing from source.

I would recommend Debian.
Debian's new net installer is great. Installing Debian is a lesson in itself, while post installation you'll get a great (really free) system.
Oh, and you'll also get apt-get

And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't differences are more between desktops than between distros?
I mean from the Look'n'fill point of view - one can get the same desktop for all distros...

Broadly, I'd agree with henryg. Xandros and Lycoris would be ideal if your mom is gonna freak at anything too un-windows like. These distros are almost XP clones. If your mom won't be too scared by something which is *obviously* not windows: Mandrake, IMHO.

I use SimplyMepis 2004, a very easy to install distro. The CD was only $10 directly from www.mepis.org, arrived in the mail just a few days after placing my order.

Installation is extremely simple, just put the CD in and reboot. Mepis loads and you can test it to your hearts content. If you want to install, just open the "Mepis Installation Center" and click "Install to hard drive". Answer a couple of questions regarding if and how you want your hard drive partitioned, and what passwords you would prefer, and in 10 or 15 minutes, it will be on your system.

Mepis comes with a lot of programs, Mozilla and Konqueror browsers and email clients, XMMS media player, KSCD cd player, OpenOffice suite, Kooka scanning software, Digicam photo software, Guarddog firewall, etc.

Updates are easy because Mepis is based on Debian, so you can either use KPackage to download new drivers and programs, or open a terminal window and use apt-get to accomplish the same thing.

A few years ago I tried SuSE 7.1 and found it kind of frustrating. BeOS was much more reliable and to my liking, but no one has yet made a really good browser for BeOS. I've been using Mepis for over a month, and it has met, even exceeded my expectations. I don't have Windows on my computer at all anymore.

Hi folks!

**I'm a 100% Linux N00b {started out last week}

The only distro that worked for me was Mandrake 10.1 .
I tried Suse 9.0, FC 3, Yoper and Knoppix. With Suse and Yoper my screen was filled with L090909's when I chose LILO and Grub :blinking text : when I choose Grub.

This is what I did with all installs (system in sig) :-

-Completely formatted the Maxtor and set it as my first HDD with the SATA as the secondary HDD.

-Then I popped un the cd(s) and installed Linux with LILO occupying the MBR of the IDE.

-After everything, when I reboot I see L090909's or Grub: and it just sits there forever.

So, I tried Mandrake and everything works perfectly! I can dual boot! Something I thought would never happen.

I guess Mandrake works best for N00bs like me.

I am OC'd. Could that be the cause of my installation problems??

Thanks guys and forgive me if I posted in the wrong place.

Super Nade, yes, overclocking can make installing an OS difficult. The advice is always to clock at normal speed, get a good install, and then push it back up there But, your bootloader problems were probably something different.

i'll try it, how hard could it possibly be

hi

mandrake 10.1 seems to be good for newbies
after that fedora can be good also

For a newbie, I wouldn't recommend Fedora. There's too much fiddling involved...especially with multimedia.
There are only 2 distro's I'd recommend......Mepis or PCLinuxOS. Trust me...PCLinuxOS is really wonderful. Best I
have EVER tried. All browser plugins installed. NVidia edition available with drivers. Limewire installed. MP3 support. It's all ready to go. Synaptic-apt for RPM which works great.

I was going to try PCLinuxOS, i even downloaded and burned it, but i never booted it to see what it was like, i wanted to get rid of all the various linux distros i had and just install mandrake and win xp, so i never tried it, silly me, i only burned everything i had to disk