I have a laptop with a freshly formatted FAT32 30gb HD which i want to upgrade in 6 months or so. I want to install XP with a partition and Linux on the other section first. This is to allow me time to get used to it (which i'm really looking forward to - goodbye unnecessary expense and viruses!) Which version of Linux should i get for ease of use, nice GUI's, and simplicity with the obvious things being as simple as possible (internet, email, wireless cards)? Havo no clue but have been recommended Redhat 9 and Mandrake. Any suggestions?

Welcome to LQ.

There are plenty of distributions that are good for newcomers to the Linux world. Even if you do choose a point-and-droolish distribution (friendly mocking ) where everything is configured for you, you will still have to learn quite a lot if you're coming from Windows.

Redhat 9 is quite dated and has be superseded by Fedora Core. The current stable version of Fedora Core is 2, I believe. SuSE is also a big hit among a lot of people (especially europeans it seems), and so is Mandrake. Pick one or download them all and try them out. Knoppix might be a good start too - it boots and runs entirely off of a CD-ROM, but it can be installed to the hard drive like any distribution.

Major distributions that are generally considered a bit less user friendly (more or less correct, depending on how you look at it) include Slackware, Debian and Gentoo.

Håkan

redhat 9 is great, presonaly i dont like fedora, suse is nice also, college linux has an easy install and is a pretty basic distro, my prefered distro is slackware but you may not like it much, i didnt at first, its more command line orriented, sort of, command line is essential though, just avoid desktop lx and linspire theyre horrible, i installed desktop lx for my parents about a year ago and hated it almost as much as windows. anyway i would recomend using win 2k instead of win xp also, its alittle more stable and not as many problems with the updates unless you have a specific reason for using xp

If you try a search for your question you will find hundreds (and I do mean hundreds) of answers to this. This question arises at least 5 times per day and the answers are normally identical.

The best distro is the one you like and the way to find out the one you like is to do a bit of research (here and here are 2 good start points) and to install and uninstall several until you fid the best. You also end up learning a fair bit too.

Slackware really is not the easiest to use but after you learn it it's great because it has no limitations.