which is the best to get.. I wanna learn that crap.. oh yeah.. can I have this and XP without having to partition my drive? and just choose which I use to boot up?

Mandrake is the sorta entry level linux.

Red Hat is ok aswell.

Yuo will have to creat a partion if you want a dual boot.

I seriously recomend making back up discs of anything you wanna keep before installing.



I have a dual boot, XP/RedHat

cool.. I will start backing up stuff soon.. and do my research I guess.. Any good links for info on Redhat and Mandrake..

what about Xandross? and SuSE?

**** that... everyone knows Slackware is the best. http://www.slackware.com



Seriously though... most version of Linux is good. Mandrake, Redhat, etc are good for the novice because of the flashy GUI install. Slackware uses a basic menu driven GUI for installs, and some people consider it closer to *nix. Linux is really just the kernel, anything else is just whatever the distro publisher releases. Infact you could(and would be good if you really want to learn Linux) make your own custom distro. Slackware comes with Gnome 2, X and all the other software you could need. The only draw back is the non flashy GUI for install. If you run into problems with Linux I'd recomend http://www.linuxquestions.org.

They are hands down the best Linux help forum out there.



Cheers.

yeah... slackware kicks ass... might not be too good for a beginner though, but then again... nothing like learning from plain experience.



I would look into getting a second hard drive just for linux, that makes it MUCH easier, you can pick up a 20-30Gb drive for almost nothing. Hell, I have a 20GB I'll give you if you want to pay for the shipping.



If you have a CD burner and high speed access a good place to find *.iso files is http://linuxiso.org, download like crazy and install different distros until you find something you like.



I'd say that Red Hat, Slackware, Debian and Suse are probably good ones to start with

I don't recommend slackware for a noob, give Mandrake or Redhat a shot. I have two Redhat machines and one Mandrake machine, I like both distros.

I don't know... my first experience with Linux was with an ancient version of Redhat in 95. I knew my way around the *nix shell from playing with various comercial *nixes. A few years later I bought the info magic set of Linuxses(which is the bestbang for your buck.... $20 you get 4 or so distros of Linux plus the sunsite archives). I chose Slackware over Redhat, SuSE, Debian, etc... but this was around 97 or earlier.



Yes for the "noob* Slackware might be hard, but there is plenty of documentation out there... and it's a purer form of *nix. It's all about what you want to put into it... and get out of it. We could all install Redhat and run the plain jane Gnome... or god forbid KDE gui. But would we be learning anything?



Linux is and always has been a labor of love.. . You have more control, you can fine tune your system more, you can get more performance out of it... provided you take the time to master it.



I'm not ragging on anyone, but I'm very pro slackware...



If anyone has any doubts as to Linux's power and stability... a friend of mine who runs his on mail/web server(in addition to his perfessional responsiblities) for his family... and he's had over 18 months of uptime on that server(running debian). Keep in mind that's with updating software for security and such...



Regardless. of which Linux you choose... check out linuxquestions.org. There's bound to be someone who runs your flavour of Linux.... or knows something about your hardware config.



It's all good... Cheers.

As a side note... there was a book writen by some Linux guys called "Running Linux" and the older vesion was GPL(GNU Public LIcense... aka free) which is worth reading. I'm posiitive te older versions are available through the Linux Documentation Project... if that fails you can buy the bound version from Oreilly and associates(the best publishers of programming books ever). The 2.0 version of Runnin Linux was also availible online when I got it bundled with an info magic release of Linux. Much hasn't changed over the versions of Linux... if you can call it that... it's all the same. At most Xfree86 has changed, and it's a pain to get openGL to run with some graphics cards... but what do you expect from guys who create software out of love. It's the same as some RX-7 designing a new type of turbo manifold and sharing it without cashing in...



Most software put out for Linux is produced by enthusiasts... they don't do it for money... they want to do it so they can run their x bit of hardware or do whatever under Linux. So if you do use their software... thank them.



With that I'll digress and try to remember why I don' t contribute to open source software...