What Distro for a newbie?

[wolf550e]

Hi! i want to try out Linux (again), but i'm a complete newbie. what distro should i try? it woudl be nice if it was something easy to setup, closely resembled the "generic" distro used in how-to's and already came with all the latest stuff. i'm thinking of Mandrake 8.1 or RedHat 7.2. any thing esle?

can it read NTFS 5.1 partitions? is lilo WinXP friendly? how are the latest nVidia drivers? anything important i should know?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

redhat or mandrake would be fine, but try not to use them as a crutch. learn how to do things the "real" way because if you have problems you may not have a gui there to help you. redhat worked good for me as a first distro. easy install, easy to use, but not quite as candy coated as mandrake.

ntfs - generally you can read ntfs partitions but writing to them is not very reliable yet. i can mount mine in read only which is nicer than nothing.

lilo can load basically anything, it just points to the partition that each OS is on and the OS takes over from there.

if you get something like redhat or mandrake you wont really have to worry about installing drivers, for games i really dont know though, i dont game much and i dont game at all on linux

like i said, dont let an newbie distro be your crutch. learn how to *really* do things, visit linuxdoc.org, linuxnewbie.org and google or google.com/linux and read ALOT. learn the basics before you start. if youre not familiar with the windows/dos command yet, play around with that for a bit, it will give you a taste of a cli before you even install linux.

also /usr/doc/ is where the documentation goes.

use pico control+X exits and saves.

just play around, have fun and if possible install it on a second machine so you can have less worries about messin up your HD.

 

[hobgadling]

I like Mandrake. It has lots of gui tools to do things, but, as far as i can tell, it isnt too far from a normal install (ie, debian or slack). Just get comfortable with an editor (i like emacs, but whatever, dont want to get into that debate here ), so that you can edit the config files by hand if necessary.
I think at this point it can read ntfs, but not write, and I know Nvidia's really good about releasing open source drivers.

-Hob

 

[robisc]

I too am pretty much a newbie and have tried virtually ALL the distros for a couple years now, mostly I would DL the ISO and burn them. Of all the latest distros I have bought the boxed versions of Redhat, Mandrake and Suse 7.3. Mandrake was pretty user friendly and has a lot of proggies included, but I was having a lot of dconfiguration and usability problems with it, now I have the Pro edition of Suse 7.3 installed and I love it problem is you can't DL the ISOs for Suse.

 

[Loco3KGT]

Buy Mandrake 8.1 Gamer edition if you want to play games in linux. It's your _best_ option when it comes to ease of use. The Gamer version _cannot_ be downloaded.

 

[wolf550e]

just installed Mandrake 8.1 downloadable 3-CD set.
nice, but ugly. i need to tweak it a lot before it will be as nice as my XP.
i am NOT doing any gaming, or plan to. i have windows for that...
DSL setup was no fun. now i'm thinking of updating the kernel or some other really neat way of trashing the system. oh btw, i'm logged as root in KDE. best way of accidentaly deleting /etc !

;-)

anybody knows how can i setup the fonts to be nice? this looks ugly!

 

[fow99]

<< Hi! i want to try out Linux (again), but i'm a complete newbie. what distro should i try? it woudl be nice if it was something easy to setup, closely resembled the "generic" distro used in how-to's and already came with all the latest stuff. i'm thinking of Mandrake 8.1 or RedHat 7.2. any thing esle?

can it read NTFS 5.1 partitions? is lilo WinXP friendly? how are the latest nVidia drivers? anything important i should know? >>



Mandrake is supposed to be a newbie's distro. But I have another thing ready to be recommended to you -- Suse 7.3. I tried the Liveeval and it is really nice. With the default KDE enviroment, you nearly got a 'better Windows'.

Linux can 'READ' NTFS but not write.

If u are tring to use dual boot, I would suggest use the XP builtin NT loader. I don't really care about the gui booting prompt of Linux. Now that's bloated.

 

[stirling]

For fonts, read the font how-to's

fow99, I don't consider lilo a gui or bloated

 

[fow99]

<<
fow99, I don't consider lilo a gui or bloated >>



I think I didn't make myself clear. I was not saying that LILO was bloated. I meant the RedHat Lilo boot-up screen. Well if you still don't think it is bloated, at least you have to agree it is ugly.

 

[wolf550e]

lilo has both a GUI and a text interface. i prefer the text version.
you wanna see bloat? try PowerQuest's software. :|

thats for the link stirling. shoudl have though about it, its obvious there is a HOW-TO...

 

[Electrode]

I'm something of a linux newbie, but I got slackware 8 working in one evening, with a custom kernel and a dual boot with win xp.

The reason why I wouldn't recommend a "newbie distro" like mandrake or redhat is that they are too dependant on gui tools and wizards, and try to do everything for you. If I wanted things to be done for me I would use windows.

BTW, what is the "Mandrake Gamer edition" anyway? Is it just Mandrake 8.1 with Transgaming WineX and some extra XF86 games?

 

[cureless]

For the newbie I recomend Mandrake. However, it's still likely that you'll need to "tweak" some stuff to get it looking (working?) really nice.

If you want an "adventure" then try to go for debian. You'll get all the latest stuff if you keep up with "unstable" (which is not unstable, it just has frequent updates, hence the name).

If you don't have a broadband connection, buying SuSE is your best bet.

cl

 

[wolf550e]

debian is less standard. i want something ppl have ready RPMs for, and since Mandrake mostly Red Hat compatible most Red-Hat HOW-TO's work for it.
also, i do use BASH and try to learn how to do everything without the GUI, and yes it takes tweaking.
i dont like that lizard in SuSe. ;-) and i'm on DSL. downloading the ISOs was a snap. i even managed to make it work in linux (the reason i wanted to try linux again was because i knew i would have normal internet in it, my 56k winmodem was unsupported last time i tryed, and setting up my isa 33.6 modem just for linux?)

the gamer edition includes The Sims. check out Mandrake's site for details. but its commercial, and i wont pay a cent for linux until it will be perfect. and it's not (yet).

 

[fow99]

<< debian is less standard. i want something ppl have ready RPMs for, and since Mandrake mostly Red Hat compatible most Red-Hat HOW-TO's work for it. >>



Wow wow. Since when has rpm become the *standard*?? If there is anything better in debian, that 's dpkg!!!
rpm is just horrible. And just thinking of different rpm packages for different distro aren't compatible makes me sick.

 

[wolf550e]

fow99 - tell me more about those dpkg things. is it much better than RPMs?

and RedHat IS the de-facto standard in Linux. it has 50% market share and everyone who writes software and has a compiled distribution (not just the sources) has a redhat rpm package. some have mandrake and suse pacjages too, but debian is rare.