Jumping In

[Ded Morozh]

Okay, I've decided that I want to try Linux, did a bit of reading, and it's sounding like I might be headed toward Debian, still reading a bit more. If anyone wants to pimp their personal favourite distro, that'd be fine.

I have an Nforce2 chipset, and Nvidia has been putting out linux drivers for a bit, has anyone used them? Also, any "beginners" type sites that you might know would be helpful.

 

[SPeedY_B]

Slackware! Depends if you want to really jump in, or just have a nice easy path, something like Fedora or Mandrake would be better for that, although personally I don't think Slackware is that hard, even for beginners.

Take a look here for help etc: http://www.justlinux.com/

 

[Unleashed]

Mandrake is best for new users.
Slackware can be a bit complicated when it comes to partitioning etc if you're used to using on a GUI.

 

[SPeedY_B]

I don't think that the lack of GUI makes it any harder, the information which you require is still displayed right there in front of you.
Probably changes from person to person though, but I really don't think that it makes a difference, if you had to type all the partitioning commands out.. then maybe 🙂

 

[Yharn]

I don't think that the lack of GUI makes it any harder, the information which you require is still displayed right there in front of you.
Probably changes from person to person though, but I really don't think that it makes a difference, if you had to type all the partitioning commands out.. then maybe 🙂

install gentoo and see how fun that is. bleh. the best thing about installing it is that you learn as you go.....if you have the patience to deal with the long install process.

 

[Xie]

Although slackware install isn't eye candy GUI its still not very hard ... you get dos like colored screens 🙂 Partitioning isn't all that much harder then it is using fdisk w/ a win98 bootdisk. Also Debain I found much harder then then Slackware to install and use for a n00b.

For "beginner" sites maybe try LinuxQuestions, JustLinux, or last but not least The Linux Documentation Project.

 

[NetRyder]

I'll throw in a good word for Slackware too. (Surprise, surprise

)
If the regular fdisk command (the linux version) seems complicated, you can always use cfdisk instead. Didn't seem particularly difficult to use the last time I went through it.

 

[SPeedY_B]

Thar she blows!

Nice and easy to use 🙂

 

[vern]

I like Slack but I'm not going to recommend it. You might want to go with a distro that comes with a 2.6.x kernel without recompiling. I'm guessing from what you've said that you might have some recent hardware. With that said ... Mandrake 10.0 Community is the way to go IMO. Beta versions of Debian Sarge still utilize 2.4.x ... so I wouldn't go with it for a first Linux distro for someone with more recent hardware ... plus apt-get is not very user-friendly to get working correctly. But once you get it working, it works great. My two cents.

 

[cpugeniusmv]

my current distro is slackware. but again, i wouldn't really recommend it to someone new to the whole linux game...mandrake or fedora are for you.

 

[Ded Morozh]

Still reading, in the mean time I'm running BB4Win, so I can fake it