Fedora Core 5 is a good place to start though.

Keep in mind, getting the most out of linux takes a while, as you have to learn a different way of doing things than on Windows (i.e. filenames are case sensitive).

(Edited by Stormblazer at 6:13 pm on June 24, 2006)

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Religion: Apathetic agnostic
Political Affiliation: Independent

And one last thing, if, by chance, you have dial-up, you won't like Linux much.

(Edited by TheUnrealSlimShady at 5:14 pm on June 24, 2006)

What you should do is download Live CD versions, they run right of DVDs or CDS (most are DVDS). Its risk free too, you just need like 512mb or more of RAM.

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░░░░ You know what's annoying?
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█ People who don't read signatures.

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I've tried Red Hat... it was kinda like windows, cept it wouldn't run most of windows programs, and it ran quite a bit faster... but I was too young to mess with the open source stuff, and I really didn't use it...

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Fedora is not Redhat. Fedora technically evolved out of Redhat as a community version. Oh, and the distro has little to do with running windows programs, what runs windows programs on linux is a piece of software called Wine, or variants of it.

Fedora Core 5, as far as I know, is the most current distro as far as the recentness of the components go, unless you're using Gentoo or something similar.

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Religion: Apathetic agnostic
Political Affiliation: Independent

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Ubuntu is better than any other distro (in my opinion) especially for the less computer savy user... if you need help with installation pm me

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ubuntu has its quirks, especially synaptic.

Ubuntu: "Mplayer, whats that lolz?1?!"

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Lifes a bitch.  If it were a slut it'd be too easy.

The best for a beginning user is probably Ubuntu or Kubuntu (depending if you like KDE or GNOME). There quite simple to use.

However, check out distrowatch (link already post above) they have documentation on about every active Linux distro and a few BSD ones as well.

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My favorite distro though is probably Gentoo, mainly for speed. It's a very fast and adaptable distro, but the installation requires a user that knows what they're doing, and has time on their hands.

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Gentoo is and always has been my main distro.  Being a complete newb and trying to install (back during the 1.4 days) was quite the experience.  I like very much the fact that you can do just about everything manually (from installation to mounting volumes).  But emerging can be tedious on older/slower systems.

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Lifes a bitch.  If it were a slut it'd be too easy.

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Dapper

(Edited by TetraDragoon at 7:08 pm on Aug. 2, 2006)

(Edited by TetraDragoon at 7:10 pm on Aug. 2, 2006)

then I went to run gcc and it gives me a command not found error.  What type of linux distribution doesnt have gcc installed?  Geez.  And my favorite term setup (Eterm -O --buttonbar 0 --scrollbar 0 -x) takes noticably longer to come up than it does on slackware or gentoo.

And the fact you need to add reposotories to get programs likes mplayer and xmms.  

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Lifes a bitch.  If it were a slut it'd be too easy.