I know absolutly NOTHING about linux sept that its called Linux. I need to most

Stable
Fastest
Coolest &
the moast slim looking Ver.
I talked to my bro he said somthing about get the right ver. for your hdware

mainboard: M7VIG Pro
twin hdd: total of 120gb
Ram: 512mb DDR266
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2600+
CD-rom: Artec MadDog 52x32x52 burner
floppy: no floppy

I plan on formating bolth hdds and deleting windows xp completly off my hdds and just having linux on there with linux installed just on one hdd cus i need one of my hdd for my vids. Peace

ICQ me for help with any computer problems you might have. 270056517
Matt

Dont get fedora.... its evil. i use RH9 it seems decent.

Ummm.....

The hell it is.

Fedora Core is a branch off of Redhat

Hi

Install floppy drive first thing. You're gunna be a bit lost without one.

Next install a distro that understands that you don't have a phd in linux. (ie. tries to aviod hi tech jargon and obscure desciptions) One of the better ones is Mandrake.

I favour Mandrake as it is moderately stable. On the first install, will get most services that you expect of a computer up and running.

Coolest? Well for starters - it aint Microsoft -thats cool.

Stable: Slackware,Debian,...
Fastest: Gentoo from a stage-1 build with machine specific optimization.

Given your hardware and likely usage though, you shouldn't need to worry about either stability or speed.

Coolness is irrelevant, initial appearance is irrelevant. The right version of a distro is almost invariably the latest one and the slimness of any installation is up to you.

It's pointless trying to predict which distro will suit you and your hardware best and since you can try them all without much risk of hardware destruction, bankruptcy, disease or death, you should just repeatedly stick a pin in the list at distrowatch.

I am not sure why anenefan mentioned "Install floppy drive first thing. You're gunna be a bit lost without one.", maybe Mandrake needs one.

Many distributions can be downloaded from various websites as CDRom images. Once these images are burned to CD, you can boot and start the install from the first CD (no boot floppy required.)

I personally am mainly familiar with the RedHat distributions, Including 7.2/7.3, 9.0, Fedora and Enterprise 3.0 (a commercial version.) I have installed each of those on a number of systems with minimal effort and no problems after completing the setup.

Of the RedHat distributions I would recommend either 9.0 or Fedora as they have additional drivers built-in to handle the more recent devices in the newer systems.

All of the versions of Redhat I mentioned install easily using the default settings and come with the Gnome desktop (a GUI similar to Windows)

I have never had any stability problems with "Redhat".

Hi

Who was interested in the installing part, thats the easy bit.

Work with any system long enough, and you find a lot of good tools over the net unpack on a floppy. (like bootable diagnostics) A newbie isn't going to work out a way around it.

my 2c: I have Mandrake,RH and Fedora installed.
I find my old (8.2) mandrake a bit faster to startup, but I can not detect any noticeable runtime speed difference in the other distros.
With your CPU,RAM and HDD storage,any current distro should run well and fast.

You definitely do not need a floppy for linux. The only software I have encountered that requires one is called "linux on diskette" - used for trouble shooting. Knoppix (linux which runs from a CD) does an equally good, if not better, job. (BTW,
I always boot from floppy, so I am not anti-flop)

What you do need is google:
linux tutorial
linux install tutorial

Of my two machines at home which have had mandrake and slackware on them for eons....neither have had a floppy drive.

Hi

I didn't say linux needed a floppy drive. But I will agree the way it reads - it implied that.

Things are easier for a newbie if they create a lilo boot disk though. (unless they are using grub)

You may operate without one, but it is somewhat tiresome when things go wrong. If nothing goes wrong thats cool. Newbies though always seem to have some sort of problem, sooner or latter.

Floppy drives are not all that expensive. It is an extra booting device that will come in handy. eg bootable diagnostics, tools or as quick boot recovery device.

A floppy drive suits a newbies needs as an easy temporary medium to shift small files about between machines. eg pdfs and txt files.

To an experienced user (whichever os) a floppy might not seem important, until they have to diagnose an intermittent problem involving one or both ide channels. A bit hard without booting a floppy diagnostic.

in practice, I agree with anenefan. I have 2 boxes, both with diskettes including 1 with a 5 1/4 drive (honest to gosh - haven't used it in a lonng time). I would never configure a system without diskette.

However, with a 52x32x52 burner and R/W CD's, you can approach diskette-like use of a CD.
I have never run into IDE channel problems.
Most of mine fall into the careless user category. Booting from diskette has greatly reduced the impact of this category.

I agree and would recommend that you don't skip the "make a boot floppy" section in just about every distro I have tried....and also make a backup of that floppy!

The Simply Linux Book-http://jetblackz.cjb.net/ would be worth a read first before you start. It has a lot of good info reguarding Linux for those new to it.

Yeh, had the same question about which distro of Linux to install. Knoppix was by far the easiest- boots and runs from a CD, problem was everything ran a little slow.
Suse 9.1 had sweet graphics, everything worked at the start except for the dual boot to Xp. Couldn't figure out how to mod the bootloader or how to add programs from Yast(?) without becoming a member.
Simular good/bad issues with Mandrake. Super easy in install, most things worked at startup but could only find "last years model" 9.2. Mandrake 10.0 and updates may be for members only. I'm not 100% on this. Can anyone verify?
Favorite is Fedora core 2. I use apt-get and yum for extra program install and update. Use yum.comf from: fedorafaq.orq/samples/yum.conf
Apt-get from:
dag.wieers.com/packages/apt/ FC2 i386
Do yum update, apt-get update then apt-get install synaptic. Synaptic is an easy to use, graphical, update utility.