Don't you think Gentoois a bit hard?!...
I would rather advice something easier for the start. Even a Debian distro looks kinda difficult for a beginner. And what about Mandrake?? He could switch to something else just after.

I've used Mandrake 7, Redhat 7-9 and they've been rather easy to install. I've used Slackware for a bit, it's a nice Linux as well. I heard that Mandrake 10 is really nice though, so I might decide to install that on one of my old machines to run a *nix development for a MUD engine.

From what I heard, stay away from Fedora core 2 if you want to dual boot with Windows XP/2000; there's been a lot of problems with Fedora smashing up the NTFS partitions.

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Original post by bkt I've used Mandrake 7, Redhat 7-9 and they've been rather easy to install. I've used Slackware for a bit, it's a nice Linux as well. I heard that Mandrake 10 is really nice though, so I might decide to install that on one of my old machines to run a *nix development for a MUD engine. From what I heard, stay away from Fedora core 2 if you want to dual boot with Windows XP/2000; there's been a lot of problems with Fedora smashing up the NTFS partitions.

that's fixed already ;)

so far I'm using Fedora Core 2... it's nice :D

I'd rather put in a little extra effort during installation than have to switch to another version of Linux later. I may end up programming using the Linux environment rather than just compiling on it every now and then for test purposes. It depends how much I get to like it.

I prefer NT4 to Win98 if that helps any.


I'll be dual booting with Win98, and possibly NT4 later. Repartitioning and reformatting shouldn't be too much of a problem as I'll likely use Acronis O/S Selector which can convert partitions to different file systems and/or resize existing partitions without loss of data.

I already have my drive split up into multiple partitions anyway, and so far only one is being used.

Do you want to "learn Linux" or do you want to use Linux as a desktop from which you do shit? If you're just planning on getting stuff done and aren't really interested in learning how to set up servers and whatnot (which are really, really useful skills tho) then steer away from things like Slackware, Gentoo, and Debian.

SuSe is by far the most polished desktop experience. 'Drake is the most full-featured, RedHat is a little dated, but both polished and extremely-free oriented and featureful. Fedora is a slightly less polished update of RedHat, with a "free software only" mentality that means a) some support for common files may be missing but b) everything on the platform is totally unincumbered by restrictive licenses.

There are also other special-purpose user-oriented platforms, like Vector Linux, which is a low-resource easy-to-use desktop distro.

Well, it might be handy to learn at least a little about Linux and set up Apache, Perl, PHP and MySQL on it to test scripts locally, as although I already have those in NT4 on my laptop, its hard drive is much smaller.

I'm unlikely to use it as a public server though.

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Original post by KurtCPP Don't you think Gentoo is a bit hard?!...

it's not that hard, just time consuming. all you gotta do is follow the instructions word for word and that's it. the only difficult part would be partitioning your drives but you get that with other distros (to some degree). it's actually pretty easy to use once you got going... the only problem is that is takes *ages* to install due to having to compile everything (well most things).

I started with gentoo, and I think it was a great choice.

No, gentoo isn't nearly as easy as some of the other options. It took me awhile to get my system going, but I learned a tremendous amount about how the system works, which made a lot of troubleshooting and maintaince tasks later on infinitly easier.

If you have a linux person around you can direct questions to, then I would go for the gentoo option. And don't hesitate to ask until they hate you. Make sure you understand why you're performing every step, and you'll know all you need to know by the time you're done.

If you don't have someone to bug, then the install instructions, even though they are quite detailed, may be of less use. Then go for debian/mandrake.

Hmm, out of the most popular distributions I think I'm leaning towards Debian based upon what is included with the download.

The ISO version of Mandrake doesn't even seem to include Emacs or Vim, SuSe Personal doesn't include any development tools and Gentoo seems to want to install additional packages via the Internet.

As I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get suitable modem drivers, that last point could be a problem.

Fedora seems to be somewhat of an unknown quantity at present, although I have heard good things about RedHat.

I've used Red Hat, Mandrake, and Debian. Debian is by far my favorite distro. I use Sid/unstable for my desktop environment and Woody/production for all my servers that are online.